Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2024, 09:21 PMIn a world where we have eliminated homelessness and hunger not everyone gets a tenth floor penthouse and prime rib for dinner.  A restaurant may have a free menu like a kids menu.  You can have a cheese sandwich and an apple any time you want.  Ordering something else would require a plastic credit card with a job or retirement so the card has a positive credit balance.  All of which the state can provide.  But everyone still has to work.  Not paying bills would have consequences.  Theft is still theft.
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With expectations more clearly defined, most people would be able to live a more successful life.  Define success as you wish, but a cheese sandwich and an apple does not work for me.

This returns to my original proposal.  NOT showing up for work does have consequences.  The consequence is that ALL you get is the bare bones box to live in and mac & cheese you eat.  If you are an ascetic who is happy with just this, you can live this way.  But if you want anything MORE than this, you need to work.

You start with the Mandatory 10 hr/wk Community Service job that everybody must do. These are all the unskilled jobs from street sweeper to janitor etc that would pay min wage.  They would be assigned weekly at the community employment office.  Once completed, if you have another skill like Dentist, you can drill teeth and make more for those work hours.

There's still problems.  People who do their community service job might be slackers.  They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done.  They work slow and take long smoking breaks.

Then for the people with skills, if they are in short supply you might need say electricians to work lots of hours to get everybody's electricity going after an outage.  So they don't show up for their community service job.  If it's just once in a while, OK, but what about systemic shortages?  Not enough Nurses, are you going to make a nurse work 10 hours pushing a broom?

RE