If we set aside the socialism/capitalism debate and take this bolded statement as a given, then you've actually agreed with me. I said that if your life does not depend on your ability to work, you will not work as hard. You just gave what seems to be a fine example of that. Far from debunking what I just said, you confirmed it.
Confirmed what, that there are people who don't need to work for a living and don't work as a result? No duh. That's not what you claimed: you claimed that needing to work for a living was
necessary to work hard, and that's obviously false. There were plenty of rentiers throughout history who had no need to work for a living but did in fact work tirelessly to give us some of the greatest contributions in art and science alike. That doesn't justify the immorality of rent as a human institution, of course, but it does invalidate your point.
What if I told you that human productivity is highest when people are secure in the basic comforts of life but otherwise not pathologically obsessed with accumulating more and more wealth on top of it, because that allows them to pursue an occupation they actually enjoy rather just something they have to put up with to survive? I don't have evidence for it, obviously, but neither do you. That's why these arguments centered around muh human nature are so inane.
Only a socialist could laugh at the idea of economic psychology. Economics is the study of how individuals make choices, nothing more. In my experience, people who seek to demean that field either have a deep-seated fear of choice or a deep-seated fear of individualism. Usually both.
"Economic psychology" is demonstrably bullsh*t. The entire body of findings from the entire field of psychology (you know,
actual psychology) exists to demonstrate that people aren't hyper-rational utility-maximizing robots. Even you probably aren't one, as much as you might try to act like it. If you're seriously trying to argue otherwise, I'm not going to waste my time with you, because you're obviously delusional.
My claim was that people work their hardest when their life depends on it. You didn't refute that; you gave an example that bolsters this claim, albeit one that occurs in a market system. If you really need a proof of this common-sense aspect of human nature, look no further than the communist systems of the 20th century, which tried (and failed) to find an ample motivation for their workers to replace self-interest-- nationalism, cults of personality, quotas, communitarianism, bureaucratic advancement, and pure terror were all tried, and all of the resulting systems were abject failures.
Of all the reason why Soviet-style planned economies (which, no, were not really communism, but that's an utterly uninteresting conversation to have) were an abject failure, I don't think there's much evidence that the problem was individual workers not working hard enough. I could be wrong, but iirc the issues that are generally cited are usually more structural in nature, having to do with the specific planning decisions that were made.
Either way though, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that people didn't work particularly hard, given that their labor was arguably even more alienated than in the capitalist countries at the same point in time. Alienated labor is by nature something people strive to do as little as possible of. If that's all you're claiming, then I guess we agree. It's just that my solution to that problem is to reduce labor alienation, while yours is to force people to work at gunpoint.
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