In the future, will humanity be united and money extinct

I think it was First Contact...THey're talking to the hillbillies who invent warp speed, and they're incredulous that there's no money.

 

My main problem with money is I feel in today's day and age it is an unnecessary resource. A resource-based economy would be much more efficient and serving to humanity.

Look back at World War 2, before the great depression ended. Despite the economic depression, our leader ordered our factories back to life, and America was able to mass produce a military arsenal in such a great quantity that it completey turned the tide of the war. Did we have the money for it? No. Did we have the resources for it? Certainly!

Money may have been useful to society in the past to ration resources and goods that were once scarce or difficult to obtain, but now we have the technology to effectively manage our resources in a sustainable fashion. The bottom line is we serve money, it does not serve us, and has created a sick and backwards society.

 

Going to a resource-based economy means we've returned to the barter system again. The problem with it is that governments have a much harder time regulating some form of standard in that system as compared to a monetary system.

The monetary system is too ingrained in our culture now to effectively switch systems in any short period of time. Take for example, fast food: If someone wanted a hamburger, they would have had to produce some good or resource of equal value to trade. Money is small and easy to store in large quantities, but where would companies fit the large amount of items they received by trading food for it? Also, what exactly would the teenage workers get paid with, a random portion of the goods received? Remember, back when non-monetary systems were the norm, the teenage employee would have been considered an apprentice, and thus usually got paid nothing or very little.

The reason we moved to a monetary system was because societies found that it worked better than the barter system since money is much more portable than goods while still containing a similar value, making exchanges happening more often.

 

There would be no barter system or medium of exchange, the whole point of a resource based economy is that everything anyone could want is accessible to them freely because our technology allows us to sufficiently manage our resources. With the highest quality education, goods, and technology freely accessible to anyone, mankind can be what he was born to be: free and independent.

 

What about the natural tendency we know as greed? If everything was free, I'd go get an Xbox360 as well as one of every game I see for it.

Problem is, if everything was free, there would be no incentive to work. That is, until people can no longer get the goods they want since everyone stopped working. By making things free, you cause the demand to skyrocket while the supply remains about the same as it was whether free or not(but likely to decrease due to no profit returns). Logically, this would make them extremely valuable or expensive, but since everything is free, its still worthless. This would cause great economic issues since companies would be unable to keep up with demand, and there being no incentive to make the products wanted.

What you seem to be wanting is a Utopian economy that currently wouldn't work until human qualities like greed, lust, envy, etc were removed.

 

I don't understand how could you remove money or even wish to do so. What advantages does it have? We would be just sending ourselves back into ancient era.

 

Almost all ancient civilizations had a currency. Money is almost a universal characteristic of any state society. It acts as a means of control. Only 'legitimate' wealth can be printed by the state and no one can create wealth independent of the recognized currency, thus no one can grow a resource base independent of the state.

In globalization this paradigm shifts.


Though money is problematic it also a very good way to mediate an exchange of a great variety of goods, a great number of people, and great stretches of distances. The problem with money is that isn't inherently valuable, and it is simply numeric. You can do all sorts of things weird things with numbers that you can't do with material resources. This creates a strange sense of 'wealth', it also uncouples 'wealth' from the material environment it represents. In this planet there is a great deal of virtual wealth, but a dwindling quality of resources (due to environmental degradation) that money is supposed to represent. This is the main things the economists don't understand.

People may think money is necessary in this world, which may be true given the population and complexity of it, but they assume that the money system can only take one form, when in fact its properties can be played with. For example, some towns going through a purchasing recession actually made a currency that became worth less as time progressed. This made people spend their money, which invigorated the economy, and turned virtual wealth into utile, material ownings.

I don't pretend to know whether money should be kept or not, but there definitely problems with it, and I don't think there is any harm trying to deal with problems of exchange by examining different possibilities.

 

Yes I think the human race will be united one day with no need of money. Some alien race will come here to Earth and conquer us all and take our entire race as hostage and makes us work as slaves. And as a slave you have no need for money as the slave masters do not pay the slaves. The slaves only get enough food to exist well barely enough.

 

^ A living argument against the use of marijuana =)

I think what Rebel was attempting to communicate after having watched 'Zeitgeist Addendum', was that in the proposed resource-based economy (which as far as I'm aware is a lot of 'wouldn't it be nice' without any real idea as to how we would achieve this), the Marxist maxim would apply 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'

This means goods and services would be available to every contributor to society, from the lady who connects your calls, to the scientists developing technologies.

As far as greed goes, one would assume that there would be some sort of daily limit on what you could acquire for yourself on any given day. Perhaps luxury goods and services would be attributed to something like a points system (just speculating), whereby everyone had a card and had X amount of points they could spend per day (or whatever), then what you chose to spend your quota of points on would be determined by individual desires and would be earned through mutual contribution to society. Basic requirements (food, hygiene, basic clothing etc) would be divided equally among the populous.

Another main theme is that technological advances would no longer be hindered by the constraints of finanace, simply having access to the shared resources and know-how would be enough to make it happen, and then it would be applied to society for the betterment of humanity thus freeing up our time to persue more worthy persuits (eg. a lady would no longer connect our calls, an automated computer would, thus freeing up the lady to persue innovations in a given field of personal interest or expertise).

Motivation to perform duties that contribute to society would stem from the possibility (perhaps) of being excluded from said system, thus being left to fend for yourself.

I could go on but I'm tired... thats the gist of it anyway.

I think the idea is essentially what Albert Einstein was attempting to communicate in his essay Why Socialism?, but still no workable model exists. Even if it did exist, why would the people listed in Forbes Magazine want to give up their hard-earned power and status in favour of a system that would just treat them just like everyone else?

Zeitgeist Addendum Official Download Page - Activist arm of The Venus Project

 

I question how optimum resource allocation could be achieved in the fields of scientific development without money. Would science be a single governed body in which all advancements are restricted apart for a handful due to the costly nature of them and the unwillingness for society to take risks ?

Money from The Individual allows for risks to be taken and in science taking risks to achieve a goal can sometimes be fruitful.

Progress requires risk and true equality does not allow for risk to be carried as no one man puts the same value on a gamble. Indeed no one man gains equally from a scientific discovery which bring up another conundrum that a world with this philosophy would only develop technology which would benefit equally (or possibly the majority (No wait the majority still means lack of equality)). This restricts science horrendously and could even mean technology would gradually destroy this societies underlying purpose.

I realise we're not talking about perfect equality here since that’s impossible but the destruction of money means research and development has to be decided upon by a central body as opposed to countless individuals hoping for breakthroughs of many different magnificent but unlikely outcomes.

I personally prefer the latter