Life cannot be sustained without effort. Does real freedom entail freedom from the demands of reality? The question I have is, whose obligation would you say it is to provide a job that you consider good enough?
In this day and age, sustaining life should not require 40+ hours of work per week.
As a society we are producing a ridiculous amount of surplus, and then conditioning ourselves to consume that surplus so that we can produce even more.
Where does it end?
Until some place has a successful anarchic-type revolution (a la Spain & Paris) without an outside power coming in to overthrow them we're stuck with this legacy economic/political system and the best we can do is civilize it with prudent regulation (which we can barely do because it's been systemically corrupted).
Two examples:
1) I read an article where the writer took a job somewhere in the Pacific or Southeast in a non-heavily developed area. When he gets to the village he has no place to stay. How will I live?
What happens, which as a Westerner he did not expect, was that soon the community gathered at a spot and over the next few days built him his house! It was simple but in line with the community standard. The expectation was that when someone else had a need (maybe a house) he would return the favor.
2) In the scandinavian model, I believe you get schooling paid for until you find a job and then you have to pay the gov't back. Which is sort of the reverse in NA where you pay upfront and hope to recoup the cost yourself. With that model it seems the gov't has incentive to ensure there are enough jobs so that they can recoup costs.
how is this different than borrowing money from a bank to get a house built? In the village, the westerner had a debt - sure it was verbal, but it is a debt never-the-less. This method don't work when the size of the village grows beyond a certain point (because you cannot keep track of more than about 100 people without needing written records and formalizatin).
Fast forward a few hundred years, and you end up with what we have right now - a system of money, credit and work. Its exactly the same, except with way more indirections so that the participants don't have to directly know each other and keep tabs on each other.
As for how it would scale, I don't know. Is the structure and culture of western urban society the only form possible?