Um, what? People who are happy and taken care of may well be that way precisely because they are able to spend enough money to either prevent problems from arising, or make them go away if they do arise. There is no magical way to make people happy and taken care of without doing productive work, and a free market is the best way we know of to efficiently do productive work.

> The sooner we can get out of this "money is a proxy for everything because markets are perfect" nonsense the better.

I would say that the sooner we stop trying to monkey with markets because we think we can do better when we actually can't, the better. I completely agree that not everything can be provided by free market transactions; but that doesn't change the fact that without all the stuff that can and should be provided by free market transactions, our current civilization could not exist. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live the kind of life that everybody would be living if our current civilization did not exist.