We all know that money is only an abstraction for real wealth (goods and services). I hardly think a jelly-bean video (though impressive) is an example of high economic output. The best case scenario you're describing is a world in which a small fraction of the populace creates actual wealth (food, plumbing, servers, etc), and everyone else rides their coat-tails by creating frivolities like fashion accessories and entertainment. (Come to think of it, we've been trending this way for decades.)
While I acknowledge how far capitalism has taken us in wealth creation, it has a blind spot: some forms of wealth are invisible, and either hard to measure, or hard to capture. Every person making a living with YouTube videos is a person who is not teaching in an inner-city school, or rehabilitating the homeless, or building a power grid in Somalia, or a thousand other useful things which don't dangle a direct profit motive (or enough of one to meet a threshold for action).
I'm as loathe as anyone to see a top-down "government" approach to these problems; setting aside the issues of corruption and perverse incentives, even the most well-meaning social programs tend to suffer from insane bloat with no metrics or feedback loops, and therefore mixed efficacy at best.
The only way I see to create this invisible wealth is to supplement markets with new bottom-up community-oriented economies, whether based on money, gift economy, reputation, or something entirely new. We have some precedent for these kinds of distributed institutions (Wikipedia, Linux, Anonymous), but when you compare these to the scale of Microsoft or the U.S. Army, you can see how far we have to go in giving people useful work that also lets them pay their bills.
(Side note: there is a case to be made that pure libertarianism would result in more wealth for everyone, meaning more people could afford voluntary charity and community spending. Bluntly, I don't have that much faith in human nature. At minimum, I could only see that working when coupled with the right sociocultural value system, which emphasized a balance between selfishness and community, rather than an adulation of greed.)
> actual wealth [vs.] frivolities like fashion accessories and entertainment.
I'd argue that's a fallacy. Show a pre-industrial revolution subsistence farmer a car factory, and he'd throw his arms up in horror over the frivolity. Imagine his reaction to seeing a airplane factory producing billion dollar vehicles that are meant to freight hundreds of so-called "workers" to spend a week out of their FOUR annual vacation weeks drinking and dancing in southern Spain (where? the furthest this farmer has ever travelled is the next county over where his sister lives).
> (Side note: there is a case to be made that pure libertarianism would result in more wealth for everyone, meaning more people could afford voluntary charity and community spending. Bluntly, I don't have that much faith in human nature. At minimum, I could only see that working when coupled with the right sociocultural value system, which emphasized a balance between selfishness and community, rather than an adulation of greed.)
Governments enforcing sociocultural values only works when those values exist. In the old east-block, governments were hard at work enforcing a set of values it's citizens didn't share. It didn't work. The UK doesn't have a constitution, but it was much better at protecting it's citizens than these east-block countries whose constitutions, on paper, were vastly superior.
If the people broadly didn't care about inner city schools or the homeless, nothing would be done for them, government or not.
While I acknowledge how far capitalism has taken us in wealth creation, it has a blind spot: some forms of wealth are invisible, and either hard to measure, or hard to capture. Every person making a living with YouTube videos is a person who is not teaching in an inner-city school, or rehabilitating the homeless, or building a power grid in Somalia, or a thousand other useful things which don't dangle a direct profit motive (or enough of one to meet a threshold for action).
I'm as loathe as anyone to see a top-down "government" approach to these problems; setting aside the issues of corruption and perverse incentives, even the most well-meaning social programs tend to suffer from insane bloat with no metrics or feedback loops, and therefore mixed efficacy at best.
The only way I see to create this invisible wealth is to supplement markets with new bottom-up community-oriented economies, whether based on money, gift economy, reputation, or something entirely new. We have some precedent for these kinds of distributed institutions (Wikipedia, Linux, Anonymous), but when you compare these to the scale of Microsoft or the U.S. Army, you can see how far we have to go in giving people useful work that also lets them pay their bills.
(Side note: there is a case to be made that pure libertarianism would result in more wealth for everyone, meaning more people could afford voluntary charity and community spending. Bluntly, I don't have that much faith in human nature. At minimum, I could only see that working when coupled with the right sociocultural value system, which emphasized a balance between selfishness and community, rather than an adulation of greed.)