You don’t have to have money; anything will do, so long as it can’t just be picked up or plucked from a tree (or found in some complicated computer program). It is always interesting (to me at any rate) to think what you would do if you were starting from scratch; lets say a virgin planet.
I would use ‘credits’ that would be based on the man (or woman) hour defined as some reasonable rate of manual work for a person. The total credits in circulation would always be related to the total number of man hours available on the planet.
This achieves a certain idea of social equality in that one hour of Alice’s time is equal to one hour of Bob’s. This is very different from today where even ordinary hourly workers have wages differing by factors of 20 or 30. Much less the “wages” provided to CEOs & such.
The progress of an economy is closely tied to how freely goods and services are traded. The less “friction” there is, the stronger the economy develops, the higher the civilization develops.
Money greatly simplifies this.
Imagine trying to buy something off Amazon via trading? “I’ll give you my 1974 Pinto in exchange for this 50” TV." Like that’s going to work.
Someone who might want your Pinto is very unlikely to be the same person with a TV for sale. The two events have to be disentangled.
Instead, you sell your Pinto for $X. Go to Amazon, find out a 50" TV is far more than $X, settle for something else.
The friction of the transaction is tremendously lower. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Without money, you’re talking about a medieval level of economy. And no, you’re not going to be the lord of the manor. You’re going to be a miserable, half-starved, chronically unhealthy serf. Or, even more likely, you won’t exist. That level of an economy cannot support anywhere close to most of today’s population.
I didn’t quote all of the offenders here, but let’s stop belittling the OP and focus on the factual question at hand. While some of you may not have a high opinion of the question, there is actually a factual question here to be addressed, so let’s stick to that.
No warnings issued, but let’s keep future posts in this thread GQ appropriate.
What are your thoughts, not what you heard other people talking about?
How would you go about providing all things free to all people? Would all people get an equal share of the “free” stuff, or would some get a “free” bowl of rice a day to produce “free” goods for the others?
As has been pointed out, pure barter isn’t practical on the scale civilization has reached today, so let’s hear what you think a better alternative would be.
Plants and animals get along just fine without money.
We are animals, therefore we could also get along without money.
In fact, for the vast majority of the time that our species has existed on Earth, we did just that.
But I can give you two reasons why it’s needed in modern civilization.
#1 We have unprecedented mobility and we live in cities that many many more people than the conditions in which we evolved, by orders of magnitude. If you live in a tribe of 300 people, your brain can easily keep track of each and every person in the whole tribe, remember who has done favors for you in the past and who you’ve done favors for, predict who is likely to be counted on for help when it’s needed and who isn’t. But in a city of 3 million people, there simply isn’t enough room in your brain. We need a different system for keeping track of who owes favors to whom.
#2 As Daniel Quinn pointed out, this outrageous zoo that we have built for ourselves is quite different from our natural habitat (the one we evolved in). Unsurprisingly, lots of people find modern civilization unpleasant. So how do you force people to put up with a system that they hate? You have to lock up the food. And then you make them work to earn money, which is needed in order to buy the food.
If we all decided to go back to being hunter-gatherers and live in tribes of less than 1000 people then yeah we could get along just fine without money. But there’s not enough space on this planet for 7+ billion hunter-gatherers.
Do we need money, as in US dollars? No, we could use other things as currency.
We wouldn’t even need to barter goods directly, we could use other things to represent value.
Problem is, is that those things suddenly fit the definition of money, so we are back where we started.
If you can think of a way to create an economy without a medium of exchange (and all the other things money is good for, keeping it simple here), I’d love to hear it.
If it is actually workable, the world would love to hear it.
You might even win a noble prize, and that’s worth… well, lots of money…