In Voyage from Yesteryear, the author (James P. Hogan) describes a post-scarcity society. Quote from a summary of the book:

Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing – resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all.

Ouch. Did this author ever watch a gaggle of teenage girls purchase things? "competence and talent" have very little to do with it.

That's why I mentioned the importance of not becoming a hive mind -- much purchasing (and trading) is done as the result of social pressure, not some futuristic idea of a meritocracy or even need. In the real world, with real people, if we don't keep our minds separate, we'll end up in this huge common mind where each little whim is judged socially, promoted socially, then manufacturing and trading decisions are made for everybody at one time, then on to the next thing. But even then, even in that terribly-imagined future, immediacy becomes a tradeable commodity. You just can't get away from trading.

Quite frankly, it's easy for somebody who fancies themselves an expert (and even I fit this category by pontificating here) to imagine some type of meritocracy, usually with their own values as universal. Plato started it, so he's in good company. But this is foolish in the extreme -- it assumes some ultimate value system shared by all mankind, it assumes some metric for that value system, and it assumes each individual would evaluate that metric the same way at all times. This is just too much. Way too much. If anything, if we continue to interconnect, it'll be social proof all the way down. Creativity and competence will have nothing to do with anything.

At some point, no matter who you are, you need to expose yourself and your ideas to those outside your little clique. Hence the importance of continuing to discuss these types of problems. These ideas strike me as highly provincial.

I think the argument is slightly more convoluted, so it survives your criticisms.

Let's imagine a society where there is one thing which everybody wants (say, food) which is controlled by one big corporation (say, monsanto) with few owners. There very well can be a parallel economy between people, but for the economy to function the few owners of this big corporation must want stuff from random people just as much as people want food. The moment this small number of people control something which far more people want than they want anything you will have an infinite sink; that is, each year a certain supply of everybody's wealth will be "eaten up" by the corporation without anything flowing back in return. With technology you can conceivably have a few of these (say, Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg can't possibly want enough things to not be effectively huge money sinks in the short term), and if you have enough of these you will have a crippled economy.

> Let's imagine a society where there is one thing which everybody wants (say, food) which is controlled by one big corporation (say, monsanto) with few owners.

Why imagine that and not unicorns that fart gold bricks?

Yes, unicorns don't exist, but your scenario doesn't exist without significant govt intervention, intervention that doesn't have to occur.