5 ms·

> Free things, literally, do not exist If free things don't exist, what are for-sale things made of?

germandiago 5y ago
I do not understand your question. But my point is that things are not done by magic. Someone works on them, someone gets the material (if it is a product). Someone spends time. If a machine does it, someone created the machine (it is usually many people for a single industrial machine) and someone bought it. There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. Even if someone gives away something for free from her effort, it is the person who did the effort who"paid" in that case. There is no such thing as free and coming from nowhwere. Someone pays the price. Voluntarily or not is another matter. That is why I criticize a lot when someone says that we can get xyz for free. No. There will still be work involved. The manufacturing, the delivery, the service... whatever. So if we want something for free we should think who is paying that. I guess most of us do not want to work for free. In general terms, I do not want, I could do an exception... but not in general. So when we ask for others to do things for free what we are saying is that someone should not get its part of reward or that someone else has to pay it for us, making those people a means to our ends. I would not call that social cooperation.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  > There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. But how did the trade get started? Does it go back into an infinite past? An infinite series of trades, with neither an end, nor even beginning? Otherwise it would seem something must be free. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo
  - germandiago 5y ago
    It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself. I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively natural to me: if I can plant a big field of potatoes and you can hunt well, we assess the cost of each activity and x kg of potatoes equal y kg of meat. I think you are mixing the fact of something being free as in "no money involved" with the fact that time is "money" or that spending time doing something is also money: it is consuming time, which is also a kind of capital. So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.
    - ThomasWinwood 5y ago
      > It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself. This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to survive on a barter economy. Anthropologists have shown that what existed before trade was the same as what exists today when trade collapses: informally held debt. Alice knows how to work leather, Bob knows how to work wood; Bob needs a pair of shoes; Alice gives Bob a pair of shoes to satisfy his need and both Alice and Bob remember that; later, when Alice's house needs repairs she knows whose shoulder to tap on. This is "barter" in the sense that Alice's and Bob's services have been transacted through time, but you'd be moving the goalposts since you just defined barter as Alice and Bob sitting down and determining precisely how much wood-labour equates to a fixed quantity of leather-labour at the point of purchase. If you'd like to learn more, then David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is something of a standard reference on the subject. It's on the Internet Archive.
      - germandiago 5y ago
        Thanks for the pointer. It is an interesting point of view indeed. However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies. This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time. There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages. He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade). He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is. Greetings.

I do not understand your question. But my point is that things are not done by magic. Someone works on them, someone gets the material (if it is a product). Someone spends time. If a machine does it, someone created the machine (it is usually many people for a single industrial machine) and someone bought it. There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. Even if someone gives away something for free from her effort, it is the person who did the effort who"paid" in that case. There is no such thing as free and coming from nowhwere. Someone pays the price. Voluntarily or not is another matter. That is why I criticize a lot when someone says that we can get xyz for free. No. There will still be work involved. The manufacturing, the delivery, the service... whatever. So if we want something for free we should think who is paying that. I guess most of us do not want to work for free. In general terms, I do not want, I could do an exception... but not in general. So when we ask for others to do things for free what we are saying is that someone should not get its part of reward or that someone else has to pay it for us, making those people a means to our ends. I would not call that social cooperation.

DarylZero 5y ago
> There is literally always, someone, at some point in time that paid with time and/or money to trade something. But how did the trade get started? Does it go back into an infinite past? An infinite series of trades, with neither an end, nor even beginning? Otherwise it would seem something must be free. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo
- germandiago 5y ago
  It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself. I do not think it is difficult to see the beginning of these patterns, they seem relatively natural to me: if I can plant a big field of potatoes and you can hunt well, we assess the cost of each activity and x kg of potatoes equal y kg of meat. I think you are mixing the fact of something being free as in "no money involved" with the fact that time is "money" or that spending time doing something is also money: it is consuming time, which is also a kind of capital. So you could pay in coins, in sheep, in yarn, with your time or in whatever. That is not important, it is still an exchange and equivalent to trading.
  - ThomasWinwood 5y ago
    > It has always existed. When men collected food and survived they shared. If there is an surplus of something you do not need, what do you do with it? Eventually, I guess, they started bartering. Bartering is a primitive way of trading. That trading is possible accumulating enough, otherwise you would need it all for yourself. This is Adam Smith's just-so story, but he was wrong - no society has ever been shown to survive on a barter economy. Anthropologists have shown that what existed before trade was the same as what exists today when trade collapses: informally held debt. Alice knows how to work leather, Bob knows how to work wood; Bob needs a pair of shoes; Alice gives Bob a pair of shoes to satisfy his need and both Alice and Bob remember that; later, when Alice's house needs repairs she knows whose shoulder to tap on. This is "barter" in the sense that Alice's and Bob's services have been transacted through time, but you'd be moving the goalposts since you just defined barter as Alice and Bob sitting down and determining precisely how much wood-labour equates to a fixed quantity of leather-labour at the point of purchase. If you'd like to learn more, then David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is something of a standard reference on the subject. It's on the Internet Archive.
    - germandiago 5y ago
      Thanks for the pointer. It is an interesting point of view indeed. However, I think bartering has always existed for a reason, and when it did not or trading was forbidden, what you end up is with poorer or more violent societies. This is the same reason why we specialize our labour and we do not do all things: shoes, food, blankets, bridges, roads, trains, planes, computers. Because if we had to self-supply fully, our lives would be much more miserable. From there it follows that trading is a natural choice: I can give something valuable and someone else can give me something valuable in exchange. Of course that gets mixed with debt and other stuff (I did not read your reference yet so I cannot assess how true it is in my very limited opinion) but the alternative to bartering, trading, etc. is violence. Every time. There is an analysis from a well-known spanish philosopher that died short ago, his name is Antonio Escohotado, well-known for having written a book about the history of drugs that was translated to many languages. He wrote a 3-volumes book that is called "Los enemigos del comercio" (The enemies of trade). He researched the topic with unusual passion, since when he was young he used to be a communist. He wanted to explain to himself why he was so communist at some point. He spend around 15 years writing that. One of his main conclusion is that the alternative to trading is trading people (slaves) and the conquer of the other (violence). I really think it is true. He establishes some relationships between the amount of trading and the violence in societies (military vs trade societies). I think it is a nice read, but I am not sure it is translated to other languages as of now. The one for the drugs it is. Greetings.