Has it occurred to you that paying for things is a recent, temporary mode of interaction between humans while free and good will is the default?
You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
Get back? Please tell me at what point in history could a person just pick every item and have every service for free.
Even if there was a society like that, I don't think I'd want to go - not only did they go extinct, they don't have mRNA vaccines, spacecraft, and Telemundo soaps.
I’d say that’s about as utopian of an idea as the unrestricted free market.
In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form.
In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, underpaid labor, serfdom, like you know, these rare things that happened through the centuries. So yeah, I suppose that idea is ‘still working itself out’ two thousand years later.
Fuck all that is my point, as many souls have been lost waiting for utopia. Ask the guys that built the pyramids.
What do children pay their parents, or parents pay their kids? That's the relationship people start out with and one that is most natural.
People seem to think that there is money, and before money, there was barter. That's fake news made up by economists (the barter before money bit).
People have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Money has been around for a few thousand in select places and never used for most transactions by most people until extremely recently.
I'd argue it's still not used for the most important transactions and the existence of food stamps, universal health care in every sane developed country, free education and subsidies for parents with children is simply some of the numerous examples of most people preferring free for things they deeply value and care about.
Money is great for veblen goods and exchange among adversaries, everything else wants to be free. Free as in decided based on factors other than money, not free as in oxygen.
I'm not articulating this too well, please have a look here for a take I'm trying to express, done by a proper journalist.
I don’t think there’s enough liquidity in your system. Let’s say I think everyone should own a house. I then go ahead and help build a house for you. I would expect many others to have the same belief and build a house for me.
If at any time people decide they no longer believe in home ownership, then the house I built for you had no value since no one will build my home when it’s my turn.
This wouldn’t be a problem if you just paid me cash since it stores value.
Right, you can't please everyone, all of the time, you can only please some people, some of the time.
We can come up with pro and con examples for any set of ideas.
I remain of the mindset that monetary transactions within a community are a net negative, largely because I think human dignity should not be something you can purchase, sell or bargain for.
If we provide human dignity for every member and let money be something we use for nice-to-have items/services, that strikes me as a significant improvement.
It's been known as utopian since at least the time of Thomas More[1].
> What do children pay their parents, or parents pay their kids? That's the relationship people start out with and one that is most natural.
Yes, it's natural for that relationship. That does not mean that:
a) it applies to other kinds of relationship
b) it scales to all of society
In fact, it's that kind of thinking that leads to the authoritarianism of Confucianism, the tyranny of communism, and the stifling paternalism of western social democracy (among other things such as outright fascism).
Gifting worked amongst tribes because they're all related. As to Graeber, he's saying that slavery is the creation of money? No, he's too mealy mouthed for that “perhaps not creating but at least enabling institutions such as slavery”.
Wow, money enables slavery. What a pathetic attempt at insight and guilt by association.
Money is simply a better system than the competitors, as is liberalism - the wish that people be free to choose how they use their spending power (or gifting power, ha) - to its competitors. A gift economy was not able to lift almost the entire world out of poverty (and it will hopefully complete that effort soon[2]). Communism and socialism (not that there's a real difference) have only managed to emiserate and imprison every society it's been tried in. No thanks.
You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.