I think that for sure one of the drawbacks of the labor to currency system is the blind consumerism and the unethical conditions necessary to, say, make a bacon cheeseburger. I think the unethical parts of that interaction have more to do with corporate price-gouging and abuse of labor than the consumer themselves, who (in our current system) is kept intentionally blind to the real cost of their meal.
I think that for sure rent-seeking is one of those things that, in this theoretical government, would need to be addressed. Landlords and speculators are clearly opportunists with no connection to the stuff they milk value from, and that’s problematic.
On reflection, ultimately I have no problem with the premise that people don’t necessarily need to understand how to grow wheat, or even know someone who owns wheat, in order to consume the labor of a farmer- so long as that farmer is capable of truly leveraging their labor favorably and also benefits from that interaction. In that scenario, the farmer also uses the abstraction, which allows them to really utilize all of their labor through a larger base of people to sell to. They can also put this theoretical currency towards things that contribute to their fulfillment and that of their family members without knowing the person who produces those things personally, and so on.
I think one place I’m struggling with this is I’m having a hard time conceptualizing how people with more ephemeral skills would be able to leverage that skill into the resources necessary to obtain other types of fulfillment without a way to hold and transfer the value they generate. I’m sure there are philosophers who’ve written books on books about it, and I just need to find their work lol.
I think that we stopped using horses and adapted systems to do similar work, for sure, but that was after we had already iterated into the saddle, the cart, the wagon, carriage, etc. Horse to car is a big step if we look at the two of them without the greater context, but it was thousands of years of technology and iteration before we got there. They’re fundamentally interrelated- I mean heck, we even measure the power of an engine by horses.
I agree that the natural next step economically is coming, and that’s a fact- the questions in my eyes are: what’s the horse, what’s the carriage, and what are we replacing the horse with?