Who Owns the Future? From the Welfare State to an Inheritance Society

For half a century, Star Trek taught us how to imagine the future.

There was no hunger or grinding poverty or scramble for basic survival. No dystopia. It was positive and forward-thinking. People flew into space not because they had to earn a living, but because they wanted to — to explore, to learn, to test themselves against the unknown. Scarcity had been solved. Humanity had grown up.

It was a powerful vision, and it lodged deep in the cultural imagination. Generations absorbed the quiet assumption that once technology advanced far enough, the hard questions would simply fall away. Work would become optional. Conflict would fade. People would be free to become their best selves.

But Star Trek never quite explained how that world actually worked. Who owned the replicators? Who controlled the energy that made abundance possible? Who decided access, limits, and priorities?

The Federation was benevolent, orderly, and humane, but its citizens were rarely shown as owners of their civilization. They were cared for, protected, provisioned. The system worked, and they lived within it.

That omission matters because, as we move closer to an age of real abundance, the most important question is not whether people will have to work.

It is who owns the future they are about to live in.

From Science Fiction to Managed Abundance

For a long time, that future stayed safely fictional. Replicators were props. Artificial intelligence was a plot device. Abundance belonged to television, not life. This is no longer true.

Quietly, without a single defining moment, technologies once confined to science fiction have begun to arrive. Machines now write, design, diagnose, and build. Robots assemble goods with minimal human input. Parts — even houses — can be printed rather than manufactured. Agriculture is becoming more precise and productive. Energy, once the great limiter, is moving toward abundance rather than scarcity.

This does not mean scarcity disappears. It means it changes shape. In an age like this, the danger is not that there will be too little to go around. It is that abundance will be concentrated, hoarded, and administered rather than shared and stewarded.

Abundance does not manage itself. If it is not deliberately distributed through ownership, it becomes power in the hands of the few.

And that brings us back to the question Star Trek never answered, and that we no longer have the luxury of avoiding.

Why Ownership Matters More After Scarcity

Scarcity disciplines people. When survival is on the line, choices are forced. Work matters. Waste has consequences. Responsibility is unavoidable.

Abundance removes those pressures, and with them, the automatic and natural guardrails that once shaped behavior.

This is where many visions of the future quietly go wrong. They assume that once material need fades, human maturity naturally follows. History suggests the opposite. When constraints disappear without being replaced by responsibility, people do not become freer. They become dependent, not always on things, but on systems.

This is the difference between a client and an owner.

A client asks what will be provided, what is permitted, what can be expected. He asks permission from a master. An owner asks what must be maintained, what can be improved, and what will be passed on. He is the master. The first lives within a structure. The second is accountable for it.

In a world of abundance, that distinction becomes decisive. Without ownership, abundance produces passivity, resentment, and eventually, control by those who manage it. With ownership, abundance produces stewardship — the discipline of caring for something that did not begin with you and will not end with you.

Scarcity once enforced responsibility from the outside. Abundance demands it from within. Only humans can provide that responsibility.

That is why ownership does not become obsolete in the future.

It becomes essential.

Stewardship, Not Stipends

Ownership, by itself, is not a gift. It is a burden and a responsibility passed forward.

No serious society has ever believed that inheritance should arrive without preparation. Families teach children how to manage a farm before handing it over. Businesses train heirs long before leadership changes hands. To inherit without understanding is not empowerment. It is negligence.

An inheritance society would have to take that truth seriously.

People should not simply receive money as a result of ownership. They should be taught, deliberately and progressively, how to steward it: how saving, investing, risk, and compounding actually work, and how failure teaches faster than theory. Responsibility would expand with demonstrated competence. Control would be earned, not assumed.

This is not paternalism. It is adulthood.

And it directly addresses the fear that abundance will widen the wealth gap beyond repair. Today, inequality grows because capital compounds while wages do not. Welfare arrives after the fact, stepping in only once wages have already proven inadequate, leaving no surplus to save, invest, or build wealth over time. Ownership intervenes at the beginning. Everyone starts with a stake. Outcomes still differ, but exclusion from ownership itself no longer defines the future.

