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Also: Any economic system that can be modeled as a random walk of dollars between nodes representing human/corporations who come out unequal winners on transact
by JulianMorrison 11y ago
Also: Any economic system that can be modeled as a random walk of dollars between nodes representing human/corporations who come out unequal winners on transactions, will generate a distribution curve of inequality, and your rules one and two will automatically amplify this into feudalism. That's just what money does on its own (and this laughs in the face of "meritocracy").
Redistribution through tax can be seen as "baling the water back out of the boat" in this context: it pulls money away from the rich, but doesn't prevent it continuing to rush back to them. It's a thankless never-ending job and politically motivated interruptions in "baling" will immediately result in inequality growing again.
I'm with the Zeitgeist Movement on this: money as a Thing needs to go away. It's intrinsically harmful.
- joshuaheard 11y agoIf you do away with money, what will you use as a medium of exchange of the value of production?
- JulianMorrison 11y agoYou don't. You run the scutwork of the economy with automation, robots, etc, which provides a basic living for nothing, and let people pursue their vocations. The process for handling large allocations of resources is left as an exercise, but I'd favour direct democracy via recursive vote delegation ("liquid democracy"), at the most local possible scope (following the principle of subsidiarity).
- prodmerc 11y agoYou are severely underestimating the need for people to interact. People love to have subordinates (i.e. someone to boss around), and people love to be subordinates (i.e. have someone tell them what to do). Being free to do what you want is great, but most people don't know what they want, yet they have a natural disposition/desire/urge to lead or follow, and most definitely interact.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoI don't think cynicism is true. People play hierarchical control games because they live in a society where both starvation and hoarding are possible. Basic income would eliminate starvation; deleting money would eliminate hoarding. People do have vocations. They are just suppressed by the 9-5 grind. It would take a bit, but they'd pick them up.
- oberstein 11y agoYou kind of need an AI God to bootstrap that. At least, that's the easiest way to get from here (needing a money concept) to there (not needing a money concept).
- JulianMorrison 11y agoThe fastest realistic one is probably via basic income.
- sageikosa 11y agoSimple: just outlaw trade and exchange worldwide. You might find it tricky after a while to police the state of affairs, if only because there won't be a system of accounting costs to figure out resource distribution for the police force.