Don't forget the cooks and the restaurant owner and the other employees, costs such as materials to cook with, the gas electric water. No restaurant food would still have a cost to it. as it is, ingredients are one of the lowest costs at a placee Big Boy or Perkins. Even the food you buy in the grocery store would have the shipping and store operations overhead on it. you are oversimplifing the supply chain andbdistribution costs. Just because we have an over abundance of food doesn't mean it can be delivered to you local market and.kept fresh for free.

The Sun is an abundant resource and we don't use it nearly as much as we should.

orathaic: As a socialist, I think this is the worst defense of socialism I've ever seen. Maybe that's because I don't understand you, or because you have a different defenition of socialism.

abge, what about The Times? Abundant or not?

Maybe... This wasn't a defence of socialism, this was an exploration of abundance economics...
Draug, thanks that's very useful. I'm going to guess that a part of the low cost of food is government policy. (subsidies to growers, combined with any other policies aimed directly at keeping food affordable - because a well-fed population is an apathetic population... Or however cynically you wish to look at government policymaking...)

Making transport capacity abundant would be a harder task i fear, the easiest route would be to bring food growing closer to human occupation - but i don't think that suits human transport needs (people visiting each other, optimised by urban living, just as universities might optimize sharing of knowledge by focusing specialists in one area)

Local growing (ie having your own garden) will only gorw a small percentage of our food, so another solution is necessary - and while i can imagine a solar powered super train, it think the development investment would be prohibitive. (note we do treat sunlight as an abundant resource, nobody pays for it, nobody worries that there will not be enough and it lights our home for half of every day... Also does a lot of heating... )

Abundant power would really be a game changer here, but that will take some doing.

Ok, let's assume we can provide logistic subsidies for transport, storage, and distribution to your local market/restaurant (i'm still ok with paying for the chef, waitress food prep etc, just free to take food home and prepare it yourself - notice you can now do away with food stamps entirely, so there is some saving)

Still there are problems, how do you maintain food production levels? How do you encourage a minmisation of the cost? Obviously you're talking about paying for any new research from public funds but at least the new tech is not owned by a small collection of corporate entities... What do farmers as civil servants look like?

I'm always wary of people who make statements such as 'I'm a huge socialist'. What does that mean in a market economy?

That the declarant weighs at least 240 kilos?

NigeeBaby: It means that they have a high BMI and therefore eat more, lifting the economy.

Well, generally having socialist leanings tends to allow sympathies for alternatives to a market economy - i suspect a market economy doesn't make sense for an abundant resource - you can't market sunlight, or love ;)

@ora - You forget the overhead on the supermarket as well. The walking coolers. The people who stock the shelves and run the registers, the building itself. These all mean the food at the grocer still won't be free.

And unless we move to a purer began society local.farming could.never supply all our needs. How do you raise dairy cows in the deserts of Nevada or go fishing there, for that matter.

Add to that the nature of man to want what is rare and hard to obtain and suddenly you have people paying yet again for Maine lobster in Chicago and California oranges in New York.

Re: Solar energy - Solar energy is an infinitely abundant resource as far as we are concerned, but the means of collecting it are neither abundant nor free.

Speaking as a person who is a card carrying member of the Labour Party and former Council Representative I have spent many a time and oft trying to describe/understand my political hue.
My thoughts on Socialism are now not based on the method of trade transacting or ownership of the means of production, both are very blunt instruments they do not really touch the quintissential thoughts/feelings/beliefs I have as a Democratic Socialist.
In my own mind economic/political/business practices that are sustainable in the medium to long-term I would regard as Socialist. That needs a little bit of thinking about but if Marx were alive today I would be counting on his support for such an idea.
It's not private capital per se that cause trade imbalances, market boom & bust, hardship, poverty, social injustice, etc. It's more the greed of the people within the system, the 'Goldman Sachs phenomenon'. This company and others represents the crazy and abusive excesses that can take place in Capital Markets when no controls or restrictions are put in place. They are completely unsustainable. One day GS and their ilk will fall, that will be a great day for all ...... rise up against corporate greed which is not good but really really bad !!

"@ora - You forget the overhead on the supermarket as well. The walking coolers. The people who stock the shelves and run the registers, the building itself. These all mean the food at the grocer still won't be free."

Come on, there already exist supermarlet who minimise their overheads by putting stock on pallettes instead of shelves; there are robot at the intel manufacturing plant which can move delicate chips very carefully around the ground, getting a pallet full of food to a shop floor is pretty easy by comparison. We could use conveyor belts similar to the ones already deployed in factories to process food.... Registers which offer self-service also exist (and whem the food is free who is bothered to steal it?)

