> Anyway, my thought is that if we can give people basic freedom from the inane logistics of life, they will free themselves up to do other things. Very few people will do nothing. I can't even imagine nothing.
You need to realize that all money has to come from somewhere. If you're some 3rd-party observer and want to hand money out to some people, you'll have to take it from others, and you have no business doing that, nor does anyone else. We're all trained to think about economics from a central planning perspective. People drone on and on about what should be done to an economy, or how whatever should be arranged, when in reality, it's all about people interacting and engaging in voluntary exchanges and investments and so on.
Capitalism is just people pursuing their personal gain, which is something they'll do regardless of what kind of "system" you'd like to place upon them. It's important to realize that Capitalism itself, as I've just described it, is not a system. It's not a model for economic behaviour that's imposed on people, it's what people do in any case.
Scarcity is a fact of nature and life. This planet's resources are scarce - there's just a certain, finite amount of them out there, and that's it. Our time as human beings is scarce too, there's no way around that (for now). It's pointless to wax poetic about "post-scarcity" and what should be done about it. If we get there, we get there. But until then, we'll have to work within the confines of scarcity and that's fine. We're all responsible for our own well-being, we're all pursuing our personal goals all the time, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just how we're biologically wired to behave.
The only problem with economies in the world is coercion, ie. other people intentionally affecting your choices in the market, compelling you to do something else than you'd otherwise do. Perhaps the most massive example of this is fiat currency. Without taxes being collected in dollars and euros etc, no one would use those currencies.