Ok, I read back through that a few times and realized I was in a pretty funky mood when I wrote it so lets revisit some ideas. First I am not really sure that we have reached the point where it has outlived its purporse. Case in point, if you take the GDP of the US and evenly distribute it around you wind up with everyone having about 30k a year. Not bad money but, not great money. For capitalisim to really outlive its usefullness I think that number needs to get to the point where general living costs for everyone is around the same rate as tax is today.
30k is probably a good water mark for enough money to live comfortably. You won't be driving a new car every 2 years or living in the really nice section of town. But you certainly arn't going to starve and if you have a little sense of self denial you won't be head over heels in debt. However, 30k for everyone in the USA represents pretty much 100% of all value being produced in the economy. This means everyone would be working to make sure everyone has the same things. Meaning some people would be doing things that are more valuable than someone else. That is one of the fundamental short commings of communisim. It just dosn't allow for the desire of people to distinguish themselves from each other.
So for a system to exist where you remove money from the need to survive IE provide basic life (not welfare) provisions across the board, the cost to society as a whole needs to represent a reasonable fraction of all value being produced. Current Welfare costs percentages would be a good place to start as to what we could sustain, they may also serve as a good mark for what we cannot exceed. In order to do that we need to be a couple of magintudes more productive per capita without a corresponding increase in cost of living. This is really not that crazy an idea if you consider the recent growth in per capita production through the past century or so. If you compare productivity levels of an average worker from pre industrilized economies with that of today you see an exponential growth curve.
The problem is that while the growth curve of productivity has been exponential, the purchasing power that has come along with that growth has been much smaller. If you are talking what I could buy 100 years ago with my present sallary it would seem fantastic. However there was much in that day and age that we take for granted that was not available at any price then. So this increase in productivity came with a corresponding increase in the costs of living. Cars, Airconditioning, better health care/drugs all cost a great deal of money. Money that was not being spent before. So while you made more you had more to spend it on and in many cases they were not luxuries but things which really did and do improove the quality of life. The car beats the snot out of the horse, Refridgiration beats an ice box and Viagra beats ground up rhinocerous horn etc etc etc....
Even so the power of the individual to purchase luxury items has greatly increased. To the point where owning multiple cars/houses/pleasure crafts etc represent items for the average person rather than just the wealthy. The gap in expected life span between the average person and the wealthy has also closed to almost negligible. So if we continue down this track and reach the point where the equivalent of 30k distibution to everone only represented roughly what it costs for welfare we will be at a point where we need to reconsider capitalisim as our main means of distinguishing ourselves from each other.
The reason I was able to consider that we have already reached that point is because I am not sure that 30k today is what basic survival should cost. I think to some extent we have inflated costs to deal with our increased productivity. IE we have created a sink for the money rather than allowing a large gap to grow between the average persons needs and the amount of money they have to spend. If goods are worth nothing (ie represent no significant cost) then you can't pay someone responsible for making them very much. Probably the best example of that these days is food. Farmers are paid to grow less food because otherwise they would flood the market to such an extent that farming would cease to be economically viable. Yet under those circumstances the cost of a basic need like food would plummet. Granted without a means to keep the farmers farming (no incentive if they can't make enough money) then sooner or later there is so litte food produced that the pendulum swings the other way. The problem is of course that such a swing is known as a famine and they are pretty damn nasty. What that dosn't change is that for the first time in history we possess the means to produce insanely cheap plentifull food but not a system of economics which can sustain it. Isn't that Ironic... don't you think ? To add insult to injury due to that lack we have to pay those incentives with tax money which inflates our cost indirectly as we are the ones that pay the taxes in the first place. So not only does food not cost as little as possible it costs us more besides to maintain the higher costs. So in short we pay more in taxes to keep food prices higher.
The real kicker there ? In a capitalist system that insane state of affiars actually makes sense as the option of farming ceasing to be an economically viable endeavor would lead to massive starvation as a means of ballancing the equation so that it was economically viable. I suppose in a way all this has been about my gut feeling that there has got to be a better way.
Housing is another good example. With the advent of the two income home, income per household has skyrocketed since the 50's. Logically if per household income roughly doubled you would think that the percentage of cost represented by housing would essentially half. In otherwords if housing cost 50% of your household income before it should cost 25% after it doubled. Well point in fact, housing cost roughly 30% of average household income in the 50's and it costs roughly 30% of houshold income in naughty aughts. This is because people started buying larger houses (as just owning a house was no longer a means of distinguishing yourself) and houses started costing more because people had more money to buy them with.
So in part the cost of living today is inflated from its true value. Right now I think you could make an argument that the cost of a comfortable living is a function of GDP evenly distributed. Perahps I will go track down enough numbers to prove or disproove that idea. But what that would mean is that no matter how high average income rose the cost of an average living would still be essentially 100% of GDP evenly distributed. Meaning that we could never escape that fact without altering our system of economics. This is not to say that the quality of life represented by that comfortable living would not increase, far from it ( we live better today than we did in the 80's and better then than in the 50's ). However the bell curve still exists and we have a very poor system of providing for those that wind up with the short smelly end of the stick. Of course we all like to think we can end up on the other end of the curve and enjoy having more than we need. Mathmatically though that is as impossible as it is to eliminate those at the smelly end with the current system of apportioning the basic need of survival (money).
So while in the end I don't think we are ready to change to another system of economics, I also don't think the true cost of a comfortable living really costs as much as our entire GDP evenly distributed. As for what it really costs... I imagine to find that you have to go back and look at things like the increase in the cost of housing, the onset of over production of food and other similar indications of artificially inflated prices with regards to basic needs (cars come to mind).
ahhh perhaps another time. For now I am tired and have rambled on long enough. Later
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