Except in rural agricultural societies... for example in the Transkei in South Africa, the Xhosa people has a custom to work for beer. If you want help to build a hut, or to change your roof, you just brew some beer and people will come to help. Raw materials and food is plentiful... because there are no fridges, the custom is to slaughter a goat or sheep or cow when there's a funeral or a birth... and there are plenty of those. Oh, and the women carry water. You can visit communities like these... seeing life before modern technology is a revelation.

@Dagelf But what if a Transkei wants a mug of beer without taking part in the labor? So... no.

@Dagelf That's cool, but they're still not working for free. There are examples around the world of people helping others without reward or compensation - but nowhere will you find an operating example of people living their entire lives without compensation in one form or another with one possible exception: stone-age societies like the Sentinelese - people who have no appreciable technological base that depends on innovation and the idea of wanting something better than exists "today."

@CodeswithHammer (a) That's not relevant to the question. (b) It's also short-sighted, politically motivated, and fails entirely the basic rules of economics. The government has created an artificial condition where a skilled laborer refuses to work because all his/her needs are met without labor. The workers could easily return to work "for free," contributing their skills for the greater good of society as there are (and there are) people in need of those skills. Given the choice to work "for free," they chose to stay home - thus making my point.

@JoinJBHonCodidact, and what's the difference between your friend the plumbing contractor's issue now and one where another contractor offered higher wages and greater benefits? Part of the whole concept of the market is if the conditions change, participants have to adapt or they can't compete.

@Join JBH on Codidact: But people do get rewards & compensation for helping others, it's just not an immediate monetary reward. E.g. I help my neighbor fix his car, because I know that I can depend on him to help me when I need to move heavy stuff.

@mkinson Your free energy example is effectively a post scarcity society. Whether or not such a thing is possible, or the outcomes thereof, is basically irrelevant: OP clearly specified they are NOT asking about a post-scarcity society.

@mkinson Does it matter why it failed? It failed. It will always fail. There will always be limited resources, personal greed, the need to overcome adversity driving innovation....

@KeithMorrison Are you asking in the frame of the OP's question, or are you simply challenging the assertion that government benefits are getting in the way of a normal business activity. From the perspective of the question, something is providing all the needs of the workers - and they're not willing to work as a result. I could do the same thing with welfare recipients, the majority of which (and I've worked directly with hundreds...) won't work until their benefits are threatened. I'm merely using the government benefits to establish the condition that proves the point of my answer.

@jamesqf You make a point, but should we assume that everyone who does something nice is expecting compensation? Part of the problem with the OP's question is separating the consequences of a reward-based economy from the reality of basic human nature. Humanity had to compete with all of nature throughout its entire evolutionary path to stand atop the evolutionary ladder. Expecting humanity to change for a political ideology is, IMO, very short-sighted. As an example, the world is filled with trivially-accessed Internet porn, so why are there still rapes? Human nature is hard to control.

Your answer completely depends on the genetic makeup of these inhabitants to be that of typical Western humans. Change a few genes around, a completely different scenario. I have never known any other species in nature to use money, yet they have survived admirably without it. Somehow, only humans have the 'money dependency/capitalist' gene.

@JustinThymetheSecond But not without barter. The bricks and wood came from somewhere, and while it's nice to think the carpenter cut and milled the wood himself.... And while it's further nice to think I built this up based on typical Western humans, you're welcome to explain what humans, anywhere, anywhen, acted differently other than stone-age peoples (and even then...). And I've never known another species in nature to build a cellphone. Have you? The OP wasn't asking about ants.

@Join JBH on Codidact: Sure, people have many different reasons for doing things. For instance, in some circumstances I might help people because that demonstrates that I'm stronger than they are - a boost to the ego, if you like. As for internet porn (or porn of any sort), that's really like reading an illustrated cookbook. May be interesting if that's your thing, but it's no substitute for an actual meal :-)

I just want to point out that every last species on the planet lives exactly in the way of OP envisions, with the exception of humans. Can we? Yes. If we lived like animals.

"... you're welcome to explain what humans..." We now know conclusively that there is no unified homogenous species called 'human'. There were many, many pre-species 'humans', each with different social genetics and characteristics, that inter-bred in different regions, in different 'percentages', to produce categorically different sub-species of 'humans'. With other animals, we call them distinct 'breeds', with distinct characteristics. Denisovans were very socially distinct from Neanderthals. medium.com/@promit/…

Given that some of these 'humanoid' species lived just 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, and surviving continuous contiguous human cultures have been around in for instance Australia for 40,000 years, it is only by some quirk of history that 'our' species with 'our' social culture and organization genes prevailed.

@mkinson Even animals fight over territory and food.

@JoinJBHonCodidact I think the plumbers example would be more relevant if they had refused to work for free while living in a society in which working for free was the norm, and which depended upon them doing so. The fact that people who are used to capitalism tend to think like capitalists is not necessarily evidence against the possibility of a moneyless society. That said, I think the rest of your answer does make a decent case against it.

@JustinThymetheSecond You're splitting hairs.

@DoctorDestructo The norm? How do you get to "the norm?" The answer is certainly "yes" if you're willing to rewrite humanity - but that's a meaningless answer. People have been bartering for their needs for millennia before the "invention" of capitalism. We competed for our dominance on this planet for eons before the "invention" of capitalism. You're positing a condition that has never existed and using it to rationalize a condition that can never exist.

@JoinJBHonCodidact Yeah, I wasn't questioning your conclusion, just the validity of the plumbers example. Maybe I should have put it this way: the fact that people expect to get paid for work in a society where getting paid for work is the norm doesn't reveal anything about the viability of a moneyless society.