The family is older than any economic model you can come up with. Do we stop taking care of granny when she's too old to work or does she still retain some value? Do we not pay for our children to get educated and feed them and teach them responsibility until they are old enough to do it on their own? You wouldn't run your family like a business and your real family is the whole of humanity.
That digging holes and throwing the dirt into other holes example is exactly what capitalism is, all of us undoing the work of each other. I'd say 90% of capitalism is bullshit jobs and completely useless. Think of all that free time we could have. We've got skyscrapers full of paper pushing and competition for no reason at all except to keep people busy and keep the money funnel pushing wealth up the chain. It's not a good system for the majority of people invested in it. We can do better.
I agree with one thing, we can do better. But the way to do better is to empower the family, not make government into a giant family of all of humanity. This is the problem right here. I would not throw my granny out, unless she was a crook. Then she deserves to be thrown out. She would have a few years in a shelter to consider her poor choices before her death. That is actually compassionate, because I care enough about my fellow man that I do not accept and empower and support evil behavior, even in my own family. I can’t see whether every granny in the world deserves my devoted protection and care.
I would educate my children, and feed them, until they reach the age they can do that for themselves, and should. It is not more spiritual or more ethical to treat the entire world’s population as your children. This is going to have the exact opposite effect as that which you are intending, because it’s not based in actual ethics, it based in a need to ‘feel good’ about oneself for trying to lift the empoverished whether or not they want to or deserve to be ‘lifted’ by you in the direction you set for them.
If we truly want to do better as a civilization we need to teach self-reliance, because only those who are self-reliant have anything to offer to the weakest and most marginalized folks. If you want to live simply that can be done with a minimal amount of work in this country—I know plenty of guys hobbling together a living doing odd jobs or reselling on EBay and are perfectly fine in their studio apartment and want to remain bachelors indefinitely.
And, if you like the goodies of the material world you can work hard and learn to play the game well, but neither of these choices are inherently more spiritual or ethical than the other.
Any system is only going to be as good as the individuals comprising it, at this point no system will work well or has any hope to work well because far too few people have stepped outside their current systems long enough to use their creative potential to envision something new.
We are left with the technology worshippers who will give our freedoms over to the algorithms as our new Lord and Master. The ‘communists’ will rejoice that all is distributed evenly to the masses at last, when the tech works right. The ‘capitalists’ will rejoice they have the best excuse ever to strike. Meanwhile Granny’s moved from simple conning to murder because everyone continues to assume her innocence in the whole charade we call modern culture.