You ever go to a garage sale and wonder why they bought all that useless junk in the first place? What were they thinking? What materials were used to make some ugly statue of a deformed gorilla or some generic Wal-Mart looking lawn gnome? People argue it shall be choice to want something trivial. But if they had their needs, and were happy with themselves because of a society that allowed true freedom globally, would he need that garbage or want it after all?
You think it's an ugly statue. They didn't think so.
Some people love lawn gnomes -- they even paint them and accessorize them.
Neither of those things is trivial, because they come from human pleasure. Someone bought that gorilla because it pleased him. People buy lawn gnomes because they please them. They put them on grounds arranged and decorated differently because it pleases them. These things put color in people's lives.
Your paragraph here shows why socialism has to be a dictatorship: some one person will have to decide what is "need", and that's what people will be allowed. Nothing "trivial" could be permitted -- and that would take all color out of life. Society would become a gray, dismal place, monotonously the same, with no room for individuality or individual expression.
You speak of "true freedom globally", but that means ugly gorillas and lawn gnomes. It means being able to choose things that are trivial, things that others find foolish, things that are more than just needs. True freedom means I can paint myself green and go to the movies and eat friend pork rinds because it pleases me -- not because I need to.
Why do companies make toxic Styrofoam to make money so that the remains shall end up in landfills? Cups? Air pressure cars are the best source of green energy and is very efficient. Why do we allow the oil companies to have so much power over energy control? Why do we allow a health insurance company to be privately owned? Why would I want some company seeking profit to have the power over my life knowing they are of the richest companies in the nation?
Because of freedom: people like the convenience of styrofoam cups. They've said so with their trips to the store and with their dollars.
Air pressure cars are only as green as the power source for the air compressors. They haven't eliminated pollution, just relocated it. (They sure would cut down street noise, though!)
Capitalism is a way of life and is designed to be run under a system of economics with an orderly form that allows private industries to own the needs of the public. However, the government shouldn't own the services either. The public should. The public should BE the government truly. For example, after we evolve morally and socially through a gradual process, people will not need to be rewarded money for their hard work, but rather an abundance of needs and the ability to express a true human potential. People could work at community run grocery stores in which the products are made naturally grown and made organically with natural ingredients that would be available to everyone seeing as money is no longer an issue with cutting back and using artificial chemicals that cause cancer and other billion-dollar making illnesses such as diabetes.
You should read
Voyage from Yesteryear, by James Hogan. What you're talking about sounds like it would work out in practice the way he describes in the book.
If that's it, we lack several things for reaching your socialism: first, an effectively infinite supply of cheap energy; second, a relative excess of all raw materials; third, a non-human labor source capable of producing everything humans need.
That's the only way you can get where you're aiming: the only way to eliminate status arising from material wealth is to make material wealth irrelevant. If anyone who wished could have a yacht, owning a yacht would be meaningless; if anyone could have the house of his dreams, the house would lose all social value; if the latest iPod could be had by just walking into a depot and walking out with one, having it wouldn't bring envy.
That in turn would require that no one have to work. If people's worth depended in any way on what their work could be traded for, materialism would still reign, just in a very different fashion. But in such a system, where money was a joke because everything anyone might wish was there for the taking, work would take on a different value: people would be free to work for what they believed in, or doing what they enjoyed, not what they had to grab just to get a paycheck in order to eat. Someone who loved seeing fences in beautiful condition could roam about restoring, repairing, and maintaining fences; someone who enjoyed caring for trees could travel from place to place helping fight tree disease, etc. Work would be a way of saying, "This is what I enjoy", or "This is what I care about" -- or both. And status wouldn't depend, then, on accumulating power, but on doing well what you chose to do.
People argue money will be reinvented because products' value must be counted or measured. But people can't shake off certain patterns in thinking that are so ingrained to them. What they don't realize is that the products would never need to be counted or be given a price, because they wouldn't be sold.
"They wouldn't be sold" can mean two things: there wouldn't be any such products, or they'd be given away.
In the first case, the products would, if desired, be reinvented and made clandestinely, and a black market would develop for trade in them. Money would then get reinvented as well, as markers for relative worth.
In the second case, and only then, money would be irrelevant for two reasons: first, because who needs money when the price is zero?; second, because when everything has an equal price, the relative value is unity, i.e. everything is worth the same as everything else.
We are still living in a narcissistic, prehistoric early-stage in social development. Change happens gradually. That is why Marx Said socialism nor communism can be IMPLEMENTED because it makes the implemented system an oxymoron. Society needs to make simultaneous mistakes within itself to finally be enlightened.
You're talking about a phase change. That requires a new set of conditions. Ordinarily, such new sets are achieved through revolution, which generally involve a good deal of violence.
