Damn, Tom, ER's right, you do have a hard time resisting the tactic of constructing straw men to demolish. But you did at least keep it to a relative minimum here, so it's worth continuing with only a few reframings.

Social credits, and systems like it (I'm not advocating SC per se) are by no means based on the premise that "wealth just is". Just the opposite: They look deeper into the modern economy, and account for more its features, and for the features that didn't exist in Adam Smith's day.

A full-and-honest accounting is vital to the premise. In the 1700s society had little real infrastructure; it just appeared. Roads appeared where the horse and wagon traffic tamped down the dirt. Water appeared in streams and rivers and springs. Energy appeared in the form of trees growing wild in the forest. Waste disappeared into a hole in the ground. A very small amount of infrastructure was actually built, by the King's men working on militarily-important works.

The modern world's nothing like that. Our infrastructure is entirely manufactured, and somebody pays for all of it--me and you and all other taxpayers.

Consider the modern road system. 90% of the traffic it carries benefits business: Trucks moving goods, and employees going to and from work. Yet there's no special tax on businesses to balance the special benefit they get from a multi-trillion dollar investment of taxpayer money. Waterworks, sewage and trash disposal, police and fire services, and the myriad other pieces of modern infrastructure are all constructed and operated at taxpayer expense, and the benefits are definitely not distributed equally in return.

Social credits and other "societal share" systems are intended to acknowledge the public contribution to the prosperity of business, and to repay it to the "shareholders" who made the investment. I can understand that it has ideologically unpalatable features, because it debunks the Horatio Alger myth that wealth and prosperity are created in a vacuum (not so different from "wealth just is", when you think about it). And it may even be "collectivist", but it got there honorably, by acknowledging the collectivism that already and actually exists.

Your other post contained the particularly silly straw man of imagining survival on a desert island. It actually is a meaningful comparison, but not in the way you intended.

In the 1700s Smith described an agrarian economy, which is characterized by subsistence through self-sufficiency, and prosperity beyond subsistence through trade. A farmer transplanted to a desert island wouldn't even have to change occupations to survive, just learn to farm coconuts instead of corn.

The modern world bears no resemblance to the world Smith described. In the 200 years since Wealth of Nations, we've transitioned to the industrial model, even in farming, and the industrial model is based on employment, which is to say, on dependency and interdependency. 99% of us no longer possess the skills to survive without cooperation with other people. The only way to make an economy work on the lines described by strict free-market ideology is to completely abandon industrialism and force everyone back on the farms to survive as best they can. Didn't Stalin try something like that in the 1930s?

One of the intriguing features of systems like Social Credits is that they would encourage a flowering of entrepreneurship like the world has never seen before. Anybody with an idea would be able to live off social shares while developing the idea into a business. In true capitalist tradition, people would have investment income that they could choose to reinvest in their own businesses. How many better mousetraps have been invented over the years that never saw the light of day because the inventor had to work two or three jobs just to survive? How many great novels went unwritten? How many Next Big Things failed to change the world because their inventor had no access to capital and had to worry fulltime about survival?

Is that Utopian? Hardly. It's idiosyncratically Conservative to believe that if the threat of starvation is removed, people will suddenly sit down and never move again, and pretty silly. The truth about today's economy is that people need to be coerced into working for other people, to advance other people's agendas and dreams. But look at the energy people put into their own hobbies and avocations and side interests. People will work like dogs to realize their own dreams; it's service to the oligarchy that must be coerced at gunpoint.