It's not as if work being unnecessary is unprecedented. Just look at primitives, or non-human primates. You see them working? They mainly just sit around. And when they do bother to lift a finger, it's generally in the form of leisure activities like hunting or screwing. Rationing in such circumstances, where it does take place, can be on the basis of need (such as when harvests were distributed equally, just as stomach capacities roughly are), merit (such as when a carcass is distributed among the hunting party and their families, with perhaps the deliverer of the killing blow getting the coveted testicles), or proto-property, which is to say violence (such as when an ape or a capitalist calls dibs on a fruit tree and promises to kill anyone who comes near it). I think it's obvious that the fist two systems are preferable, perhaps one for some resources and the other for others. Also, I have to quibble with the notion that we now ration according to work (forgive me if that wasn't your meaning). It is true that the many without property receive a wage in return for working for the few with property, but it is the latter who accumulate wealth. Nor did the accumulators or even their ancestors create the machines; the machines are the product of previous, analogous production cycles. Nor does this regression ultimate in entrepreneurial Adam's indispensable genius, unless of course you count the forced enclosure of the commons as entrepreneurship. Don't get me wrong, some capitalists do some work. For in addition to the saboteurs known as common shareholders, who merely ransom industry, there are a minority (a group owning a minority of capital, that is, not a minority of capitalists) who actually oversee the operation of that which they hold hostage. If the latter had instead to sell their labor to the former, the managerial skills they'd have acquired through a lifetime of bossing their fellows would of course return them a higher than average wage. However, even that wage would be less than the income they earn from the product of their labor and their capital both. An owner-operator is thus both a capitalist and a worker, who, dispensing with the formality of paying himself a wage, confuses it with the unearned part of his income and lets his apologists define the whole by the little that is labor.