This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

you can't hold the viewpoint that essentials should be provided to everyone and still think that large groups of people should have careers that produce nothing meaningfully useful because the resources, time, and manpower to provide those essentials have to come from somewhere.

Sure, but lots of people out there already have careers that produce "nothing meaningfully useful" AND aren't doing things they love, or even necessarily tolerate. If it's between making a webcomic and saving peoples' lives, then yeah, saving peoples' lives is pretty dang important. If it's between making a webcomic and sitting around in a cubicle all day writing sales reports for Coca-Cola or something, then that's a different story.

Our culture has this notion that "jobs" are inherently virtuous and everyone should be busy all the time, but obviously there are tons of people who aren't busy with anything seriously important. Perhaps we have the societal equivalent of twelve people all helping to carry a single brick. That, combined with the fact that under the current structure, those people might NEED to be brick-carriers in order to put food on the table, means that there starts to be an incentive for unnecessary brick-carrying to take place, for pointless walls to be built.

I suspect that our society isn't as high-maintenance as we all sort of assume. I suspect that if we cleared out the cruft and sorted things out a bit, we could make it run with minimal fuss and leave absolutely everyone with plenty of free time. Sure, everyone needs to pull their weight, but that might not actually work out to very much pulling. Particularly if we installed a block and tackle.