this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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Oh I see the problem you're having, you still think most jobs need doing.
They don't.
The majority of jobs under a capitalist society are not needed to produce goods, nor distribute goods, nor consume goods.
We could just eliminate health insurance. Entirely. Just completely remove the concept from our society. There are now 1.6 million people that need work. Median age of 32.
Remove all insurance and we get up to 3 million. That's about 5% of the working population.
Insurance is only needed under capitalism. so let's eliminate that.
Now eliminate Marketers. Now all advertising. and so on. Eliminate middle management.
Congrats. we keep going like this and we can easily get a quarter or more of the working population doing something useful.
Now let's bring in incentives for the chronically unemployed, the majority of which just can't compete in capitalism, but still have both the skills and capability to flourish under alternative economic systems that don't require 40-80 hour work weeks after begging for a job through the least efficient hiring process ever developed.
The more you dig into the facts, the more you realize that not only do we not need most people working full time, we don't need most people working.
And with more free time that increases innovation, and without a capitalist structure preventing automation vis-a-vi complete societal collapse, congrats you now have incentives to reduce work even further to the minimum amount.
This not only allows for depopulation, but actively encourages it, naturally, as despite having more free time and resources and less stress, people would only have kids if they wanted kids. Not because they need someone to take care of them in their old age, or other such coercive, frankly evil excuses to have kids.
Are you advocating for not treating the sick whatsoever, or are you assuming total governmental funding for treating the sick?
'funding' is a capitalist term, but yes a simplification of socialist and post-currency economics would be 'the government funds treating the sick'.... like it does in 109 countries, including every developed nation, and a majority of recognized developing nations except the US.
What term would you use instead of “funding”? Even if we ditch capitalism, as we should, doctors et al still need to get paid, and hospitals still need money to operate (assuming we got rid of any for-profit healthcare). We wouldn’t be doing this with a barter system, right?
I don’t think most jobs need doing. I don’t want any jobs at all period.
But if you have four old people who need four workers to care for them and there’s only one worker to go around no amount of firing social media managers and insurance adjusters that’s gonna fix it.
This isn’t an economic problem, it’s a demographic one. Which is why it’s a problem across the world and not just in capitalist nations. (And is in fact worst in China due to the effects of the one child policy.)
You don't need one worker per old person. The best care homes in the world still do 10-1. Most care homes get by with minimal incidents at 20-1. Heck you won't even get investigated for neglect in the US until you're at 30-1 or higher (depending on the state.)
As someone who was a CNA for a short while -- either the old people are doing fine, in which case they mostly take care of themselves with 'reminders' and 'structure' provided by the carers, or they're REALLY not doing fine in which case they're going to the hospital and statistically will not need constant care for much more than a few hours.
Old people are shockingly self sufficient, almost like they're people, even in terrible condition; one good nurse and a CNA can handle a 20-odd crowd from breakfast (including wiping) to settling in for bed (including wiping, so much wiping). Technically a nurse can do it alone if they have no overweight or PITA patients to oversee.
Okay, let’s assume it’s 10-1. How many other people, in a perfectly efficient system, would it take to provide a decent quality of life for that caretaker and the 10 elderly people? Growing and transporting food, building and maintaining infrastructure, researching and providing medical care, producing electricity and clean water. Nothing extra.
And how many people to support these people.
Probably more than we’d have available to work.
There’s a reason China started taxing condoms.
Way, way less than you think. 2+2++1+3%. That is the entirety of food workers and food transportation, packaging, and sales, respectively, as a percentage of population for the united states, which produces twice the food needed by the population.
Water workers? maybe 5%. and that's a hard maybe because that includes all plumbers, not just infrastructure. Electricity? As long as we don't go with coal and oil it's an average of 1 worker per GW. admittedly line workers and electricians make up a decent chunk approaching 3 whole % of a population, but let's be honest here, we're fine on that front still.
And that's the great thing about economies of scale and automation and mechanization. It's not the 1700s anymore. We don't have to have 98% of the population in food production. We don't have to waste productivity. We are, and this isn't a joke, on average more than 10,000 times more productive as individuals and as a species than our ancestors.