Do we need "Money"?

reply to post by Pappie54


That's not barter, that's crappier money that can only be spent in one place. If you're working for an intermediate unit of exchange which can be exchanged for other people's work, you're working for money. That's what money IS.

Originally posted by Carlthulhu
no, man -you would not need a one world government. You'd just need verifyable, untraceable electronic cash, that's attached to your unique number. We wouldn't even need RealID, because that number would only have to be something you would personally know, and could be assigned arbitrarily. Cryptography would take care of the details. The only reason we don't have this system now (it was proposed in the '70s!) is that the govt, and banks would have no control over it.
This is just another power game.

That is ALSO money. Just electronic money. And banks and governments would have just as much control over it as they do over cash. (if not more. Where do you think you'll get your unique ID from?) It's not even meaningfully different from having a checking account and debit card. You earn money, it goes into an electronic account, and you can spend as little or as much as you want with a simple swipe of a card and the entry of an identification number. It's tracable, sure, but you can always use an ATM to get untracable cash and use that.

Do you guys even read stuff that's not been posted on this site?
Please take 30 minutes out of your busy schedule, and read what good Mr. J. Orlin Grabbe has to say. I beleive he sums it up quite nicely.
My personal view is that we can live without money, however I realize that most people have gotten too used to our currently employed system.
That's why I think that electronic money saved only on your own personal card, and possibly on a backup system in your hooch, is a viable alternative!
The banking system already is fully binary! Theoretically I could run ATM software on my laptop. Seriousla, this is a control issue. That's all.
(I apologize if you feel flamed)

EDIT: Ok, maybe you don't read quite as fast as me... take 1-2h

[edit on 2009.3.10 by Carlthulhu]

I pay everything in cold hard cash. No debit or credit cards, no automatic withdrawals if it's not required. Cold hard cash is anonymous. Electronic money is just another control mechanism for the government. Say goodbye to 'under the table' deals if there's no cold hard cash around.

Bartering can only work on a small, local scale, and not for everything. Everything you barter is ultimately translated into a monetary value for a fair exchange. So, you'll always need money.

reply to post by Carlthulhu


Seems to me that digital money is money, just not paper so what is the real difference? To me, when the electricity goes out, you'd be wanting some of that paper money in your pocket. If nothing else, to go down and by a generator.

I think you have to have money to survive.. if you do survive with out money is because somebody is allready providing you with everything so you don't really then. x.x

reply to post by Thunderclaps


You don't need money to survive; you could be a hunter/gatherer, or farm. Some people have a kind of proto-nostalgia for this. I certainly don't.

Or you could get incarcerated in a prison, or committed for insanity. You could live in a communist society and work for the state. You could join a religious order, or a huge family, or a tightly knit cult. These things, of course, depend on there being a stable society OUTSIDE, though.

You need money to have a society that's more advanced than the farming/blacksmithing/carpentering phase. (unless you're willing to go to some other kind of meritocratic totalitarian state.) Unless you've got some omnipresent government or AI taking care of all the minute transfers of material needed, or some extreme change in the way people work so that they go out of their way to fill everyone's needs, the only way for people to get what they want is through barter.

And barter precludes an industrial society. If you make nails in a factory, you'll be paid in nails, which won't do you a whole lot of good when your neighbors are done building things. If you want to eat, you'd have to go to a marketplace and spend your valuable time haggling them away for other things, which is generally a lot more of a pain than having money wired to a checking account, and spending it wherever checks or major credit cards are accepted.

currency been created because of human greed.

they not satisfied when they trade item, because some of human feel their item more valuable then the opposite trader item.

or

some human dont need anything but the other need their item so they make a way to 'purchase' that item.

Originally posted by mdiinican
You need people manning the farms and factories, and to do so, you need to give them a reason to work in farms and factories. Hoping they'll do it just out of goodwill to their fellow man ranks below even the threat of physical violence as a motivator. There needs to be some actual incentive.

Or you could simply trick them into wanting to do it. "we'll give you money for doing this for us". "Oh, hang on. Now you have got to pay us to give you the right to live".

And for helping the rich man to be richer, you may even be fortunate enough to "earn" a place to live in for the life you just paid them for.

Paper, plastic, or skin for barter? All of those sound a little better than our current monetary system, unbacked and built on a foundation of sand. Let's consider the Yanomamo Indians, thought to be one of the last remaining "primitive" cultures. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon conducted a famous study of the group that has served as a benchmark for examination of "lesser-developed" societies ever since. What he discovered caused him to write a book coining the Yanomamo as "The Fierce People."

