Communits- what about money for services?

[Mclaren]

That is my point you would need money and who is going to work for nothing. I won't. I just ges that I will hav eto get out of your country

[flames of the flag]

someone should invent a governement with currency used only for governemnt business. then people with goods can barter for food and so on OR those without can work for money that they then take to a governement office where they canexchange that money for goods they can barter with. Maybe that has already been invented and i am ignorant but yeah reply

[peaccenicked]

communists dont think people people should work for nothing but money is only access to goods. If goods are freely avaialble and greed is outlawed or even outgrown
you don't need money and it could only work as a world wide system.

[Guest]

Hmmm.

Instead of doing what the other current guest would do and telling you to go and read the Second Treatise, I'll just give you the crash course here.

Money is good for a number of reasons. The first and most obvious is that it is a convenient medium of trade. It assures that deals are fair...if I make cars and you make houses, we might not be able to come up with a fair deal (two cars for one house might be a little cheap, three cars for one house exorbitant, and I can't very well make half a car). So currency allows us to make equitable deals...clunky old bartering is not quite as efficient.
Secondly, I think you'd agree that we should allow people to save. Even if you don't think that we should have the ability to hoard wealth, I don't think that you can not allow people to create a nest egg for themselves (unless you think that children and the elderly, who cannot work and create their own resources, should be wards of the state...I hope I don't have to explain what a whack idea THAT is). This is where my boy Locke comes in. The nice thing about money, see, is that it doesn't go bad like food and other things do. You don't have to get rid of it immediately. The other nice thing is that the saving of *money* doesn't take *resources* out of the economy. For instance, if I'm a lumberjack and I want to cut down some surplus trees for myself so I can save for a rainy day, I'm storing up wood that other people can't use to build houses and fires and rocking horses. Whereas if I save *money* I'm not depriving someone else of something with any real applicable value in the same sense as wood or other resources (unless you like to burn money in your fireplace or paper your walls with dollar bills or something). Now, if for some wacky misguided reason you think that people shouldn't be allowed to save, that they should produce only what they need, I'd implore you to stop for a second and think about what you're actually saying. In saying that people should only produce what they need, you're saying that the community should only produce what it needs. Which means that it's not creating a surplus of resources. Which means that if shit happens (which it has been known to do), the people in your community are up Crap's Creek without a paddle. If natural disaster, domestic strife, or international conflict should arise and somehow inhibit your community's production temporarily, you're all going to starve. And if you don't starve immediately, you'll at least be busted down to Third World status in short order, because economically you'll never be able to recover.

So basically, you need money if you're going to enter into a codependent system of society. Even if "greed is outlawed," you still need money to act as a medium of exchange and to allow people to create a surplus (which isn't just good, it's essential for survival). You guys need to stop and think about what you're saying, or at least take a political theory or economics class.

[Valkyrie]

nice website Peacenicked.




(Edited by Paris at 5:32 am on Dec. 22, 2001)