One word that is conspicuously absent from this articles and the comments so far, is &quot;SCARCITY&quot;.  Both socialism and capitalism are systems designed to deal with scarcity (and often, to generate it as well, since as systems, (and the stake holders in those systems), they benefit from scarcity.<p>The problem we have now is to establish a new system (or systems), to deal with abondance, or at least greatly reduced scarcity.  If the stakeholders of the old systems don&#x27;t prevent us, eg. by declaring a very destructive WWIII.