I think, as technology advances, it’s a useful question to ponder. What do you do, if machines have advanced to the point where they only need relatively minimal supervision from humans, from the mine to the store?
Think of an island with 100 people.
Inefficient, no machines - everyone has to work just to eat.
Opposite extreme situation - super efficient machines - only 1 person has to tend the machines, 99 can sit on the beach all day, have what they need, and pay the 1 guy for their food, clothing, shelter - all made by the machines - in coconuts they pick up on the beach.
That 1 machine tender would be quite rich in coconuts - since everyone else has to pay him for their food clothing and shelter.
At some point, those 99 would wind up wanting more and different things. A boat to look for other islands. Books. Artwork. Calculating machines. Etc. More than that 1 machine guy could make with his current machines.
Some enterprising ones among them would go into business making and selling these things.
Thus, you’d then have some of them employed and working.
Now consider our world, run by financial elites.
Their plans currently are to make most Americans poorer. Anything they can have made overseas they do. Even if it can profitably be made here. They then tell the sheeple it’s because “costs are too high here”, “Americans won’t do the work”, etc., which are lies.
They’re simply moving us in the direction of the 99 people sitting on the beach, and the machine guy is just an importer.
And they’re purposely making sure to squash any new efforts to put those people to work in the private sector.
They are planning on making Americans poorer by increasing government spending (thus increasing taxes), cutting pay and eliminating US jobs, and increasing consumer prices, until the US is brought down closer to the status of China in terms of per capita wealth and income.
They think Americans will accept merging with a regional or world government if they are in enough economic pain. Certainly if we lose a war, the US will have little choicein accepting world government.
The first generation would coast slowly downhill as the productive classes would not immediately abandon their ambition and work discipline. The decline will not take long. The idle will turn equality into an even greater fetish than it already is, and vote continuously to plunder the dwindling surplus produced by the still-productive. The question is what happens two or three generations into the experiment, when the saving remnant has shrunk to a tiny size, and the mass of the population has abandoned any felt need to work.
Answer: people will fight. Here and there, creative and energetic people will put in some extra effort and create something of value. The indolent will try to steal it. Residually competent subcultures will hive off, separate themselves from the mass, and look for ways to defend their turf. And people will fight over status, ethnic or religious differences, gang affiliations, or out of sheer boredom.