Check history of the Soviet Union - it was a glaring issue there.
Which famously struggled because it didn't overpay its software engineers enough. So instead of doing productive work like optimizing ad impressions and creating DRM they all became garbage collectors and cleaners.
No, I'm not trying to engage in constructive debate right now. Apparently I lack whatever skill is needed to debate liberals without triggering their COMMIE!! reflex.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I've just mentioned Soviet Union as prominent and well-documented example. Don't put words I haven't said in my mouth. Thank you.
Heck, this issue is not even specific to communism.
Because anything else is wishful thinking at best and destroys society at worst.
I guess people can have different definitions of "destroying society."
I grew up in the USSR where you literally lacked physical stuff in your life that people in the rest of the world took for granted decades prior. A huge contributor to that was that people's work was rewarded on a metric other than their productive output, as measured by what society was willing to pay for in the free market.
To put it another way - we need people to produce. And we need them to produce the right stuff. The best system we have to deciding what's right is what other people use their dollars for.
If we paid people on some other metric we'd end up with a lot of bullshit work, no aspirations, and physical shortages.
I am sure your definition differs.
Define "rest of the world" because for the time period when the USSR was in existence, my part of the world was either actively being colonised or foundering in the neocolonialist wake of independence.
And that's the crux of it, isn't it? The world's foremost capitalist states (and the imperialist states that preceded them and laid the foundation for their current success) aren't less destructive than the USSR or than Maoist China. They simply had/have the dubious luxury of externalising the destruction and misery (and hiding it where it exists at home, in the poor and marginalised). The West built (and still builds) its abundance of "physical stuff" on the sweat, tears and sometimes literally blood of the developing world. Today's "free" market runs on the back of sweatshops, destabilisation and child labour - there has to be inequality and suffering elsewhere for companies to afford to put up the prices that consumers have become entitled to.
But hey, that destructiveness is not in your own backyard, so I suppose it doesn't exist.
I am not sure the crazy town you are taking this to. But in case it somehow helps you understand - the USSR was horrible to its own people and to neighboring countries, forced labor and all, and still wasn't able to provide basic shit to anyone but the party elite.
To me that seems like a non-sequiter.
There is no reason to suspect that the optimization (with respect to whatever objective you desire, e.g. total happiness) of a large, complex, chaotic, system (such as a society) can be best achieved by using 'ethical correctness' as the only criterion for decision making.
At least, that's my opinion. I hope that doesn't make me an indecent human being.
Practically, giving someone a direct incentive to do worthwhile things works out far better than some central planner deciding how much they should produce and how much they deserve. Somehow it always turns out that the central planner deserves way more than everybody else.