> If we have the industrial / economic capacity to provide everyone with necessities of life (food, water, heat, shelter, ...), why not just provide that directly?!
Because my utility function isn't the same as yours, so outside of goods and services where there is strong reason to believe that the conditions do not exist for markets to work, it's better to provide people fungible currency and allow them to maximize their own utility function through purchasing decisions rather than have a centralized bureaucracy decide what they most need. Also because despite the aforementioned variability in utility functions, agency seems to pretty consistently be positively valued, so centrally imposed selection would be inefficient in utilitarian terms even if it perfectly reflected the recipients utility function before considering agency.
Because my utility function isn't the same as yours, so outside of goods and services where there is strong reason to believe that the conditions do not exist for markets to work, it's better to provide people fungible currency and allow them to maximize their own utility function through purchasing decisions rather than have a centralized bureaucracy decide what they most need. Also because despite the aforementioned variability in utility functions, agency seems to pretty consistently be positively valued, so centrally imposed selection would be inefficient in utilitarian terms even if it perfectly reflected the recipients utility function before considering agency.