You are new here, so you might not have seen me post before. I typically sit on the sidelines and read through various threads that are outside of my area of expertise. However, economics happens to be my area.
I year or two ago, I got pretty interested in the Zeitgeist movement and watched all their videos (even the 9/11 conspiracy one) and read a lot of their stuff. In general, I agree with them in sentiment, but find most of their ideas too utopian to be of practical value. The “no money” idea falls into that category. I agree that one of the biggest problems in a capitalist society is the focus on money as capital. Those with money are able to extract “rents” or non-value added fees just for the sake that they have what others don’t. 99% of what the financial services sector in this country does could fall into that category. It’s insane that Wall Street can get so wealthy by essentially providing nothing in return (and occasionally crashing the economy).
That being said, money will always exist in some form as a way to facilitate barter. Even if most services and products are just provided to people free of charge, there will still be some goods or services people will want to exchange and some sort of token or “money” always helps facilitate those transactions. Also, while I disagree that profit always produces the best outcomes (for example in health insurance), the truth is that it does produce great outcomes for most things. The innovation in retail and consumer goods is an example. While a utopia might produce an iPhone or Nike’s, the simple truth is that competition for money create these things faster and better than a planned economy can.
If you read some of my previous postings on MMT, you’ll see another alternative that is actually feasible. Simply put, we the people, in our capacity as democratic rulers of a sovereign nation, have at our disposal a monopoly on the US currency. The US can never run out of dollars that we create essentially from nothing and we can put those dollars to use making life better for everyone. We have the ability to provide whatever we want to whoever we want with the only constraint being production capacity. It is in this sense that I don’t see a reason for anyone to ever go hungry or to be denied life-saving or life-enhancing medical care.
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