Anytime a non-profit stops for lack of volunteers, that’s a gift economy that’s failing. Whether it is goods or service that you are giving, that’s part of a gift economy.

Most non-profits aren’t gift economies. They’re places where “volunteers” come together to give to “recipients” not in the non-profit. They have no infrastructure for the volunteers to be gifted things, and usually having such an infrastructure is a violation of the law. In a gift economy, volunteers and recipients are all the same class of people, exchanging gifts between all of them.

When you include this criterion, are there still experiments in the 60s and 70s that qualify?

But I have met enough people to know that there is also a very common profile that considers that if you can get away with free stuff, you are smart. And the people who made these rules are dumb. And it’s totally fine to “win” by taking away what you can.

These people exist. And it’s not a rare profile. They are not going to be stopped by a sign that just says “please”. And I don’t want a system where we have policemen chasing them and beating them up if they don’t obey the rules. It’s unavoidable, we have to play their game of wits to some extent.

You’re making one big leap of logic here. Yes, selfish behavior is unavoidable. But you can’t just assume that that makes fighting selfish behavior worth it. Paranoid schizophenia is unavoidable but that doesn’t make lobotomies worth it. If you’re introducing the neurodiversity lens, then consider that we typically don’t treat people who need accommodations with hostility and threat of violence.

Selfish people will take more stuff than they deserve, but if you post a guard to stop them, you’re losing the guard being able to do something more beautiful with their life, you’re losing the joy and comfort of everyone who gets inspected or questioned, you’re creating a culture of suspicion, you’re creating an opportunity for the guard’s prejudices and biases and possible harmful tendencies to harm innocent people, and you have to take into account that the selfish person will either outwit the guard or find a place that is unguarded. Possibly because it’s more vulnerable.

Before you know it, you have more guards than selfish people, all sitting around doing nothing useful with their lives and forming a toxic culture in their idleness, you have hundreds of normal people per selfish person going through difficult processes to demonstrate that they aren’t selfish, dozens of false positives who get treated as selfish and get pigeonholed into a selfish lifestyle, while a handful of people who can’t manage to attract a guard still get fucked over by the selfish people and those selfish people still end up with a similar amount of stuff.

It’s like anti-homeless infrastructure. It doesn’t seem like a big step to remove the bench next to your shop, but next thing you know nobody can sit anywhere, every street looks hostile and barren, and homeless people still find some underpass to sleep under, except now they’re more likely to get sick and require expensive medical care so they might turn to organized crime to get the money they need for the operation they wouldn’t have needed if there had still been benches.

I would sooner believe that the existence of selfish people means gift economies can’t work (because they lose too much to non-participants) than that their existence means gift economies are viable if and only if there’s a sufficiently oppressive gatekeeping system to prevent selfish people from taking more than their fair share.