Money Problems
Money is such a terrible thing to organize a society around. It's a resonance cascade where having money makes it easier for you to get more money, simultaneously creating billionaires and poverty.
The root of the question is: how do we make a society where things are fair and every person is motivated to contribute and improve society?
Minimums
The first step is to create universal minimums.
- Minimum housing
- Minimum nutrition
- Minimum education
- Minimum everything.
This explicitly includes minimum accessibility accommodations. Not everyone needs to be given a wheelchair but wheelchairs must to be given to everyone who needs them. This is not unfair. The people who need extra accommodations are a drop in the ocean compared to vampire billionaires, selfish politicians and people who are actively taking steps to harm society. Accessibility makes it possible for more people to contribute. Not granting accessibility guarantees that those who are underserved will look like they are a drain on the system, and this is how it is now intentionally for political points and scapegoating.
Accessibility makes it possible for more people to contribute.
A life of only minimums should be humble but comfortable. Everyone deserves a life of minimums. Programmers, sales people, felons, artists. Every human being deserves the minimum comforts our society has been easily able to implement for 100 years. Not every good person, every nice person, every smart person. Every person. UBI is a step towards this and need not be avoided because it incorporates money--indeed, the transitive steps towards an egalitarian society will necessarily incorporate money.
Luxuries
Once all true needs are met luxury things can be earned (and I mean actual luxury, cell phones and steaks are not luxury are treats. What I mean is jewelry, expensive cars, yachts, etc). If you contribute to society, you should be rewarded. The rewards have their limits, though. Even someone who single-handedly solves the climate crisis still does not deserve to be as powerful as a billionaire. That is rewarding altruism with power but when concentrated, power is tyranny. "Won't this make it so people are lazy and don't contribute?". No, and if you're asking this question you were probably totally fine with society not making it easy for Stephen Hawking to navigate, yet he did anyway and he still changed the world. You might want to be lazy in this society but if there are opportunities open to everyone, I guarantee that laziness will become stale and people will yearn for more.
if there are opportunities open to everyone, I guarantee that laziness will become stale and people will yearn for more
The Value of What We Contribute
Why would anyone be a trash collector or janitor in this world of yours?
How miraculous is it that anyone wants to do jobs like that in our current world, given that the pay is always meager and the job is looked down upon? Are you ever happy to look at trash on the road? Do you ever see dirty windows and think "it'd be nicer if these were clean"? You've had the impulse to do that job, even if it's for the duration of a single task, but why didn't you? Because there is no reward unless that's your job and if it's your job, that's not rewarding! What if you didn't have to be a janitor all the time just to survive? What if your time was free for you to pursue anything you wanted? At some point, you might want to just clean something and because your needs are met, your rare desire to clean can be productively applied.
In this way, the work society does is not organized around capital, but around care. Have you ever heard or said "Man, someone needs to create this thing, it would be awesome". What comes next, though? "I can't, I've got a job I hate that I have to get back to". What if you were like "You know what, I wanna see that thing come to life, I'm going to work on it!". Even if you weren't the one to create it, you could inspire excitement in others, who also would not need to get back to jobs they hate, to make it happen.
Art could be decoupled from greed.