Why can't everything in this world be free?

Question

i mean we never have to pay for anything in this world like everything is free

Answer 1

What incentive would there be for you to produce anything?

Answer 2

Well that depends how you mean 'free'.
If it means do your job and be given the things you need without having to buy (ie no money) then it sounds alot like communism. There are problems with this coz who decides what is fair distribution of goods? And why would someone do a hard job and get the same goods as someone who did an easy job?
If you mean do nothing and get everything for free everyone would be sitting at home. And they would get nothing anyway coz no one would be making it.
If you mean don't pay for anything, but you can barter goods this is doable and was in affect for hundreds of years.

Answer 3

Believe it or not everything in this world is free. Let me explain. Try living one week without spending money. You could do it easy and find there really are alot of things that are free, especially food. The real question is why do we feel like we have to buy so much. I lived for a while without any money. I found food on trees, slept on a beach and peed in the woods. Now I have bills, etc. and I know everything could be free but I'm trapped in this materialistic existence for now. Oh well.

Answer 4

Look at why things aren't free. People ultimately need feed, water, and a roof over their heads, or else they can't live. Since those things aren't free, people need to make money by doing other stuff, and hence everything acquires some cost.

So you might ask, why can't food, water and housing be free?

Well, maybe they could be. People have actually given a lot of thought to so-called post-scarcity economics. The idea is that with technological advances everything will become so cheap that it isn't worth charging any money for it. Imagine that we had StarTrek-style "replicators" to make our food, or self-repairing robots that did all our farming and collected our garbage for us. (In a way we already do have robots like this. We call them "trees" and "cockroaches". But I'm assuming we don't want to live like hunter-gatherers, we'd like to keep our modern hi-tech society).

Some people asked why anyone would bother doing anything if they didn't have to earn money. How about because greed isn't the only motivating factor in human existence? If it was, nobody would submit answers to Yahoo Answers, or contribute to Wikipedia. To me it seems probable that people would do scientific research for curiosity, teach because they get satisfaction from helping children grow up, carve wooden furniture because they enjoy being artistic, and so on, even if they didn't have to earn a living. The distinction between "work" and "play/hobby" would disappear. You'd probably see people working at "jobs" they actually enjoyed, and hence doing them really well, rather than doing a shoddy job of something they hate just to make ends meet. I also think people would have to give up the idea of getting "paid" in an exact proportion to the amount of work they did. We'd have to learn to be happy with just having "enough to get by", rather than getting uptight about who-owes-whom-what-favour.

If you enjoy reading science fiction, there's a novel called "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan which deals with all these ideas.

Of course, you'd need a society in which people didn't just take more stuff than they needed, just so they could show off by having a flashy car or whatever. Maybe in a society where everything was free, that wouldn't be a problem, because having a flashy car would be meaningless if anyone could have one.

So the basic idea is that new technologies would make it possible for everything to be free - like the idea of capitalism driving down the price of mass-produced goods, but taken to the extreme. Of course, that might not work. Back in the 60s/70s people were predicting that nuclear power would make electricity "too cheap to meter" - it didn't work out, I'm not sure of the exact reasons.

If you did have a way to make everything free, you'd still have a chicken-and-egg problem, because the need for money is self-sustaining (eg. farmers need to charge money for the food they grow, so they can pay for fuel for their tractors, and so on, round-and-round in a big loop). Maybe the best thing to do would be to create an alternate "free economy" and let people "defect" to join it. You could start by making sure you only use open-source software!

Who knows if it could be made to work? It might be overly optimistic. But it's certainly not a stupid question.

Answer 5

you propose that everything be free so that there would be no inequality? if everything was free there'd be no poverty, etc.

it would probably be worse if everything was free. whoever has the might to get something will take it leaving everyone with nothing.

plus there are resource limitations. if everything was free, people would take too much and there wouldn't be enough resources to produce more.

Answer 6

why my dear did you ask such a dumb question?? you do know every thing is free if you are a so called minority, and you can kiss up to the man or woman in charge, but, the rest of us must work to provide for you and others like you,aren't you proud?

Answer 7

How could you get anyone to work if everything was free?

Answer 8

who said there was no such thing as a stupid question.

What purpose would that serve? What would be your motivation to get up go to school and get a decent job and go to work if everything was handed to you?

Answer 9

If everything was free, why would anybody bother making anything...

Answer 10

Because the main motivating factor of human achievement is greed.

Answer 11

All the "Free Spirits" of the 60's already tried that, when the
others, got tired of their "freeloading." They had to get jobs
like everyone else. "Bummer." <}:-})>