The value of money should be tied to the amount of food, water, shelter, vital utilities, clothing, and medical care required for one average human organism to maintain health for one year.
@kot So would 2 hours of pushing broom still buy an 8x12 4 bit room? :)
@Absinthe
Assuming a 40 hour work week, you need to earn enough in one hour to provide about four hours of basic necessities of life. So two hours of pushing broom would need to pay for a meal, 8 hours of rent and utilities, and a little bit toward your clothing and medcare budget. So six hours of pushing broom for one day's minimum living expenses. Eight hours of pushing broom if you want to have weekends off.
@kot so working a 40 hour week should merely provide for the necessities. If you want hobbies and entertainment and money for hookers and blow, you need to work doubles, or at least some overtime?
Some of the private currencies have come up with man-hour coins or script. So that a unit was equal to a man/hour. So you could earn a man/hour/dollar for mucking a stall for an hour, or cooking food for an hour, or whatever. Then the trade of one for one on items and services would be dealt with from there.
Perhaps make the currency based on a unit of necessary food staple. Perhaps a pound of hamburger or loaf of bread, gallon of milk. So then if your job is worth 100 loaves of bread a day, and the cost of bread goes up so does your pay. Not that you are actually paid in loaves just that it would buy the same.
I have known self employed persons who did something like this, one of them based his hourly rate on the cost of a First Class postage stamp X some number. And the other one used the gallon of gas. When it hit over $4USD he had to change his service call formula though since it didn't work with such wide short term cost shifts. :)
@Absinthe The one thing that's universally valuable is health. That's why I think that one unit of money should represent the minimum amount of basic necessities for one time-unit of health. Hamburger or bread or gasoline by themselves aren't sufficient for health. As I see it, the formula needs to take into account all of the basics: food, water, shelter, clothing, utilities, very basic medcare. In other words, the value of money should be tied to the minimal cost of very - 1/2
@Absinthe basic living. That doesn't mean that a motivated individual couldn't do well for himself. It just keeps the value of money rational. - 2/2
@Absinthe
I only picked a year to account for average of necessities variation through all seasons. Naturally there would be much smaller units... month, week, day, hour, minute, second... all in proportion to year.