Saturday, June 21, 2014

Money Hate!

In various posts around the internet I witness a lot of hostility against money. Why?

Do people believe that in a world/society/civilization without money they can end up on top of the heap? They can be the new "rich"? Or that everyone will finally be perfectly "equal", economically?

So, I have some questions and observations for money haters:

How do you plan to buy food if the guy who has what you want to eat, doesn't need what you have to trade? Money won't go away because it is what makes trade convenient and easy.

People who don't understand money make it out to be this magical, mysterious Unknown (and generally their enemy), but it isn't. It is simply having something in your pocket that is almost universally accepted in trade for what you want. That's it.

 If you can come up with a way to facilitate trade without "money", you will have invented money. 

A "Resource Based Economy" ("RBE") can supplement money, but never totally replace it. In fact, I see the RBE as making a different type of money. When you assign some "trade value" to something you produce or take, you are making up "money". Unless I can just bake a cupcake and trade it for a new car...

There is no ethical difference between trading beans, goats, shoes, or gold for a cow, but there is a practical difference. I might not need a cow's worth of beans or shoes right now, but if you pay me with money, I can buy shoes, beans, and whatever else I need when I need them. I don't have to try to keep up with who owes me what, if I only needed 1/100 cow of beans this week, but traded you the whole cow anyway.

Money is an awesome innovation that won't go away just because you don't understand it and therefore fear or hate it.

It doesn't bother me if you want to live without money. Personally, I love to trade. I just don't understand the hostility toward people who choose to continue to use money, too. I suspect I would continue to be broke in either system, since I seem to not be producing what many others want- and money or not, that is the root of the problem. I think both ways could happily coexist alongside one another. But, please, don't hate on money- it just showcases your ignorance.

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