We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.
If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...
If it were efficient it would clear the queue with max throughput. This is not so.
I imagine that you can pony up to be seen in two days in Canada too, and also that the single-payer system keeps those private practice honest, so you'd pay less for your fast turnaround than in Freedonia. I may be wrong, of course.
"If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.
"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.
your argument is ideological, not rooted in reality.
- Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid): 24%
- Social Security: 23%
- Net Interest on Federal Debt: 15%
- National Defense: 13%
And I'll point out that the enormous bill for the interest on debt is a pretty good reason to avoid ringing up so much debt in the first place.
Then get ready to be a slave, bc noone, absolutely noone gives things for free, which is, in my view, reasonable.
Why would I believe this?
What happens when labour-based production is fully replaced by automated factories? Then ?
The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
I suspect the size of the debt is just a "dc offset" and not the main signal. While important, maybe not as "information-ally" significant as it's size would suggest. Still it is probably hiding something, a subtle bug in the accounting, and that something contributes to the frequent cycles of debt-jubilees, revolutions, upheavals etc.
Now the real question you have posed is what is missed in the debate - most wealth in our society is captured in the make up and choice of goods and services consumed, and what is the contribution of a bias towards wealthy consumption here? e.g. in my country there were about 150 luxury yacht sales totaling ~$4billion, vs ~80,000 luxury car sales @ ~$15billion, vs total car sales of ~1,000,000 at ~$100billion. The annual cost of our public disability insurance scheme is ~$50billion. The "sharing" seems to have a significant access to resources compared to luxury on those accounts. I personally think the public disability insurance scheme causes harmful distortion to the broader economy while also meeting the important needs of some members of society.
My gut feel the issue is not ideological or political or a luxury preference, it's structural - the economy is not structured to deliver the correct set of needs, and this is due to real material constraints that have always constrained the economic problem. Not in terms that just the wrong top down decisions are being made, but that the correct bottom up decisions are prevented from being made. If you apply a model of computation complexity, feedback and iterative improvement - bottom up generally has more access to information and compute to directly address problems, while top-down can occasionally deal with global biases and accumulated error.
One true material constraint is the scarcity of competence and accountability. Wealth accumulation is the natural consequence of that material constraint. Top down "political & ideological decisions" are generally the enemy of competence and accountability.
This cruel system has to end.
Entertaining a lump of monolithic production fallacy is also silly.
There are any number of detailed and specific problems that need to be solved to solve the greater economic problem you describe. A system that promotes direct effort to solve specific problems is required.
Your naivety only exacerbates the cruelty.