TIL there is a proposed HTTP status code 451 indicating censorship, referencing Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 novel

It's not "exploitation", jackass.

Let's play pretend. Let's say that your hippie nonsense happens and we all overthrow our oppressive masters, redistribute the wealth and kill the lawyers. Great! Hell, let's get rid of money too. Now, we still need to eat, which means some of us are going to need to farm. Well, there are 7 billion people on the planet so it's pretty obvious we can't all be farmers. Now, we could have some people farm and then redistribute their food among the rest of us, but who's going to want to farm if they get no reward for it? People are greedy, remember? So what we need is a system where people who agree to work get some sort of compensation. Either that, or we have to make everyone work so no one feels like they're being taken advantage of. This is one of the basic tenants of socialism, and it sounds fine on paper. Everyone according to their abilities and we all share the bounty. Problem is, some jobs are easier than others and the lazier people will gravitate to easier jobs. In that society, you end up with a shit load of, say, clerks and a dearth of doctors, engineers, etc; jobs we need. Why would you study for nigh-on a decade when you won't be rewarded any better for it? Sure, you can make people do it at gunpoint but then you've effectively crossed over to a dark place.

So instead, we need some method of rewarding people who do valuable labor, a reward that they can then trade people who hold other jobs in return for the fruits of their labor. In our world, we call this "money", and it enables people to trade their labor for things that they need to survive.

The problem is, people want to do more than survive. You really only need so much food, so once you've satisfied that requirement, you start to look for other things to occupy your time. Turns out, that "money" thing we invented can do just that, by providing you access to entertainment. That entertainment is a job that we invented that helps feed those of us who can't be farmers, or who maybe aren't smart enough to be engineers or doctors. It's a job. Now, some people are greedier than others and smarter too; they use their talents to accrue more money than others. This is bad, but it's really not the fault of the system, after all, if no one gave them their money, they wouldn't have it.

The Soviets tried to do away with Capitalist practices in favor of communism, a command-economy instead of a supply-demand one and it made people's lives very, very miserable. Sure, with capitalism you get inequality, but it's a system that rewards and punishes, and frankly, it's the best system we have given how shitty human nature can be.

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - theguardian.com