Money Helps?

[The Vegan Marxist]

I was in this conversation with a person on youtube, & we got into a money conversation & how valid it really is in society. I've argued that money can be an incentive to many purposes of work, but is also an incentive to many crimes that take place in society to & that money, in the long run, is not helpful to society at all, but rather the resources that we use to bring to the community. Though, his argument back was this:


That is a REALLY stupid thing to say. First off all, there will always be scarcity. Thats just a fact of life. The best way to reduce scarcity is through a truly free market where entrepreneurs compete to supply consumer demand. The venus project is not a economically sound way of reducing scarcity. Second, only an idiot would say money serves no purpose. Money is a medium of exchange. It improves efficiency and allows humans to solve the problem of "double coincidence of wants" and it also serves a vital purpose in the price mechanism, which is ABSOLUTELY crucial to economic development. Dont make such STUPID statements.

How do all of you take this?

P.S. he's an anarcho-capitalist btw.

[Robocommie]

I mean, I'm a pro-money socialist and I don't really think scarcity can ever be completely done away with, but anarcho-capitalists are ridiculous. An anarchist society with private property would basically lead to outright slavery and all kinds of awful Mad Max-type shit.

Money without a communal, socialist government to oversee the proper distribution of said money is basically a tool to crush everyone else. Free market competition will never be able to meet everyone's needs, because market firms are not charities, they're out to make a profit, not just to meet a demand simply because it exists.

That said, exchange is a necessary fact of life in human society, because some place or some person (or a group of persons) will always have access to resources that others do not, and vice versa, and money is simply a useful tool to regulate that exchange.

[x371322]

The guy sounds like an anarcho-douche to me. I would just try to throw the epic fail that is anarcho-capitalism back in his face. Like Robocommie pointed out, it just leads to slavery.

[ArrowLance]

That is a REALLY stupid thing to say.So this is his thesis? Not a way to open.


First off all, there will always be scarcity. Thats just a fact of life.Pretty technically true.


The best way to reduce scarcity is through a truly free market where entrepreneurs compete to supply consumer demand. The venus project is not a economically sound way of reducing scarcity.Why would he say that, what models and evidence can he provide?


Second, only an idiot would say money serves no purpose.You didn't say that.


Money is a medium of exchange.ORLY?


It improves efficiency and allows humans to solve the problem of "double coincidence of wants"Our recommended economies do not deal in in-kind transactions and so are also solutions to the coincidence of wants.


and it also serves a vital purpose in the price mechanism, which is ABSOLUTELY crucial to economic development.How vital is this price mechanism and why is there no alternative? It may be crucial but there is no reason to believe money currency is the only medium to facilitate these mechanisms.


Dont make such STUPID statements.He has not show that your statements are stupid and so has made a fool of himself.

[Raightning]

There will always be some degree of scarcity, because we can't all have literally everything we could desire, but he's making the assumption that the most profitable distribution of production is the socially optimum one.

A profit-based system rewards greed. Now, this could mean people work to make things more efficient and to provide more services, yes (it could not, but let's assume it's able to for these purposes). But do you think it's likely that capitalists will act entirely altruistically?

The primary motivation in the system being greed, those in control of the means of production will thus attempt to get as much resources for themselves as possible. This isn't "human nature", as the cappies often claim, it's something produced by a system which is entirely centred around it. If you're going to teach that the world is based on greed, you'll create greedy people. And if you put them in charge, they will siphon every penny out of anyone they can. The capitalist concept of money is fundamentally flawed because it means the allocation of scarce resources in a manner that rewards such behviour.

So, capitalism doesn't alleviate that scarcity, because any gains you make from efficiency (and this assumes that the ONLY way you can motivate people is through greed, which is a typical narrowminded cappie assumption) are lost because you have a system which fundamentally distributes everything entirely unevenly.

As for this 'medium of exchange', we hold that in a planned economy there will be no need for such a medium, because everything will be distributed according to social utility. However, we know there must be a transition. Point him towards the 'labour credits' strand of Marxism - as I recall, Marx advocated in the transition to communism a planned economy based on a system where each worker earns solely from their work a non-transferable currency, removing the capitalist problem of accumulation of wealth and solving the "coincidence of double wants" issue.

[The Vegan Marxist]

wow, of course, after I've countered his arguments, he goes off the deep end by then claiming that Communism will lead to black markets because it's economy will fall to pieces:


no refutes?? you can apriori refute communism and explain why it fails every time it is attempted. Here ya go: Since there is no private property in the factors of production and everything is owned by the state there will be no prices in the factors of production. and if there are no prices, one cannot engage in cost accounting. And because you cannot engage in cost accounting you are unable to compare input and output prices that you get for your product, and without that price mechanism you can not know whether you are using the resources efficiently or completely wasting them. Thus, your economy is complete garbage. And because you economy is garbage there will black markets that occur and in order for the state to counter the black markets they always resort to the complete totalitarian police state, scape goating and other excuses. That is a bulletproof refutation, so any stupid excuses you come up with are not valid.

[ArrowLance]

That is a bulletproof refutation, so any stupid excuses you come up with are not valid. This is where you just chuckle and walk away. The whole argument is non-nonsensical babel to me. There are no prices because there is no private property? And so of course this means we have no idea if we are making useful products for an efficient economy or just staring at them and calling it good.

[CartCollector]

Not to mention the implied assumption that the price mechanism in market capitalism works and reflects the true prices of products (hint: it doesn't). Basically, what you did is call him out on using a broken calculator, and said that it should be replaced with a better functioning calculator. For some reason, he confused your desire to get a better calculator with the desire to get rid of all calculators, perhaps because he thinks that there are no calculators besides the one he has.

Here are my views in image form:
http://bayimg.com/HalKgAacO