Sure, it's not pretend because it has legitimacy. Most people practice it. But, that doesn't mean we can't strip it of that legitimacy and implement something

Sure, it's not pretend because it has legitimacy. Most people practice it. But, that doesn't mean we can't strip it of that legitimacy and implement something different if we think it's going to work better. Probably, this different thing would still involve a state where a 0 balance means that you can't do certain things, and yeah that's a fact of life, but at least then your difficult situation would be determined by a system that was designed to work in context with modern challenges, e.g. a deteriorating climate. I like your proposal. I think. I'd love to be able to just trust a low price to mean that the product isn't made by driving the bees extinct or some similarly problematic practice. But it seems at odds with how we practice money. If you want burning some resource to be costly such that people don't do it unnecessarily, you need there to be a high price. But high prices create incentives to do the bad thing, because else is going to be collecting that money. Or am I misunderstand it? Like, if I want to buy the salad whose pesticide killed the last bee, and I'm ok with paying an extra trillion dollars to compensate future generations for their lost pollinators, where do I look to determine if a trillion is enough, to know where to send the money, etc?