? ... financial incentives is the motivation for most labor.
Thus widespread availability of "labor of love" open source software, and the relative crappiness of a lot of commercial software.
If I didn't require an income to cover a family of five, I would be retired, and doing whatever it is that I love at any moment. But instead, I work for a living, for money, to meet our needs.
The pool of people who are capable of collecting garbage is non-scarce, so the price for labor is relatively small compared to the social value it produces.
Advertising is so well rewarded because the attention of consumers is a very scarce resource, so companies put massive amounts of money into capturing some of that.
And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.
There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.
There is not much difference between China and western countries. Sure, China is a bit more oppressive (understatement of the year), but they both have element of capitalism and a huge set of coercitive and authoritarian laws which err on socialism.
In other words, "communism" is an authoritarian/dictatorial political system that masquerades as an economic system until it doesn't have to put up with any dissent, at which point it goes back to "capitalism." (State or Party or whatever. I think they call their version "with chinese characteristics" in the west.)
I'm not making a fundamental judgement on this, all laws are coercive in some sense, capitalist systems often have redistributive features, taxes and such.
However redistribution in the extreme and complete sense in communism is often characterised in utopian terms. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. That's a fine sentiment, but it entails an awful lot of systematic and thorough coercion, and the virtual elimination of freedom in the distribution and use of capital, or in fact property or resources of any kind. This is why we keep getting the "no true scotsman" complaint that criticisms of communism are invalid because they are never 'real' communism. That doesn't account for the coercive and prescriptive nature of a thoroughgoing redistributive system run by a bureaucratic elite. Since they need the authority to redistribute all resources, they need effectively unlimited power. That's why they keep ending up becoming so corrupt.
To the extent that socialist systems retain any freedom in the use, exchange and accumulation of money, they become correspondingly capitalist. Hence communism with 'Chinese' (read capitalist) characteristics.
Most countries I can think of implement a mix of capitalism and socialism. Some features are capitalism, some are features of socialism.
Coercion and taxation are not capitalism, taxation is just theft operated by the state.
I consider the "no true scotsman" argument for communism to be valid: we never arrived to real communism and that's because it's impossible.
Communism can be achieved only if all the individuals of society are perfect; without that perfection the best you can achieve is a socialist dictatorship.
On the opposite (anarcho-capitalist) side, I think we should try to get rid of all our society socialist features and see if the free market can support us entirely. In my opinion, capitalism is not bad, we just don't have enough.
I agree communism is impossible, that's why I think no true scotsman is an invalid criticism. My post was largely an attempt to explain why I think it's impossible and also actually undesirable. That's all just semantics though, I think we agree on the actual issue.
I disagree with your last paragraph. I oppose socialism as an ideology, as it is pursued by dyed in the wool socialists, but don't necessarily oppose all policies implemented in the name of socialism. I oppose ideologies generally, politically I support policies that have turned out to work, whatever the reasons might be.
For example I do believe in the power of free markets and that capitalism is essentially based on individual liberty. However for example here in the UK we have a very effective and beloved national health service. It's not perfect and might not be the system I would choose from scratch, with unlimited power to make it as I wished, but it works and I would oppose any attempts to radically reform it. There's just too much that's good about it that we could break. Maggie, one of my political heroes, tried to reform it along market lines in the 80s and it was disastrous.
But then there are historical reasons why Britain has some of it's economic and political settlements. Social consensus is important and what works for us might not work for others with different traditions, institutions and expectations.