Not at all, I hate LACK of money. 
Seen on a bumper sticker on a Rolls Royce:
Poverty Sucks
I love it.
But I need more. 
I love it so much I had a diving board installed in the room where I keep my gold coins so I can swim in them.
Since people have mentioned barter as an alternative I’ll bring this up. There are local (non-government) co-operative schemes in this country where people have devised their own system for organising barter using the schemes own tokens. I’m not a member of one of these schemes but I have a friend who is, he will earn credits fixing another member’s PC and could get paid in fruit’n’veg or car parts*****. I can’t go into detail because that’s about all I know.
The main advantage I can see of a setup like this is that because no “real” money changes hands there’s no way in for the taxman. There’s also the lack of middle-men in the transaction, which is something you always get with money.
*****Or dope. But you didn’t read that here.
There are similar schemes here. But since they became more widespread, the local equivalent of the IRS has begun to try and crack on them. They don’t like the concept of people being paid in untaxable tokens.
[hijack]
Why am I not surprised? The scheme my friend is in is basically a formalised system of favours. How could any tax system track and charge these sorts of transactions? (Not that I’m saying they wouldn’t try)
[/hijack]
So what you’ve got there, Clanger, is money. It’s just a different form of money, exactly as “real” as the federal reserve notes most of us exchange for the same purpose. Which illustrates the point that people will independently invent money, and that it’s not just something imposed on us from above.
Heck, I’ve seen the concept of money invented by a bunch of eight year olds divvying up Halloween candies, though I don’t think any of us realized at the time that that’s what we were doing. It’s a universal human construct.
Well, I don’t like it either. But that’s not what I said.
In regard to the point about what box-stackers should be paid, you’ve raised the grand question of economics. There are those who feel that there should be at least some minimums on wages. Those people include the federal government of the USA.
But after that, what do you plan on doing? Are you going to set the price of every job in the country? Who will do it, and who has that kind of time? The USSR for one gave it a great try, and they pretty much showed that it’s a great way to put your economy down the toilet.
Aside from maybe some minimums, things are worth whatever people will pay for them. That’s all there is, and there ain’t no more. Chant it to yourself. The entire idea of “value” means “how much we treasure or want to get something, compared to how hard it is to get.” The only realistic and accurate way to do this is to hold an auction for it, which is what every job and price in America is.
If I’m selling floral print men’s dress shirts, I’m going to have a problem. My $30 price is going to sell veeeery few. After a month of this, I’m going to change it to $20. When I still have most of my stock a month later, I’m going to change the price to whatever I think will get them out the door. I may even decide that they have so little value that I’ll just give them to a charity because they’r not worth my time or sales space.
The same thing happens with jobs. If you can pay only $8/hr to get boxes stacked, then are you going to be the very weird employer who pays $12/hr instead of hiring someone else to get a different task done? I highly doubt it.
Now, if stacking the boxes is really hard work, you may find that no one will work for more than a few days before quitting. You may find yourself understaffed and in trouble with clients. You will then have to raise wages to get people to put up with all the grunting and sweating.
I did not say that people who work more with their bodies are doing things worth less. It entirely depends on what they’re doing. If they’re 6’6" carpenters who can install ceiling joists just by holding them in place with one hand and hammering with the other, they’re going to be pretty valuable. If they’re a backhoe operator who shows up on time and can dig a plumbing ditch to a 2% grade the first time, they’re going to be valuble.
Jobs are not worth just the labor put in. If you can fix the company’s proprietary accounting software, you’re very valuable to the company, even if it only takes you ten minutes to find the problem. They may argue that your fee should be low because it didn’t take very long, but watch their tune change when you decide that it’s not worth your time.
Jobs are worth exactly whatever the going rate is. If it were harder to get, it would already have a higher going rate.
The reason that physical labor jobs are not usually paid very well is that there are thousands of other people who can lift things and shovel sand. If Dave doesn’t want to do it, Bill will, or Jose will…
Things are not worth a lot of money because we need them. but because we have to pay a lot of money or no one will give them to us. Air is pretty important to us, but it’s so available that I dare you to try to charge for it. You might get a few suckers if you advertise it as an oxygen bar, but even those haven’t done very well.
Blimey Chronos is a SDSAB maybe I should tread carefully?
Nah.
I gave this a (very) little thought – money is quite a slippery subject.
I was going to say that in a scheme like I mentioned no physical tokens may actually be exchanged, but that’s obviously true of “real” money too.
The biggest difference I can think of is that in a token system the value of the currency (which is rather vague anyhow) is determined by the folk in the scheme. Also in a setup like that you can effectively make your own money (something which is discouraged with conventional money). The people who get the most benefit are those like my friend who have few ways of getting their hands on real money (enough of the scare quotes) but live in a community where they can easily build up a credit in favours. The system relies on trust and works in a rural community where people actually know each other. Good luck getting it to work in a city.
A further thought. Rather idealistically if you could trust everyone you had to deal with you need never exchange anything - like the way we deal with deciding whos round it is at the pub.
You can’t trust people so we have money.
I don’t hate money. I hate people
Well, you can say that you’re setting the value of the credits, but the real value is gauged by what they can get you. If there’s only one roofer in the co-op, and he’s way busy working for other people, then his services are going to require more credits to get him to make your job his next priority. That is, unless somehow you’ve removed the free market entirely.
Is someone defining roofing jobs as being worth X credits per sq ft of roof, no matter what? How does the queue form to be the next customer? Is it just first come first served? Is there no way people can give extra to be next in line, no matter what? If so, then yes, this is a system that will only work among a small group of people who not only know each other but are restrained by the knowledge that they’ll have to see everyone for quite a while.
As for making your own money, you could just keep a record of tally marks in a notebook conceivably. In the real world, we don’t trust people not to make extra credits on the sly and lie about the services they’ve provided to others.
Oops, this is getting to be a proper hijack.
AFAIK the cost of a job or goods is agreed by the participants, the system relies on goodwill. It’s not really a free market economy in that people are swapping favours and aren’t out to make a profit, on any deal you only have to break even
Without talking to my friend I don’t remember enough about how it works but I think the key thing is that it allows trading of goods and services between people who don’t have a regular supply of cash.
If I find out the details I’ll either post here or start another thread.