Ok at present my supermarket offers some 'points' scheme; they like to track my individual purchases so tjey can profile me and work on marletting. Such a reward system is great for mptivatong desired behaviour, i'm pretty sure getting people to keep track of their own consumption habits woild be a pain without it, but i'm sure someone can come up with a viable reward system to get all the data needed to run an efficient system...

And yes solar power (electricity) is not abundant nor cheap, sunlight is abundant (at least during the day, well actually in irelad it is more like a grey 'cloudlight' which we get in abundance...)

@Neebaby,
I kinda agree to a point, the methods you use (markets, reward games, handouts etc) to achieve social justice do matter but they do not define a political philosophy, they may be more or less effective at getting certain behaviours, but the point of socialism is something else.

I'm not really well read, but i'd guess the point is to encourage a classless society. Markets may be the best way to achieve some of this equailty; but in this thread i want to explore abundance economics...

What about a meritocracy, where people and companies and entrepreneurs are fairly or well' rewarded for their hard work/endeavours/success but markets are not planned but managed so at to prevent abuses of personal or corporate power.
We should not stifle creativity and/or innovation.

Robots? Free? You just added a cost. Sure, you got rid of the stocker and the cashier, but the cost of building and maintaining robots is hardly free. And you still have the energy they (and the walkin coolers) run on.

Face it, obi, the food itself may be free, but the means of getting it in the people's hands is far from it. There is transportation, storage (especially of refrigerated and frozen goods) and presenting it to the people. Plus you have to consider the canning/packaging companies and competing products, oh, and not everythign you buy in a grocer is food. Food may be cheap/free, but consumer goods like TP and soap are not.

Ora, not obi. Freudian slip there. Sorry my friend. Don't hate me for comparing you to one of the resident whack jobs.

Sorry i forgot to tell your walkin coolers about the basment cellars rooms which are cool all day and require some egineering when constructing your building but no external power after that.

And as the free market shows automated tills are cheaper (otherwise we wouldn't see them in successful supermarkets, right?)

As for robots, i'm pretty sure the delivery of pallets to a shop floor is something which we can find some middle ground on - between the driver who brings it there in the first place and the customer who can easily operate a pallet truck...

How much incentive pay do you need for 'innovation', really? Many innovators die broke (my boy Tesla) and without credit. Most people are committed to their craft without any need for millions to keep them doing it.

All new products should be named after their inventor. That was the Soviet way, and there should a Ministry of Innovation & Invention to make sure inventors have a secure income to invent new ideas. Much like artists should have public support.

Tetris was named after it's inventor??

Ok draug, i feel the need to allow food to go to companies/corporations/individuals so they can 'upvalue' it (ie from free) and allow the market to determine demand for these non-basic food stuffs.

Unfortunately this leads to demand/supply stuff which again favour needless overconsumption (whereas my system only lacks efficiency through a potential lack of motivation) This hybrid system seems like it would marry the worst of both systems to create a nightmare...

I guess it is better to focus on banning advertising/marketing campaigns where current usage levelsmare shown to be detrimental to overall health (tobacoo advertising was banned, alcohol limited, next diabetes should be hit ;) eventually we'll live in a perfectly safe society :p

I support scientific socialistic utopianism.

I say we find two habitable planets, colonize both, and turn one into a libertarian utopia and the other into a socialist utopia. Apart from having to butcher the current residents with our advanced technology, this will be an objection-free way to finally run an experiment and see which one works out better.

I think we can be creative and find mixes of each which overcome the shortcomings of both. Of course i imagine the system described above as a mixture which amplifies the shortcomings of both, or non-utopian. (speaking of which, why don't we just use our advanced tech to kidnap some utopians and see how their society runs?)

The Kalishnikov rifle, the Iliziarov Apparatus, the Tupolev Ant-20, the Cherekov detector, Kirlian photography, Maksutov telescope, the BI-1, the Berkovich tip, etc.

The Americans ripped off the inventor of Tetris without paying him anything. That's how much they respect inventors.

Utopians annoy me. Socialism should be about what works. Leave the pie in the sky thinking to the Objectivists and Austrian economists.

That's how muh the respect SOVIET inventors who did it for nothing... And didn't the USSR originally license tetris and profit from it? (before collapsing and leavig the license unclear...)

Yes they profited from it, didn't stop Mirrorsoft from ripping it off. The inventor is still being ripped off with all the tetris clones out there right now.

@ora - Thsoe bbasements are fine for firge style coolers, but they won't keep frozen unless you want to haul in ice and set up a draining system. And then you are putting a whole industry out of business (like my customer Manitowokc). :-)

But Putin... Isn't capitalism eavil? So someone is being ripped off from profitting in a capitalistic way. Wouldn't that be a good thing? I mean it prevents them from succumbing to the dark side of capitalistic evil.