[Mockingbird]

I'm going to offer a brief counter point to all this and at the same time try not to look like an ass. This is going to be a trick.

First of all, if it were possible to reach a 'workless' society, it isn't one that I would want to live in. Without any sort of struggle, without someone getting the short end of the stick, there isn't any reason left to innovate. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that the innovators felt inclined (even though there's no real benefit to them personally in a socialist society) to keep improving things for everyone else even though pretty much everyone was getting fed by food bots or smoking weed all day or something. That wouldn't last long -- look at Atlas Shrugged. You can only fuck with the people with brains in your society for so long before they get really pissed off and demand that they get more than their 'fair' share, because they're doing a hell of a lot more work on improving society than John Q Layabout. If what you were saying was feasible, you would have a capitalist society still, but one that would lean towards a technocratic bent. One in which it's believed that technology solves anything so the people that can create and maintain the technology are the ones who end up rich.

Another problem with this is resources, for which I'll cite Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Say you have two rats in a box and you feed them 500 kilos of food a day. A hell of a lot for two rats. At the end of everyday, you take out what the rats haven't eaten and replace it with a new 500 k block every morning. Now, your rats are going to multiply like fucking crazy because they've got the food to do it, but eventually you're going to have a set number of rats, say about 1000 or something. You'll notice that the older rats die off to make way for new young and your population will stay at about 1000 rats.

Now, double the amount of food you give them each morning. What do you think will happen? The rats will double. Now, imagine letting the rats somehow control their food amount. Do you think they would choose to limit it? Unlikely, they'll just keep spreading until you have nothing but rats everywhere and eventually, not enough food.

Okay. The rats are people. As it is now, we control our own food source through agriculture to a certain point. Yes, we still have starving people, but our population simply doubles and doubles and doubles. And think, even those starving people eat food, though it may be scattered and hard to acquire because otherwise they wouldn't be starving -- they would be dead. So, if you created a 'foodbot' that just synthesized food out of something, (because of the way physics work, you'd have to use something, I doubt we'll ever have the ability to spontaneously create matter out of a void) people are going to eat and fuck until whatever it is that we're using to make food, no matter how common and available it is, will run out.

Of course, it would never reach that point. As soon as things were starting to run a little low and food was becoming a problem, the scientists and people who were making society function would either force the gluttonous society off its ass and get it put to work solving the problem, or annihilate them altogether.

Even introducing some sort of nano-fail proof birth control, you'll still have lazy folks just sucking up welfare or what have you and popping out kids left and right, doing nothing at all to make the world better. Any reasonable working person is going to see that what they're working for is bullshit and stop.

What I'm trying to get at here is that for decades socialism has seemed like some sort of noble ideal that human nature isn't quite ready for. I would like to see that come to an end. Socialism is stagnation, plain and simple. Stagnation of creativity, stagnation of innovation, stagnation of soul. Free market capitalism works -- people who work hard get paid well for it. Why should it be otherwise?

So rather than the crew of Star Trek being budding socialists I think it would have been far more likely that they had the resources and just weren't dicks. Share, if you have it. I have no problem with that. But, if I'm working harder than anyone else, recognize me for it.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck. That was long, sorry folks. Communism/socialism/etc. is just sort of a hot button issue for me.