And the way we do it now those sociopathic parasites become CEOs and use their billions to buy off politicians to create laws that make them even richer. I’d rather have my sociopathic parasites staying home playing video games than manipulating the stock market and ruining other people’s lives. And don’t tell me they aren’t parasites. Creative financial instruments are piracy, not work.
Our desire to punish the undeserving is one of the things that holds us back more than anything else right now. We can float a huge number of hangers on. And who knows, maybe some of them are going to turn out to be great once they find they live in a world that cares rather than a world that doesn’t.
As for the soviets, if you compare how the soviet union faired to how capitalist murderous dictatorships faired, they didn’t actually do that badly. Their problem was never finding ways to stop people from leeching off the system. Their problem was having killer megalomaniacs micromanaging everything. You don’t create a society based on the idea of caring for one another by relentlessly murdering everyone who doesn’t make quota. I’m not saying that communism is the way of the future, but that was not why it failed. As you said (via Freud) people need work, love and play. If you give everyone the freedom to live without requiring them to subjugate themselves to an employer, people will still do lots of work because people want to do work.
If it weren’t for the large salary I get to uselessly push paper around, I think I’d prefer to be a janitor.
