3 ideas
In "The Card", written during the Occupation, a decree classes the elderly, pensioners, artists and writers as 'unproductive' consumers. Each is issued a card allowing only a set number of days of existence per month, and for the remaining days they simply vanish. The narrator, a writer, records in his diary how a black market in time tickets soon lets the poor sell their days to the rich, some of whom end up living more days than the month contains.
The story sets up a single impossible premise and then forbids any further magic. Every consequence is worked out with the plodding consistency of a civil servant, including paperwork, markets, police and vanity. The comedy and the horror both come from how calmly ordinary institutions absorb the impossible and carry on.
If a state measures out a vital good, even existence itself, the allotment immediately becomes a tradeable currency. Bureaucratic classification of who is 'useful' decides who gets to be alive.