Napoleon traveled to Brazil and attempted to immerse himself in a money-less village. He soon discovered that with no "civil" concept of money standing between himself and his study subjects, he had to learn a whole new set of rules for trade. Many of his possessions were lost to the Yanomamo through bribery, trickery, or just plain violence. With no money and only his wits to trade freely, Chagnon commented on the lawless and primitive feel and adapted his actions to avoid victimization. He became more aggressive in his own acquisition of goods and more protective over his personal possessions. This is not to say that a lack of paper/plastic money makes a person more "fierce" as his book title implies, but merely requires a greater aggressiveness on the role of a consumer to increase possessions... because-- paper has NO VALUE. Over time, the humanity has been removed from the bartering process. This makes for shorter transaction times, but does anyone else consider how ridiculous it is to give such value to dirty pieces of paper with dead guys on 'em? But if we had no standard for exchange like a set denomination of $1, we'd all need to be a little more creative in general.

I consider, what would be worse? A money/paper-less society that brings with it an implanted tracking chip for our brains, our current economy of exchanging unfunded "fantasy" papers between ourselves, or a money/paper-less society where we dance to our own heart-drum and go after what we want?

Down with the money, up with the ferocity!

Reading all of the posts, it seems to me that the legitimacy of a number of wealth presentations is valid. certainly, on a personal level, the concept of maintaining a precious material as a measure of personal wealth seems good. old for instance.

However, we then get into issues of purity, of exchange... do you really want to have to cart gold bullion around? Also, there is the issue of value fluctuations. All "monetary" substitutes suffer from the issue of inflation depending on the amount of that substance currently in circulation. It is not just an issue of trade or conversion to another form.

Barter is good but works in smaller communities and it requires conversion factors that again are subject to inflation.

Here is the rub, the real problem isn't "money" or "gold" or "barter", but inflation. We have to ask the question - What system controls or negates the influence of inflation?

Well, then we have to look at "control" and the limits of scoping. When foreign trade comes into the deal then we have issues of conversion factors again... inflation by any other name.

The maxim for this is that inflation on all properties and transferable goods or applied services may be neglected when traded within a closed supply chain scenario.

All is not doom and gloom though because the real power is one of application, choosing the right trading level to effect different monetary solutions. For instance, think of a community that predominantly trades between members and uses specific "outside buyers". As long as the outside buyers can be trusted (by audit and control) then the closed community does not need to be affected by inflation internally per se, only by effect of external trade.

Now consider that the external trading associations are also controlled and audited by a governing body who's interest is one of maintaining order within society. That body could oversee the inflationary aspects that may affect the close communities.

Of course, then there has to be a body controlling geographical areas and fundamental goods (i.e. food) getting a larger and larger domains until you end up with a world order of fair trade.

One might call it a "new world order" ;-)

Further to my previous post, I earnestly believe that a form of "inverted feudalism" could provide a better method of social policy framework.

I use "feudalism" as a term of reference since most people are aware that it involved a closed communal group at differing levels of hierarchy that owed allegiance to a "head".

Closed communities could be geographically grouped peoples, i.e. towns and villages that choose to be represented as "feudal" entities. However, rather than power being asserted from the "top-down" as in the historical model, power is asserted from the people-up. The communities are small enough for the real voice of the people to be heard and to run their locality.

Of course, there are some attributes that require a larger infrastructure - health care in the form of hospitals, policing and the armed forces. However, these could be derived from reasonable taxation and controlled by accountable members of the social hierarchy, voted for and in confidence of the people.

The most important negative aspect of this would be the introduction of communal borders. However, is this such a bad thing? Our own borders start at our front-door, then to our property perimeter, then to our road or street and upward until we lose sight of our own community. Why should we not reclaim our communities and have pride in them, protect them.

This may seem an anathema to the current all-inclusive model of society, but the fact is that humans do not work well in this scenario. We are by nature, tribal although we can probably work well in numbers of around 15,000 max - i.e. a "town".

I'd like to hear of reasons why a this model would not work, right up to a national scale. We try to do it naturally, why can we not support it physically so that we once again have government by the people for the people. Accountability of government right on our streets.

Of course, the politically correct fear is one of "exclusion" - The people that don't fit into the "local" model are simply exiled. Is this such a bad thing for harmony and social normality. We are by nature tribal and all tribes have exhibited a policy of exclusion for the betterment of the people rather than the person. We don't need to revert to whipping them through the streets but it would negate many of the social ills that we see right now.

What do other people think? The question of whether "we need money" has a far greater implication for social policy than just the form of value that we trade to survive.