It'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

It'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.