I'll add that doing that would make the real cost of nutritious food skyrocket without providing any mechanism to meet the demand through production increases. This is mainly a product of the "no questions asked" clause. "No questions asked" is likely universally bad. Unconditional policy incentivizes abuse. Again, this is why the Soviet Union didn't work. It attempted to impose condition-less-ness on a conditional world. Supply and demand is as real a mechanism of society as gravity is of physics.

This doesn't mean there are winners and there are losers. It means that winning is for the taking. In the West, if we want food, we trade our efforts for food (money = representation of production = representation of efforts). If we didn't do this, we would find that if we wanted food, there wouldn't be any because the same applies to those who produce food. Like us, they too would wish for results without effort. Winning = labor + resources. In a non-coercion society (basically where you don't have fear of being murdered or mugged or restrained unless you did some murdering or mugging), everybody has the ability to do this

Furthermore, even if trying to establish universal unconditionals does work, it is at the expense of the future. Capitalism doesn't necessarily make things better right now, but it does tomorrow. This is because of how competition drives innovation.


Instead of saying "let's feed everybody" as our foundation, I think we should ask "how do we sustainably feed everybody?" I think we'd find the answer to that doesn't involve mandated institutions, yet does involve a capitalist approach.


Another thing to keep in mind is that capitalism requires non-coercion. It is true that in a lot of societies, a stateless one would give rise to an authoritarian state. I think this means the starting point is to create a state with a constitution that mandates non-coercion. This would basically make a government that is constitutionally required to stop people from doing things like murder, but can't stop people from doing things like selling drugs. In a way, I'd say our real problem is that our constitution doesn't address coercion correctly. If we could figure out a way to make it illegal for the state to coerce anybody who is not causing harm to others, we'd be on the cusp of a global revolution.

Honestly, I think if we could unshackle ourselves from the evangelical right and nanny left, the US could actually get something like this put into the constitution. It won't happen though. But that doesn't matter since technology advances far more rapidly than laws, and we will eventually achieve post-scarcity. It won't be as quick as it otherwise would be, but it'll still happen