Why is money so important? Why can't most things be free? I know some of you are like "wtf?" Im trying to explain my point best I can.
Honestly, I don't blame you for not understanding. You were born into a society that has become detached from the reality of economics - so nothing you have experienced to this point has much grounding in economic reality.
Why can't the internet be free? Or cable tv? Or movie tix? Or a car? Food?
Nothing has a set value. Those things that are wanted/needed have value - but there is always a limited supply and a limited demand for those things - which, in conjunction with the effort necessary to provide said 'thing,' gives each object its value.
For example - many of your clothing retail stores deliberately over-charge for items when they first come out. People who want-it-now are willing to pay obscene amounts for the latest and greatest. Then they go on sale a few months later for 50% off where the store is pretty much breaking even with their operating costs to clear inventory before donating them to charity for tax write off.
If you could work for free to recieve free stuff like above wouldn't they world be better? Crime would go down, no more people getting killed over money. Way less drug dealers, ect.
There is a lot more involved in manufacturing a car than in baking a loaf of bred or washing a tub of dishes.
Generally speaking, though, what ends up happening is a gradual corruption of these systems. You don't get to keep the fruits of your labor under these systems. Whether you plow 200 rows a day or 20 - you get the same. Only those with the strongest work ethic continue to work as if they were directly benefiting.
But an even worse problem begins to arise. Let's say you're a baker. You're a noble person and you are running that bakery with other good bakers - turning out over a thousand loaves of bread a day.
But, still, the line outside never seems to shrink. The bakery next door may only turn out a couple hundred loaves of bread per day, despite having a relatively similar number of staff and equipment. But, still, you and your workers have to wait in line at the hardware store to get what you need to fix that broken door at home, you are still only entitled to a certain rationing of bread for your own families....
So, eventually, the workers realize that they can get things from the back doors of stores and find things that 'fell off the truck' if they steal away a few extra loaves of bread to hand out. These people begin to develop an underground economy within the communist system.
Because communism invariably produces a lack of goods and services - those with access to those goods and services tend to protect them. People hide what little wealth they may have or what things they may possess that their neighbor does not. They sneak vegetables or even go so far as to create secret gardens.
Think of it this way - we create a law that says food is a right. I can walk into your house and make a sandwich out of your refrigerator. It only takes a few people doing this before you do one of two things - either you stop stocking your refrigerator with food (because someone else is going to help themselves to it, anyway) - or you are going to put a lock on your door in direct violation of the law granting these people the right to food.
While that's a relatively simple analogy - it describes exactly how people behave under communism and, to a similar extent, socialism:
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"Honest participants would be expected to roll ones, twos and threes as often as fours, fives and sixes. But that did not happen: the sheets handed in had a suspiciously large share of high numbers, suggesting many players had cheated.
After finishing the game, the players had to fill in a form that asked their age and the part of Germany where they had lived in different decades. The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers of high rolls."
The first settlers to arrive in America also tried communism.
It killed them.
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"By painful experience, the Pilgrims learned something that should never be forgotten. Two hundred twenty seven years before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, they disembarked from the Mayflower in the New World and established a colony based on communism and it did not work.
They arrived in 1620 and spent two years trying to work within a system designed back in Europe by the settlement’s financial backers, a system that held all property and wealth created to be owned communally. We all know what happens in a system like that. We’ve seen the results in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and other nations that failed to prosper. When nobody owns anything, nobody has a real interest in working. Why work hard planting crops when you are an equal owner in the crops somebody else is growing? Why build a nice cabin when other people have as much right to live in it as you do? Why chop firewood for winter when you can get warm with the firewood other people chopped?
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Notice the comparison of communism to slavery. The comparison was made by the women, who apparently were expected to wash and cook for men other than their husbands. One can imagine a 20th century Soviet woman nodding her head in complete understanding... like Ayn Rand, for instance.
In 1623 Bradford abandoned the settlement agreement written by the London financiers and assigned each family or group its own plot of land. From that point forward the Plymouth Colony thrived as men took to their plows & axes and started working for themselves instead of the commune. They thrived that year in spite of a two-month drought: "
Basically - it should come as absolutely no surprise that when you take what a man has done and give it to someone else - he is going to be less inclined to labor himself for things that can never be his own.
We work for money to buy things but lots of people struggle so wouldn't it be better if people recieved free things to help them struggle less? What harm would it do? Now I'm sure some would say "well people would stop working and we wont have some of these things" but that wouldn't be the case since you'll still be awarded for work.
