You tend to ask questions with preferred answers, patty - such as this one, as Gokul pointed out. But that isn't the only flaw in that poll. More:
pattylou said:
(a) Obviously there is a need to work in any situation where people hope to live. We need to eat and have shelter. Question 'a' is senseless.
Yes, exactly! That's one of the fundamental flaws in any system where you are not rewarded for performance. I call it the "death spiral of medicrity". Such systems eventually fail (ie, the USSR) because they breed mediocrity. I visited Lithuania with the Navy a few years ago and you can practically taste it. As we pulled into the shipyard, one look at the rows and rows of rusting cranes and abandoned ships and I said, "yep, that's what I'd have expected from communism".
(b) There is no stratification of wealth in this scenario, and so your question 'b' is the same as my poll.
Yes, I know - but it sounds a lot less enticing the way I put it, doesn't it? You and Smurf both just assume that such a system will work and you tried to imply that people who don't work within the system are lazy. Well the USSR
did not work and it wasn't because Russians are lazy, its because a system where you are not rewarded for individuality and performance
crushes your spirit and
does not work. You're the one pursuing the contradiction, not me.
The way you asked the question assumes the existence (or potential existence) of a fantasy world.
(c) I fail to understand how you cannot draw conclusions based on the way the question was framed.
Maybe I emphasized the wrong word there. What I said was: the conclusions
you drew cannot be drawn from your poll. You set up the poll question in a way that ensured that you'd get the answers you were looking for and as a result, the conclusion you drew is meaningless.
There are, however, some conclusions that
can be drawn from it. Most importantly, you'll notice that people said they'd do things that make them happy or feel good. Not a lot of people will choose to be sewer cleaners, or janitors, or fast-food workers, or mindless office drones. That highlights one of the major flaws in the system you envision: people will not do the work that sucks but still needs to be done unless you force them to.
But it gets worse: in a system where you have a chocie, you can be happy being a janitor because of the knowledge that you have some level of control over your situation. A system that does not reward performance crushes the spirit of the brain surgeon who makes $8 an hour because he isn't being rewarded for his skills
and it crushes the spirit of the garbage truck driver because he's being forced to be a garbage truck driver and there is nothing he can do about it.
It is no coincidence that the USSR had one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world. But that isn't the cause of the medicrity, it's just one more
effect of a system where people know they will not be rewarded for performance.