Who owns this concentration?
This is what prevents you from escaping, you can't even postulate a world where folks are not concerned with who owns something and still acts responsibly towards whatever it is.
Just because I don't own a car, doesn't mean I am going to intentionally drive it into a ditch, and were somebody to do that in most systems there would have to be action taken to minimize the wasted work.
If it was an accident, fine, but if it was an intentional destruction of the hours of somebody else's labor, that is a situation requiring addressing.
That car could have persisted through dozens of key holders with proper maintenance.
one way to determine if the decisions are correct is if that concentration of resources grows over time.
Tell me, if you have a place to live, and food to eat, and work that satisfies you, what more do you need?
Crapitalism's incessant need for more is its undoing.
That more is somebody else's less.
The way you know you are doing it right is in the success and persistence of your work.
If you are building a house and it stands for 100 years, I would say that is pretty good.
If you build one that stands for 500 years, that is even better.
Do I think I should bend over backwards to kiss the ass of the better builder, umm, no.
But, he can refuse to build me a house if I don't, too.
I think with proper automation 90% of the human race is going to be crapitalistically irrelevant.
Useless eaters, if you will.
If we don't find value in those folks the capitalists will kill them with soft kill weapons that make them fat, nasty, sterile, and stupid.
Oh, wait, we already have that at every McDonalds.
All hail, crapitalism!
Give that Looking Backwards a quick read.
He gets bogged down into details better left to the local labor federations, but otherwise he does a good job of painting a world that doesn't account in dollars.
Once I read it, I knew why 1984 was required reading in my Junior year scifi class and Brave New World for extra credit, they can be used as instruction manuals, but Looking Backwards is never mentioned because it offers a viable alternative to wage slavery.
First you say:
... then you say:
My previous point turns on the notion that a particular society wants to achieve more than just subsistence living. But sure, if all you want to do is live a simple life in a society full of people who want to do the same, I have no argument at all.
The reason I want to do more than just live a simple life like that is because I believe this goal promotes human flourishing. I agree that what passes for capitalism today leads to starkly uneven distribution. I think this can be corrected by protecting private property, promoting voluntary human interaction, and freedom of association, all without abandoning capitalism.
I don't see them as mutually exclusive.
My utopia retires at ~50.
Rule by force is the disease, who and how are symptoms, eh?
Take rule by force off the table, and by default, utopia it is.
So simple only the highest brows can miss it.
With robotics, the math on needed work hours per person to maintain the status quo is around 20k hours.
We would all be working part time, but billionaires need more billions.
What I want to know is, who cleans the toilets once we have all we need?
Without poverty, how do you push that labor off onto someone else?