> That sounds way too much like capitalism. No, it's basic free market economics. "Free market" does not mean the same thing as capitalism, although many capit

> That sounds way too much like capitalism. No, it's basic free market economics. "Free market" does not mean the same thing as capitalism, although many capitalists (i.e., people who want to get their hands on as much capital as they can, by hook or by crook) like to claim that it does. Free markets promote freedom and wealth creation. Capitalism can under some circumstances, but under others it undermines those things. Many people feel that currently it is doing the latter. > "Trade" only makes sense to the extent that human labor is in demand. Human labor is always in demand. Even for "resources" which are in "excess production", those resources still have to be transported to the people that need them. For example, food grown in the US in excess of what people in the US need to eat needs to be transported to somewhere else in the world where people are hungry. That requires human labor, and that need for human labor is ongoing, because people don't stop needing to eat when you've given them food once. That process represents wealth creation and is always happening. Also, people have needs and wants far above bare subsistence. The medium in which we are having this conversation would not exist in a bare subsistence world. Neither would countless other things that people value even if they are not strictly necessary for bare subsistence. There are always things that can be produced and traded to create more wealth. > A bullshit job, if you want to call it that. Sure, there are lots of bullshit jobs, but even if you eliminated them all, you wouldn't be eliminating the need for human labor. You would just be redirecting human labor towards more productive uses, i.e., towards actually creating wealth instead of just pretending to. That's a good thing. Even in some utopian future where the vast majority of production processes are automated, so the amount of human labor needed to, say, produce food, is minimal, there will still be human labor required to do other things--like decide what things to produce. Also, in such a world, the price of all those things produced by automation would be close to zero, since the marginal cost of their production would be close to zero. So the drastic reduction in human labor required to produce the necessities of life would be reflected in a drastic reduction in the cost of the necessities of life. That is what "no more scarcity" should look like.