I disagree with most of what you've said here, although I enjoyed reading it and learned a few things. > humans can produce conducive environments ... witho

I disagree with most of what you've said here, although I enjoyed reading it and learned a few things. > humans can produce conducive environments ... without having a profit motive This is an answer to a malformed question. It's not a question of whether people can be successfully oriented without a profit motive. We know the answer is yes. People can be oriented around altruism, team affinity, wanting to impress colleagues, racism and fear, etc. The real question is whether the profit motive is optimal (and to what extent) for orienting people towards some goal X relative to other approaches. This is a highly complicated empirical question, with an answer that probably differs by domain. If you want to orient people towards genocide, the profit motive is probably the wrong way to go about things, although it can help a lot along the way. Stoking fear and disgust and team loyalty is king here. If you want to orient people towards creating an iPhone and get it into a billion hands, or a reusable rocket with low marginal cost, the profit motive would rank extremely highly on the list, if not number 1. > incentives are built into the universe Incentives are bio/psycho. They're evolved and in the brain. Resources are a strong motivation and incentive. They contribute to status (ego), survival, attractiveness (for men), which are things that motivate our species. Moreover the nice thing about profit motive is that, in general (although not always), it's aligned with consumer satisfaction, and so maximizing this selfish thing leads to a better outcome for the counter-party as well. > [profits] are not legitimate because [of public externalities] This is a separate question to whether the profit motive is the best way to orient people towards a goal. That's for a separate discussion around private property. > the most important point is that the waged (non-property owning) knowledge workers are the ones providing the value, not the executives and property-owners (in this case intellectual property). This is just not true. Entrepreneurship and capital are scarce factors of production. 20,000 engineers aren't going to magically self-assemble and operate effectively and efficiently together and invest billions of their own money in servers etc towards some common goal. We see some entrepreneurship and managerial skill donated for free in FOSS, but nothing like what we see when a profit motive is involved. Also, a lot of the value in businesses are inherent in the network, relationships, brand, the idea itself, etc, which are only tangentially related and attributable to labor. > stopped from seeing the above truths because we are now so embedded in this inorganic hyper-commoditized and highly-privatized society This society is also hyper-prosperous and well-off, on almost every metric, with long lives and happy people. The empiricist in me is the main reason I reject these overly critical perspectives. If the world is so good relative to all of human history, things just can't be as bad as this narrative suggests. [Climate change is a problem that demands its own solution.] > "even as the Chinese workers ... are driven to suicide" [1] This is a nonsense thing to say. China is (including Apple's workers) so much better off thanks to Apple and firms like Apple. Have a look at their median GDP per capita or any other metric you can think of. They've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. This is the beautiful concept of economic surplus post-trade. Socialists take a 1-dimensional look at the "low wages" and are upset, but they forget what the alternative would have been without these "low wages"; more poverty, more suffering. Further, so called "low wages" always lead to high wages a few generations down the line, due to the virtuous cycle of better nutrition, increasing tax revenues that feeds into education and infrastructure, etc. Western socialists arrogantly risk stifling this virtuous cycle in poor countries. Imagine if nobody was allowed to use cheap Chinese labor 20 years ago, and therefore no FDI came in because it wasn't worth it to pay 5x market rates? Their economic growth would've been stunted and they would have more poverty today, not less. > Einstein This was before all the failed experiments with communism. Empiricism showed he was wrong about QM and wrong about this. I like to think he would have revised his opinions had he come back in 1990 and seen the new data. He even predicted the failure mode; "how is it possible ... to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening?"; but underestimated just how difficult (probably impossible) it is avoid in practice.