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It is kind of absurd, especially once you get into the messy bits around bartering and gifting. But then all sorts of elements of modern society are absurd when
by leoedin 4y ago
It is kind of absurd, especially once you get into the messy bits around bartering and gifting. But then all sorts of elements of modern society are absurd when you look at them closely.
It seems that once you get into the world of macroeconomics, everything is absurd in some way or other. It's all just a great weird fiction that we all buy into because it keeps society running. Money itself is a weird social construct. GDP is completely mad.
What does the author suggest we do instead? Something that isn't as absurd?
- pwinnski 4y agoIt's a tongue-in-cheek essay, I'm not sure the author intends to suggest an alternative. The way I think a out the barter rules is that they are there to keep people from using barter terms to describe non-barter economic activity. In other words, if someone lives their entire life avoiding cash or instruments of cash, but trades units of work for goods to deliberately avoid income taxes, the rules allow the IRS to say nope, we see through you, you're putting in 32+ hours and getting what other people pay roughly $50k/year for, so what you really have is a full-time $50k job, and you owe taxes based on that. A world without such rules might be a world in which many, many more people "barter" time for goods and services in just that way.