I don’t think anyone has ever argued that nobody would ever be productive without pay. The concern is that not enough people would choose to be productive if they didn’t have to.
There seems to be a correlation between doing productive things for fun and higher intelligence and education. There is also a strong correlation between higher intelligence and holding left-wing views. Hence, the people posting these types of memes think that everyone would do what they would (be productive for fun). But ask some more… average intelligence people, and you will find that they’ll tend to say if they could just chill and play video games or scroll TikTok all day, that’s all they would do.
Could we continue to feed people even if work was made optional? At our level of the tech tree, probably. But people don’t just want to be fed, they like having computers and video games and houses and running water, all of which take a stupendous amount of labour to create and maintain, and I’m just not convinced that we could subside off volunteer labour for any society bigger than a few hundred people (which, not coincidentally, also tends to be about the maximum size of a left-wing commune)
The profit motive has been getting in the way of a lot of productivity lately.
When people are like “nobody would want to sweep the floors!!!1!1!1!1” all I can think of is this dude on YouTube that just goes around clearing drains and culverts cause he likes it.
There’s a particular flavor of person for everything and even if it’s not something you love to do, it’s something people would be willing to do if it’s not something you have to do 40 hours a week or your family starves.
This sort of thing is unironically the best thing about Youtube. It lets people do things like this, and make money from their activities through sharing them with the world. Obviously the money isn’t the motive, but I’m sure he appreciates the Youtube revenue on the side, and it means people get to see someone doing something good that they’d otherwise be oblivious to, which helps the perception that there are, in fact, good people out there.
What’s the channel?
