it’s also probably worth noting that in practice, “everybody is provided the necessities of life, whether or not they work” doesn’t actually fix the problem of “most people have to work very hard or they’ll die”, it just changes the mechanism from “if you don’t work very hard, you won’t earn enough money to purchase necessities” to “if you don’t work very hard, the government will kill you.”
True! It doesn’t really get you out of the problem of being forced to be useful to society under threat of death, though – or, rather, it can only get an extremely small number of people out of that problem, so any given person is unlikely to be among them. That appears pretty intractable. A social democracy can improve your quality of life and reduce overall inequality, and I think most if not all of our societies could stand to move farther in that direction, but I don’t think you can resolve the basic issues that a) nearly all people need to do work deemed socially useful or die, b) the amount of work people need to do to live varies dramatically with social position, c) the amount of work people need to do fluctuates based on global trends and the nation’s fortunes, and d) the population will be disproportionately clustered in the groups that need to work pretty hard.
To be clear, I am very socialist. But I see a lot of people who seem to imagine that socialism will fundamentally change the incentive structure of society to make it egalitarian and non-coercive, and…no. That’s not going to happen. IMO the outcome to shoot for with socialism is “shitty in roughly the way things are currently shitty, but appreciably less so”.
Not uncoincidentally, shooting for that outcome likely involves shooting fewer people.
For instance, I like wage subsidies as a plan, which are in that direction and have some support from economists. What is the likelihood that wage subsidies will result in either the total collapse of society, armed revolution, or ideological death squads? Pretty low.
But they’d take an awful lot of pressure off the working poor and increase their negotiating leverage on non-wage matters (like safety).
