I'm so glad I decided to quit being angry at staggering ignorance of the past. Now it becomes pure fun. Funniest proposal I've seen on CFC this year. And most of the comments so far are true, even the apparent contradictory ones. In spirit it's a descendant of the english poor laws. It's capitalist. It's communist. It's also fascist. Everyone is scared of the unproductive ones. Hell, even many anarchists have been!
Countrygrl, why don't you try to dig up the minutes from the International Recreation Congresses? Back in the 1930s people were just as scared of those damn "unproductive" individuals and bent on reforming them as you seem to be today. The second congress, in Berlin, 1936, even managed to bring together representatives from communist, fascist and "other" countries in a remarkable display of cooperation for that era - all for the "betterment" of their citizenry, of course. To quote Rudolf Hess: "the judicious organization of workers' leisure time is an essential condition not only for social peace within countries but also for political peace between nations". They also managed to come up, even then, with far better ideas than yours. Fascists
and communists became very adept at organizing leisure for their citizenry. So did the good social-democratic capitalists - welfare is a cheaper go at the same problem (and the congresses were an american idea).
All governments benefit from stability, do they not? And what's more dangerous unstable than unregulated marginals? But don't forget the unregulated leisure of the other ones, the workers with a job! Oh, wait,
those have definitely been domesticated, in their role as "consumers".