I was listening this morning to one of @Eceni's always thought-provoking podcasts, this time on the Bristol Pound, and it reminded me of an essay I wrote:
"Money grows in society by the process of eroding generosity. It is, then, a necrotising parasite on social relationships, systematically sucking out transactions of kindness and generosity from the economy and replacing them with a winner-takes-all, zero sum game of competitive meanness.
Money is a disease."
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2023-02-08-on-money/
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Well that's not right. It mixes the cause and effect.
Money is just the tool that helps people conduct those un-generous exchanges more efficiently. People are free to trade without money, it's just that without money the trade is more wasteful, even taking away more room for people to be generous as the inefficient trade comes with more overhead.
Money doesn't create those transactions. Rather, people conducting those transactions (for mutual benefit, mind you) create money so they both parties in the transaction can come out better.
I generally agree that gifts come without overhead, but that's not what I was talking about.
People WILL trade, and that's what I was referring to.
Given that people will trade, because they will, the question becomes, do they do it in a more efficient way or a less efficient way?
Do they do it in a way that leaves them with more that they can later gift, or less, so they can't gift even when they want to?
Money makes trade more efficient. In a way, money helps enable generosity as people are left with more after they trade.
Because they WILL trade, whether money exists or not.
@volkris @Eceni trade is an established way of moving goods around societies, indeed. But there are many social constructs which have been found to be harmful, and have consequently been outlawed or abandoned because of that. All I'm arguing is that trade is harmful, wasteful, and consequently should be abandoned.
The trade I'm referring to is person to person, my having something you need and you having something I need, so we exchange for mutual benefit.
I'm not referring to anything that requires anything society-wide.
And that's not even getting into, people do a ton of stuff that's outlawed.
Trade is inevitable. Even if you outlaw it, it will still happen. Heck, an authority probably has to engage in trade to enforce their law.
So, since trade is inevitable, the question becomes one of how to make it as least-bad as possible.
Money is part of making trade less resource intensive.
@volkris @Eceni where is the overhead of a gift? On the contrary, there's far less overhead than a transaction. There's no accounting to do, no records to keep, no money to bank. There's FAR less work to do.