If all basic needs were met (food, shelter, and medical), could socialism work (without the need for wars or famine to reduce the population)?
If all basic needs were met (food, shelter, and medical), could socialism work (without the need for wars or famine to reduce the population)?
Ideally, socialism isn’t just “the government provides for your needs”, it goes the other way around too. The point is to come together, pool resources and combine our strenghts. There’s no free handouts, you give and you receive.
You shouldn’t have to enforce a birth rate cap if the population understand that they need to match society’s capacity to expand and build the infrastructure. You’d announce the recommended number and danger number, and people would organically organize to on average make it, knowing their large family could lead to famine.
The main problem here is
That part does a lot of heavylifting there. People only play nice all together when society is working for them, people need to respect the society they live in. When scarcity happens, people become selfish, it’s survival of the strongest, and everything falls off the rails and naturally goes to capitalism and hoarding resources. The population cannot lose faith in the system.
I take huge exception to this. That is absolutely not the case in my experience. Poor people are often much more generous with their time and resources than rich people. Any given billionaire could give up 1% of their wealth to end hunger in their country, but they don’t. Rich people could give up their holiday homes and empty rental properties to end homelessness, but they don’t. And yet poor people will volunteer in food co-ops, donate to homeless shelters, work extra hours to provide for their families.
Capitalism is only around 300 years old, it is absolutely NOT a natural state of affairs for humans. It’s just another way of arranging the economy like mercantilism or socialism.