It is not artifact of any financial system, this would happen even if we had full communism, just illegally and with barter/favor payments. It is artifact of human nature.
If we make it much more prestigious and ‘cool’ for people to show off their equivalent donations to starving children, fewer will bid for the drawings and more will donate.
You mean the current financial system where concentrated wealth yields concentrated power to effect change?
And almost everyone is born into a situation where their wealth & power is insignificant compared to the rare individual who has been the beneficiary of the feature where rapidly or not there is a net flow concentrating resources disproportionately toward those already wealthy & powerful?
Nominally, the traditional result is that the few having most concentrated wealth are the ones capable of effecting the changes they desire, with most everyone else serving these masters in one way or another. With the servant class being highly restricted in their ability to develop personal wealth of their own, much less direct major resources toward independently progressive positive objectives.
I must assume that the current financial system is the same one as that of Genghis Khan.
So naturally there is a long precedent.
Anyway, back on topic not every single artist or engineer serves this type of master, just most of them.
Some create value or enhance wealth, some devalue or destroy, what else is new?
>We could invest in lofty ideas to alleviate starving...
This wise investment was fortunately made starting at just the most opportune time in human history, and has compounded itself remarkably in only a few generations. Many approaches are now well known, only requiring a properly-scalable "seed" committment for their relative degrees of success to be proven on the larger scale.
I guess we need to invest in lofty equitable distribution of resources, especially essential survival commodities.
Creating or spreading surplus value can require a lot of work, but those at the top of the food chain don't really have to do it if they don't feel like it since wealth is flowing their way already.
Plus there is just so much wealth & plenty already which is not having a fraction of the positive effect it could be making.
I can see the argument that the amounts spent on works of art are excessive, but it seems like we should at least keep in mind that this does benefit society by supporting the creation of great art.
also, how would a stateless society even have the concept of legality?
Stateless society can still have justice, courts, rules, police... It's just driven by someone else.
Ad communism: That's not true. Have you read anything from the communist theory? Marx, at least? I mean, more than a part of one book?
Communism is a change in ownership and control, but that doesn't mean that a police-like body wouldn't exist (it might not, though). They just call it "people's militia". The court system would be different, but a court nonetheless. A corporation can have police and courts and it's still a corporation. Military, the same. Even today these are deliberately kept as separate as possible from the governing body (what we usually mean with "state").
Thus I think you have mixed up the definition of "state" in "stateless".
and it sounds like you're really describing the 20th century model of essentially replacing boards of directors with government officials and calling that communism. and that's the most basic and universal criticism of 20th century communism that marxists have today, which is that that model preserved the internal logic of capitalism by preserving the structures which concentrated (capital) power within a handful of people in the same way that capitalism does, or something like that. and if you're being faithful to marx, none of those are communist societies, it's more like stage zero socialism.
i'm not trying to start a flame war, i was just confused about what you were saying, but i think i understand now.
This is my point, actually. There is no one who would forbid a group of people to appoint a few members of their community to be "police"; there is no one who would forbid a group of people to create a court. And there is nothing saying that would make it a state. Communism is about self-governed societies, not anarchy in the destructive "I can do whatever because there is no police" sense.
Even actual anarchy wouldn't be like that because if you hurt enough people, they will hurt you, and that's why you don't even do it. Later in development, they'd pay someone in advance to hurt you if you hurt them. The same thing would happen in communism, just there wouldn't be money changing hands and the organizational specifics would be different.
Saying that any form of leadership would make a stateless society not stateless is nonsense. My family is not a state and yet we have a leader. My apartment building is not a state and yet we have a leader. Etc. There will always be a leader (or a group of leaders), the difference lies in who owns what and how are the leaders appointed (e.g. on basis of what) and what rights they have. Without any leaders, the society would collapse.