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Money is nothing but a bunch of IOUs to make bartering easier.
I recommend this video which talks about bartering and how our simplistic view of bartering is quite innacurate to how things worked pre-money societies.
Andrewism is great. The majority of the video is discussing David Graebers Debt the first 5000 years which for a book about the history of debt and the relations between people in society is surprisingly entertaining. I’d recommend checking it out.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years
Yes, Andrewism is great!
If you are really interested in the topic, you should take the time to read “Debt, the first 5,000 years” by David Graeber. Totally worth it!
This is like saying, “Why can’t we all just pretend counterfeit money is real?” Sure, it sounds like a nice simple solution until suddenly everyone prints counterfeit money and expects to buy things that no one is producing now that an easier option has appeared.
I can appreciate the spirit of this post, but it’s a perspective only a teenager could hold.
people should not starve. we have the resources to ensure nobody starves. it isn’t a naive statement, its a moral imperative.
Yeah, it’s the ultimate midwit take. Smart enough to realise it’s an abstraction, not smart enough to realise that there’s a base reality (goods themselves being scarce) beneath it.
Food isn’t scarce.
Capitalism must create scarcity to justify its existence.
We live in a post scarcity society. It blow my mind that more people aren’t screaming that from the top of their lungs.
We could have automated trains delivering food to every corner of this nation - but instead billionaires launch cars into space and build death tunnels to nowhere.
This is one of those sayings that took a long time to sink in for me, despite my undergrad economics minor.
It feels like it shouldn’t be true but that’s only if you don’t really understand that business exists to maximize profits, not maximize goods and services provided. Next, that profits can increase even if units sold decreases. In a for profit company the number of units sold or services provided will be the number where profit is the most, not the number where the units/services are the most (unless they happen to be the same).
Think of this old trades saying, if you double your price, but only lose half your customers, you still make the same profits. Data driven business knows this, especially in oligopolistic fields like food production, and it’s likely the reason inflation on food is so bad. They can double the price of a loaf, and half as many people buy, so profits go up , they literally don’t care if you eat, they generate scarcity by producing below their maximum output. They trade production for profit.
That’s just my long ass way of saying “Capitalism must create scarcity to justify its existence.”
Hmm, but why would a farmer provide food to people without getting anything in return? This is, assuming everyone is selfish, which is the core assumption of capitalism.
Economics and unrealistic assumptions, name a nore iconic duo.
Well I mean, most of the liberal and classical economists generally try to predict the behaviors of consumers, which lead to assumptions such as “People will generally be selfish”.
Because they’re put in an economic system where if they aren’t - they starve.
