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Blaming money is shooting the messenger. For one thing, if you try to get rid of money, you'll quickly end up inventing it again just to manage complicated dis

Blaming money is shooting the messenger. For one thing, if you try to get rid of money, you'll quickly end up inventing it again just to manage complicated distributions of resources. You might not call it money, but it will acquire all the same connotations. For another: Consider what happens if you try to get rid of money, then run a major grid-hardening project. Who builds/works in the factories you need? Why do they do that instead of writing poetry or going fishing? How do they eat? Someone has to grow the food, right? Apply the same questions recursively. We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money.

davzie 4y ago
I don’t disagree at all. I was mindful to say that I definitely don’t have a utopian solution. I just meant that if the world really needed to do something we had the capability to do, but not the money or be wiped out, I would like to think we did it instead of just saying bye to the planet because we don’t have enough overdraft :’)
- midoridensha 4y ago
  You seem to think the money supply is fixed. It's not. We saw this just recently with Covid: governments simply printed more money to give out as assistance payments. That's exactly what would happen in your doomsday scenario: the government orders stuff to be built/done, then prints up the money to pay people to do it, then worries about inflation later after the crisis is over.
midoridensha 4y ago
>We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money. That wasn't communism, they they tried to call it that. That was "authoritarian socialism", an authoritarian single-party system with central planning. It had money just like any other economy; the big difference is that central government planners decided how the market would run, what would be made by factories, etc. It failed largely because central planning doesn't work very well. In theory, maybe if some smart AI were doing the central planning with plenty of feedback, it could work really well, but the way the Soviets tried it, it was a big failure. Still, your point stands: the system still needs money. As long as individuals can make their own individual choices about things, they need money as an exchange of value and way to limit resource consumption. Otherwise, what's to stop a few mentally ill people from grabbing everything off the store shelves for themselves? Or to keep a large fraction of people from taking too much. leaving nothing for everyone else?

davzie 4y ago

I don’t disagree at all. I was mindful to say that I definitely don’t have a utopian solution. I just meant that if the world really needed to do something we had the capability to do, but not the money or be wiped out, I would like to think we did it instead of just saying bye to the planet because we don’t have enough overdraft :’)

midoridensha 4y ago
You seem to think the money supply is fixed. It's not. We saw this just recently with Covid: governments simply printed more money to give out as assistance payments. That's exactly what would happen in your doomsday scenario: the government orders stuff to be built/done, then prints up the money to pay people to do it, then worries about inflation later after the crisis is over.

midoridensha 4y ago

>We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money. That wasn't communism, they they tried to call it that. That was "authoritarian socialism", an authoritarian single-party system with central planning. It had money just like any other economy; the big difference is that central government planners decided how the market would run, what would be made by factories, etc. It failed largely because central planning doesn't work very well. In theory, maybe if some smart AI were doing the central planning with plenty of feedback, it could work really well, but the way the Soviets tried it, it was a big failure. Still, your point stands: the system still needs money. As long as individuals can make their own individual choices about things, they need money as an exchange of value and way to limit resource consumption. Otherwise, what's to stop a few mentally ill people from grabbing everything off the store shelves for themselves? Or to keep a large fraction of people from taking too much. leaving nothing for everyone else?