It's good that your idea of social engineering stays undeveloped since it's as unworkable as all the other utopian theories that have preceded it. Who decides that my adequate is your extravagant?
And trust me, you don't want me as a roommate. Also, my wife and I want no roommates or housemates.
I currently live in your ideal of work-life balance. But I've been self-employed since 1992 except for four years as a part time university prof. Trust me, reporting to yourself as a boss can be far more exploitive than almost any other. You eat, sleep, dream and breathe the business when you're in its growth stage. But the satisfactions in terms of autonomy and creativity are also great. And I'd never want to replace myself as a boss with a co-op committee. Asymmetries of information, emotional intelligence, managerial talent and expertise, analytical and strategic sense make that a non-starter. I know this from being an angel investor in more than a dozen startups, and verifying empirically that most fail. Yours is an "undeveloped idea" that isn't even close to MVP status.
Who decides what’s essential, adequate vs extravagant? My essentials include basketball 🏀 s, basketball sneakers, basketball and tennis 🎾 courts and lessons, mountain bikes, gelato, Ben & Jerry’s, Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello, prosciutto di Parma, peanut butter, trout, salmon, German and Latvian oats for breakfast, skiing ⛷, swimming in the sea, a dive course in Eilat, going to the opera, Springsteen and Bryan Adams concerts, going to my lute player ski buddy’s concerts and music school in Italy, visiting a friend in Barcelona, travelling to the Mediterranean countries where I’ve lived and whose languages I speak, flying to NJ to visit my brother and go out to dinner with my cousin, flying to Washington to go to my friend’s son’s wedding next year, visiting my nephew in Japan next year, braces for my niece, cosmetic surgery if I’m a burn victim....
Would you ban professional and college sports as non-essential (football, soccer, golf, basketball, polo, swimming, diving, sailing regattas, sportfishing? motocross? Formula 1?) Ban the olympics?
Would you ban the cooking course in Tuscany my wife took in 2010? I hope not since the results were delicious.
My stepdaughter is a fashion designer who e-commerce business produced an ecological cycling raincoat made of composite materials that keeps me cycling dry in any weather. Would you put her out of business as “inessential”?
Would you ban all international trade as “inessential”? No more French and Italian designer stuff going to the UK, America and Germany, I guess. You’ll have lots of unhappy women very angry at you.
Would you put the Bulgarian ski resort where I own an apt out of business? (This is one of my dumbest investment mistakes). What happens to the mortgages on all those condos in Aspen, Vail, Couchevel, Cortina and Zermatt? Poof goes the banking system that financed the buyers, I guess.
Which of my essentials would you ban? By what legal procedure? What law? Who’d rule on its constitutionality? Who’d decide? A court? Gosplan USA (or EU)? How would the Central Essentials Rationing Committee be chosen? By election? Nobody will vote to have their choices be reduced or eliminated. So any candidate with your views on what’s essential would lose an election.
Capitalism is an airplane that needs redesign and refueling. The problem is you have to redesign and refuel WHILE it’s flying. Otherwise it crashes, bringing down society along with it.
