@murdoc We shouldn't use that as an excuse to avoid taking steps in the right direction. First, we have to break society's addiction to profit. Then we can take further steps.

Honestly, I don't think money itself is the problem; it's just IOUs. It's how we think about wealth, earning, sharing, society benefit, personal worth, work, etc. People will always cheat and steal and hoard. They did that before money, and they will do it after money. But profit, as a concept, is a normalization of that process, treating it as legal, morally acceptable, or even virtuous. We have whole legal systems and societal conventions built up around that concept, making it easy for those with wealth to extract more, while acting as if they somehow benefit the rest of us. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was mutated from a simple observation that selfish and altruistic goals can be aligned sometimes by the market, into justification for the entrenchment of ongoing pillaging of the poor by the rich.

@hosford42
I was not suggesting that we don't take steps. Sorry if I gave that impression. I've been advocating for stuff like this for decades now.  

I agree that money and our current system simply makes this kind of bad behavior much easier. I also agree that we need to break society's "addiction" to profit, but only to be followed up by changing the system so that we can remove the "motive and means" to hoard wealth. That's why I used the USSR as an example, because they did break that addiction, as much as anyone could anyway. But as long as the motive and means remain, that minority that will continue to seek to hoard wealth will do so, and in turn gather power to change the system back (which is why we should get rid of politics too). That's what happened to them. You have to change the rules of the game enough so that people like that aren't rewarded, so that there is no longer any means and motive to do so. Then the hoarding of wealth not only becomes mostly impossible, but what little remains possible simply becomes unprofitable to do, so there is no motivation.

@hosford42
Luckily I happen to know of a way that does this well. And although I can introduce parts of it on here, you can't really see how well it handles this problem until you've learned all the parts of it and how it works together. It's just like learning about any machine, like say a car, when you don't know anything about such things. You have to learn how all the parts work and how they work together to see how a carriage can truly be horseless.

If you haven't seen me talk about it before, it's called Technocracy (named long before any current use of the word). You can read about it here: https://www.technate.org and I'm happy to answer questions.

As for selfishness and greed, I don't believe that they are intrinsic traits of humanity. I realize that all of human history tells us otherwise, but if you've never seen iron above a certain temperature, then you'd have good reason to believe that it is always dull and solid. But being those are not intrinsic traits to iron. Change its environment enough, and its behavior changes a lot.

Similarly, I think that selfishness is not an intrinsic trait, but rather a means to an end. Find a different way to satisfy those ends, and there is no longer any need for those means. If you take a look at Technocracy, I think that you'll see what I mean.