The problem is that what you propose requires a fixed economy that is unchanging.
I have a neat idea for a new Programmable Logic Controller. Right now, I can purchase most of the major system components from parts suppliers and contract the board printing. It's not 'cheap' - but I could, with a few thousand dollars, prototype the PLC hardware. With a few more thousand - I could do a limited production run and sell the device(s) to interested industries who see the investment as savings and/or worth it in the long run (I can't tell you how many times I run across $2500 boxes full of relays when a similar box running a PLC could replace four of such boxes for half the price).
I make a profit off of those devices which is used to invest in a larger production run that allows me to drop my cost/component - meaning more profit and/or lower prices. I can afford to hire more people, to automate the manufacturing process (produce even more for less - allowing the price to go even lower to edge out the brand names) - industries that would have not considered using PLCs now have a cost-effective option that can save them time, money, and expand their capabilities.
While a box full of relays works and can be fairly reliable - it is ancient technology that is noisy, relatively power hungry, and difficult/time consuming to reconfigure. For the most part - when a company changes their facility setup/hardware - they get all-new control boxes because it's usually not worth it to try and reconfigure the old box (and the people who actually understand relay logic circuits well enough to do a decent job are hard to come by).
A PLC can be reprogrammed and added on to very easily and reliably in a manner that flows much more intuitively (since latching relays, time-delay relays, and all of that other fun stuff get kind of stupid when it comes to how to wire them).
Anyway - so ... in free economy where there is some monetary medium - that is what happens. I get to charge for my product so that I can re-invest directly into expanding and growing the business. I can hire new people, buy a larger building to operate from, etc - assuming there is a continued demand for my product.
How would I go about doing that under a system where people just get what they want?
Would industries have any reason to look at my fanciful PLC thing?
Sure, the tech-heads would find it interesting and would see some things that they can do with it - but there's not going to be a mass exodus away from the old way of doing things.
Worse - what if there was?
I'm one guy with a few prototypes that I managed to wait in line for. Now they have to wait in line for me to wait in line for even larger orders. And how do I get extra help? How do I get a larger building?
"Well, surely, if your idea is that good, society will recognize it is good and let you have things."
Really? You would? This "PLC" magic-electrical-box-thing is going to be recognized by society as important... as 'necessary' - as 'groundbreaking?'
Even if they had the time to sit down and learn about the device - they would see that one of the things it does is allow some jobs filled by humans to be completely done away with.
Why not have a guy employed to watch a set of water pumps to turn them off if the water level in the tank gets too low? That's a job - right?
But the PLC can take that away from him. It can cycle the pumps to reduce wear on them. It can monitor various sensors and switches and do things without fail. No falling asleep. No getting distracted. No shifts. It is brutally efficient and ever-vigilant.
Why would you take someone's job away?
Just... why? What will they do?
This is why any communist economy rapidly deteriorates. New job creation is very difficult and next to impossible as the model assumes static resource providers and manufacturers.
This is why the USSR eventually needed you to request to move to a new city. Not only did simple matters of housing have to be arranged - but you could not have much in the way of growth into a city as it would strain the limited systems available and the government would not be able to react before famine set in.
I don't think I explained fully and may be hard to understand. Im just saying I think there is a solution to poverty, struggle and not being able to enjoy finer things if life if money had less value.
This is precisely what the Federal Reserve has been doing for the past 100 years.
The value of the dollar is pennies compared to what it used to be. There used to be a unit called a 'mil' - it took ten of them to make a penny, and it used to be a unit of currency that people used quite frequently. A quarter had nearly the same value as a ten dollar bill in today's economy.
Yet it has done nothing to make life 'more fair.'
It's actually destroyed our economy and has us set to enter hyperinflation within the next few months (Weimar Republic).
Of interest:
"The ensuing period of liberal democracy lapsed by 1930, when President Hindenburg assumed dictatorial emergency powers to back the administrations of Chancellors Brüning, Papen, Schleicher and finally Hitler. Between 1930 and 1933 the Great Depression, even worsened by Brüning's policy of deflation, led to a surge in unemployment. It led to the ascent of the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in 1933. The legal measures taken by the new Nazi government in February and March 1933, commonly known as the Machtergreifung (seizure of power) meant that the government could legislate contrary to the constitution. The constitution became irrelevant, therefore 1933 is usually seen as the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler's Third Reich."
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... We have a president who has a pen and who has a phone, and will do what he can with our without congressional approval.
Just sayin'. Danger, Will Robinson.
