This also applies to conceptions of heaven, the best description of which I found in the movie Defending Your Life, in which the worthy deceased ascend to become "citizens of the universe" and tackle bigger, cosmic challenges with their vastly increased intellect.

From A Few Notes on the Culture

This isn't accurate as it applies to the Culture: The vast majority of the Culture does not engage in conflict. It also goes undepicted for the most part; the functioning of that society is hand-waved as a product of the Minds. But, it is also depicted as neither a hedonistic free for all, or a bland, blissful meditation on coexistence.

All that would happen is those other places would become dependent on the free food we send them, and certain of their domestic industries would be destroyed as they couldn't compete with the cost of free food being dumped into their economy.

Also here domestically excess food would no longer be produced as if you don't produce any excess you don't have to pay the cost of shipping it, or doing anything with it. Everything would become "just in time" or made immediately 1 to 1 with a specific request. So the post scarcity impression we have now would go away pretty fast.

So I don't think we actually are post scarcity with regards to almost anything currently. Efficiency is very high I would say, so high, and we're so productive that we occasionally end up with wasted resources caused by poorly estimating demand.

Unfortunately, before any of that happens, security, police, and military will be going post-scarcity, while those in power are pretty selfish.

Right now, there are tons of goods that are effectively post scarcity.

The amount of free information and entertainment (available online) is insanely higher than anything that existed even 20 years ago.

The post scarcity Utopia is being created right now, by capitalism.

Post scarcity is something that applies on a per good basis. For example nobody has ever had to pay for the air that they breath, because air isnt a scarce good. And post scarcity is being quickly applied to more and more goods.

Well, a reader of fiction is not truly content without conflict and challenge.

But I’m not sure it’s fair to extrapolate from that to a principle about how real societies can operate. After all, fiction always pumps conflict and challenge up to 11 compared to the real world. Pick a popular book or movie at random: what’s the chance that somewhere in its plot, some character tries to murder another character? I’d say pretty high. In real life, the vast majority of people go through their lives without anyone ever trying to kill them, and that’s probably been true for most or all of human history. But that doesn’t make life incurably boring.

Which is a temporary outlet for a select very affluent few Westerners (non-affluent person wouldn't even be able to afford transportation and supplies, not mentioning $500 entrance fee) who drive there for a week (increasingly accompanied by air-conditioned tents and personal chefs), frolic in costumes or negligee, burn stuff down for fun and return to their regular lives. A lot of fun, but I can't see how any sane person can see it as a model for a society.

> The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood

Somehow in the real socialism it happens in exactly the opposite way (the famous joke is that under capitalism man exploits man, and under socialism it's the other way around). Socialism always produces the nomenklatura (note that I have to use a Russian word for it, because it is so inherent to the largest Socialist experiment in history) and the privilege networks (another Russian word, "blat") which create a complex network of inequality and privileged access to formally "equal" benefits. In a capitalist society, most inequality is monetary - through class, sex and race play its role, ultimately money usually overcomes most of it (especially in a modern society, where things like open racism are frowned upon). In a socialist one, not only money can't do much without privilege, if you are outside the privilege network, the mere attempt to make this money (or otherwise route around the privilege network) would get you imprisoned or executed. Some brotherhood it is.

I know that x, which is a member of group X, has the property P. Therefore, membership in X causes property P.

I can play this game too.

Haiti, Ethiopia, Liberia, India, Honduras and Somalia have market economies, and they are poor. Therefore, market economies make nations poor.

There's really not much to learn from this kind of argument.

You are issued things like housing.

There's a pecking order based on rank. If ranks are equal, there is an alternative barter economy based on who owes who favors (instead of money).

Although all your needs are provided for (at massive cost to the taxpayer), it isn't a happy way to live.

Since you edited to add your counter-examples, I’ll edit to point out that socialism is a system that has been deliberately implemented by its instantiators in each case I’m aware of. To compare it to capitalism, but only those capitalist countries that have suffered lawlessness or other calamity, is to compare apples to oranges.

Seems like a very familiar concept ripped from today's headlines, certainly not restricted to archaic economic systems.

I usually find that apples and oranges are quite easy to compare.

No, because there's USA, Germany, France, etc. Which has much bigger market economies and not poor. But all major socialist economies has been a disaster (no, China is not a socialist economy and hasn't been for a while, neither is Sweden, Denmark etc.), and socialist societies has been even worse disaster in non-economic sense (see gulags, Pol Pot killing fields, Cultural Revolution, North Korea, etc.).

> Proof by example is a logical fallacy.

Some people call learning from example empirical research and scientific method. Others ignore all the examples and keep claiming the real perpetual motion engine just hasn't been tried yet.

I completely disagree with your impression, but that all is beside my point.

The part of the Burning Man culture I'm pointing to is the one where people go co-create all this shit anyway, when they don't have to, when it doesn't solve any need, when it's not about a contrast with somewhere else.

Not everyone needs a problem to solve to get off their arse and make something amazing, and you can see that multiple times a year around the world if you look at these events.

Compared to the USA - yes, compared to the USSR - no. France is largely capitalist economy with a lot of socialist policies. As long as the engine of the capitalist economy (private ownership, private initiative, private capital, substantial competition, etc.) is intact, it can bear a lot of socialist policies without breaking down (even at the cost of some slowdowns and inefficiencies). Once you break that, there's pretty much no chance.

> Aren't you talking about oligarchies rather than socialist regimes?

No, unless you choose to redefine what has been always known as socialism as "oligarchy" and what has been always known as capitalist economy with substantial government intrusions as "socialism". This would make conversation very awkward, as any non-traditional term usage tends to do, but will not change anything of the substance. USSR economy and French economy (and both societies of course) were different in principle, not in degree, and you can not ignore that while staying in the realm of reality and outside of fairy-land economics.

> The fact that some oligarchies were born under the pretense of socialism doesn't mean socialism was the cause.

USSR was one of the largest and most complete and consistent implementations of socialism ever attempted. If they didn't do it right, on your opinion, then nobody could do it right, ever.