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RE: Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence economy and economic futurism in the real world.
I often say that the goal of capitalism is zero employment. It’s hard to get people to accept that I mean it literally, because it sounds too unpalatable to be true. Yet it is.
Completely separate from that, I also frequently make the case that we need to decouple labor and sustenance. People have intrinsic value, and a right to access to basics like clean water and shelter from the elements of their nation is possibly able to provide it. This idea that the only value we each have is measured by the value our labor offers the market is the most toxic thing going these days, truly the root of much “evil”.
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I like "zero employment pressure" rather than "zero employment." We'll still need humans to create and maintain the systems, and to do all of the things that only have value because humans do them - playing sports, making art, writing essays about what it is to be a person. These are things that there are usually more people wanting to do them than the economic system can support, so we could see a process of moving toward more fulfilling employment. I'm curious what the world looks like when everyone who wants to spend their life playing the violin is able to.
What you're proposing would have to be a modified form of capitalism, which in practice is what it generally is. Even in the uber-capitalist USA, we still have unemployment insurance and food stamps. But the purity of capitalism is that it is always seeking to minimize expenses so as to maximize profits, and labor is the biggest expense. It would ideally like it at zero. It is important to note this even though there is no pure capitalism in the world so that we can be very clear that if we don't draw a line, none will be drawn.