"Would anybody be interested in seeing the "money system" that we live in today, change?

Question

If you think about it, all our problems from the pothole in the street down at the corner, to war, drugs, animal extinction, health, and of course poverty has the same contributor-money. Repeat offenders could be re-educated if we didn’t have monetary concerns. We could venture into space in leaps instead of crawling along as we are doing now. I guarantee anything you can think of as being a problem in this world starts with or is caused by the existence of money and could be either eliminated or corrected if the mighty dollar wasn’t in the picture.

All I'm doing is making a suggestion which by the way I have put to many, many people in different countries and most of them agreed. How about we all work and recieve points or some kind of value to our ATM/credit account. If we don't work we don't eat or buy things. If it is not actual money then it isn't coming out of someone elses pocket which means two things, 1) Someone else isn't doing without because they have to pay us and 2) They amount that is awarded to us for our job could be much more allowing us to live a better life.

Answer 1

Yeah, that's a great idea. And then each of us can just do our jobs and trade the time we spend doing certain activities for the basic necessities we need. Cause we all know exactly how much what each of us does is worth in terms of bread, corn, and electricity. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

Or, if we can't trade, maybe we can just brutally beat the tar out of people and take their stuff, resulting in anarchy. Wait, that's what we're supposed to be preventing by the elimination of money. Guess we're back to the barter system then.

Answer 2

What you are saying that we cannot afford to do everything we might possibly want to do in an ideal fantasy world. Brilliant deduction Socrates.

However you still manage to be wrong. The limitation on what we can do is NOT money: it is human and other resources. Money is the tool and communication mechanism that is used to signal needs and allocate resources -- but it is those real resources that are the limitation.

That is actually a common mistake people make. Why don't we just spend a trillion dollars this year to cure cancer? The US government could indeed borrow $1 trillion if it wanted to. But that would accomplish nothing. There are simply not enough research scientists and medical resources, laboratory resources, and computing power available to absorb $1 trillion. The money does nothing except allocate resources -- it's the resources that solve problems.

Getting rid of the "almighty dollar" would not only NOT solve our problem of scarce resources, it would cause a complete failure of that system of resource allocation, communication, and incentives that is necessary to accomplish complex societal tasks. You can be absolutely certain that no society without a monetary system could possibly do anything as sophisticated as go into space or cure cancer -- not any more than a society without electricity could have produced the Internet.

Answer 3

I'm sorry but you are living in a fantasy world. If, as the Communist Constitution says, "from all according to their abilities and to all according to their needs" worked, the Soviet Union would control the World. That's right, they would be going great guns and the West would be defunct. Instead the USSR had to give communal farm workers land to grow food for their family, any excess could be sold. Guess where the food to feed the people came from? HINT: "Communal Farms" is not correct. In China the government had to turn over a ferry service on a major river. The government couldn't make it work. Private industry is doing just fine.

Capitalism with all of its flaws is by far the best system available.

Communism can work as long as it is practiced by a group of one. From you according to your abilities and to you according to WHAT YOU PRODUCE. The moment you add a second person to the mix you will have one with a work ethic and one with a "sit on their butt" ethic. It happens every time, yep, it never fails.

And when it does happen, the work ethic works longer hours to feed the sit on their butt ethic. End result is sit on their butt folks make more babies than work ethic folks. The cycle continues until the USSR and China’s Communist system had to change.

Socialized medicine is similar. A HUGE infusion of money starts the ball rolling and it continues just fine until it develops a flat spot and requires another infusion. When that infusion doesn't come you have situations like Canada where the average wait to see a specialist is over four months, or England where open heart surgery can be delayed as much as two years. If you are of a mind to, may I suggest you compare the availability of diagnostic tools, MRIs, CTScans, etc between England, Canada, and the US.

No, some means of exchange is necessary. Somebody sometime said, hey, I grow beans, and I need shoes. The problem is the guy who makes shoes is allergic to beans. We need some means of exchange that everyone will agree to accept. And there it is, the birth of money.

Answer 4

Money doesn't cause problems it solves them. Money is the tool of trading where men deal with each other to their mutual benefit. Take away money and men become the tools of men and force becomes the arbiter. As Ayn Rand puts it. Money, guns, or whips you choose there are no other choices.

You can either pay people to do what you want, beat them into submission or threaten them with a weapon. I think money is the best choice.

Answer 5

Yes. Just that the IMF and the world banks be abolished or not ever to be controlled by USA, Arab countries or Isreal.