An inheritance society does not promise equal results. It promises participation and demands stewardship in return.

The Welfare State and the Limits of Scarcity Thinking

The modern welfare state was not built out of malice. It was built for a world where scarcity was assumed to be permanent, and wages were expected to carry most people most of the way. When they failed, the state stepped in to prevent collapse.

That made sense in an industrial economy. It makes far less sense in an automated one.

Welfare is designed to manage deficits. It intervenes when income falls short, jobs disappear, or costs outpace paychecks. Its logic is reactive by nature. It stabilizes loss rather than preventing exclusion from ownership.

This is why welfare systems grow without resolving the problem they were meant to address. They cannot generate surplus. They cannot compound. They cannot turn recipients into owners. At best, they help people tread water.

Universal Basic Income is simply the endpoint of this way of thinking, a permanent wage substitute in a world where wages no longer reliably work. It promises predictability, not progress. Survival, not stewardship.

The problem is not whether welfare is compassionate. The problem is that it is rooted in a scarcity model that cannot prepare people for abundance.

As labor becomes less central to production, a system built to patch income gaps will increasingly leave people dependent on structures that manage their need rather than giving them a stake in what replaces it.

From Welfare to Inheritance

If the welfare state was built to manage scarcity, then an age of abundance demands a different foundation: Not redistribution, but inheritance.

An inheritance society begins from a simple premise: If automation, AI, and advanced technologies are going to generate enormous wealth with less human labor, then citizens must have a stake in that system from the beginning, not as compensation for failure, but as a condition of membership.

This is where ideas like Trump's baby bonds matter, not because they are radical, but because they are modest. A small trust established at birth, invested over time, accessible only for constructive purposes — education, building a business, purchasing a home, caring for family, weathering illness. Not a check to be spent, but capital to be stewarded, an investment in a human being's future. It is, quite literally, a baby step toward ownership.

Crucially, a full rollout of this inheritance beyond the baby bond should not arrive without preparation. From an early age, children should be taught how money actually works — saving, investing, risk, compounding, and loss — not as an abstraction, but as a lived responsibility tied to something they will one day own.

As competence grows, personal authority would grow with it. One sensible model is shared control: half of the fund professionally administered for long-term stability, half placed under individual direction. Enough responsibility to learn and grow, but enough protection to cushion against catastrophic loss.

This is not socialism. It does not abolish markets or equalize outcomes. It simply refuses exclusion from ownership itself. Everyone begins with a claim on the future they are inheriting and a role in shaping their own prosperity.

Inheritance does not eliminate risk. It teaches people how to bear it wisely.

Capitalism in an Age of Abundance

Much of the current conversation about automation drifts toward the language of “post-capitalism.” The assumption is that if labor matters less, markets must matter less, too. The opposite is more likely to be true.

Capitalism is not defined by work alone. It is defined by ownership, risk, feedback, and responsibility. Those elements do not become obsolete when abundance increases. They become more important.

This is where inheritance matters. An inheritance society is not an attempt to escape capitalism. It is an attempt to extend it. Everyone has a stake. Everyone has exposure to risk. Everyone has something that can grow or be squandered.

This is also why elite scarcity rhetoric rings hollow. When people are told to lower expectations or adapt downward while ownership remains concentrated elsewhere, fear is a rational response. Abundance without ownership feels like control because it is control.

Ownership changes that. It turns technological progress from something done to people into something they participate in and are responsible for maintaining.

This is capitalism with the franchise expanded, not abolished.

Who Owns the Future?

An age of abundance is coming, whether we are ready or not. Automation will continue. Productivity will rise. The link between labor and survival will weaken.

The question is how that future will be structured.

We can build a society that supports people indefinitely after wages fail, managed by systems designed to stabilize loss. Or we can build one where people inherit a stake in what replaces wage labor, trained to steward it, responsible for its growth, and accountable to those who come after them.

The welfare state asked how to protect people from scarcity.

The inheritance society asks how to prepare them for abundance.

Star Trek imagined a future where people were free because survival was guaranteed. The future now unfolding demands something more demanding and more humane.

Not just freedom from need.

But ownership of what comes next.

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