Flippanarchy

Thanks for the clarification.I contend that presupposing socialism and collective ownership doesn't actually change human nature. There will always be those who seek a way to "get ahead" for personal gain. There will always be idiots who are easily manipulated into voting against their own best interests. There will always be those whose desire for power over others compels them to subvert otherwise-beneficial systems.

My goal here is to assume that we aren't being naïve about human nature, and to ensure that the system can work without devolving to either corrupt bureaucracy or capitalism (or, again just as bad, totalitarian dictatorship):

Why, and how, would a democraticly controlled workplace engage in widespread time fraud?

Why, and how, would a democratically-elected government turn to fascism or imperialism? Why and how would a communist government become a totalitarian dictatorship? While all three of these questions have merit, unfortunately, the fact is that they do, and in at least the latter two cases, have happened (the first has never been given a chance to at a widespread level). The vox populi is easily manipulated by those who can convince them to fear the other, or to shift blame for ills onto a convenient scapegoat, often either a minority or the apparatus of governance itself (by attacking social programs). It is too easy to manipulate people into going along with a plan because they are convinced that it will work out well for them. Heck, it doesn't even need to be secret. It doesn't even have to be intentional. All it takes is people working to do their job better or faster, and without any intervention, you will get inflation. If managers simply implement efficiency measures, but don't re-evaluate value calculations, it will not lead to inflation, but then you have labourers at those workplaces being compensated equally for lower labour. And as much as I hate to say it, we can't just imagine away the need for managerial roles, especially in a world such as this, where we seek to ensure that all needs are met. Yes, workers produce the majority of the value, but actual project management is also labour that deserves pay. Auditing and publishing values is not something that will just go away, and must be done either by management on the honour system, or by external bureaucrats on the mandate of the state. I contend that ignoring regulating checks and maintenance is a surefire way for any system to fail, so you can never do away with value audits to ensure that everything is working correctly, otherwise the populace will become complacent and easily manipulated. In any decent government, all actions must be transparent, justified using evidence, and rigorously investigated in order to ensure that the public interest is being served. In my view, the only people who can "guard the guards" are a well-educated populace with time enough to spend investigating their government to place a check on corruption. People are lazy, too, so most people will not actually be checking government data themselves, just like most people aren't reading the source code of everything they download, even if it is open-source. The problem, then, is that there will be those who seek to subvert the system at every level, and as long as there remain perverse incentives buried in the system —such as inflation through technology— there will be those trying to cheat the system to realize those potential gains. I'm trying to understand if it is possible to remove those perverse incentives. Can you think of a way to remove (or at least minimise) the incentives toward corruption, fraud, and tech inflation?

As an example of removing an incentive (or, in this case, a disincentive) I still feel that the question of Hazard Pay remains unanswered, as that throws a wrench into the idea that all labour is of the same value to society. The disincentive to take on additional risk to perform a necessary job is a serious problem, and already leads to issues such as the teacher shortage. There are many very good reasons why people do not want to be teachers, but it isn't just "I can't survive on a teacher's salary". As a teacher, I can tell you that the biggest reason I see my fellow teachers quitting is because the practice of teaching can be seriously deleterious to mental health. I can cite studies, if it would be helpful, that show that teachers leave because they don't see teaching as a profession that is sustainable long-term, because the majority of all teachers are experiencing some level of burnout, and that they might consider staying if the pay were better. The fact is, if there isn't an incentive to choose education over jobs which are less taxing to mental health, you won't have people staying as teachers, even those who are very good at it. This applies for any job with serious risks, and those facing greater risks deserve greater pay to incentivise people to train for and enter into those careers. A factory line worker deserves greater pay than their manager, because it isn't the manager who's going to get their arm degloved if they lose concentration for two seconds around a rotating axle. Under this system of hours of labour+hazard, A teacher should not be paid as much as a farmer or construction worker because the risks of death and serious injury working on a farm or construction site far outweigh the risk to mental health a teacher faces (even including the guarantee that every teacher will get every single disease known to man, because everyone sends their kid to school sick). Thus, the risks of doing labour must be factored into the values of products and services, and must also be included in the compensation for labour, or there will be a disincentive to choose, e.g., Farming as a career.