We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.

By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.

Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.

> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.

The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.

> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc

You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.

There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.

Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.

Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.

At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.

I know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.

The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go.

If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.

Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?

Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even.

At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.

People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.

Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others.

Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.

Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.

Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?

Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.

But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.

What a tone deaf comment.

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3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.