Post #1230356
2026-04-08 16:17 UTC
Replies (2)
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@Ontimp@feddit.org 2026-04-08 17:35
Well for the majority of time when we did not use money, communities were quite small and/or ressources were so scarce that money lost it's value, as people lose trust that you can actually exchange it for goods later on (e.g. during a famine the incremental value of food in monetary terms is astronomical). Money hence emerged first in situations where value needed to be conveyed over large distances, where punitive mechanisms of governance (i.e. someone more powerful than you puts you in a box or lobs off your hands) become ineffective - it emerged along the first trade routes, and means of control by distant power centers (such as in China). There are alternative systems for the distribution of scarce resources, but they ultimately require centralized governance bodies - this is where most communist states failed in practice. If something belongs to 'everyone', it belongs to the one with the biggest stick, usually the state; If something should be used for the common good, someone qualitatively needs to decide what that is. I can't think of any alternative forms of resource distribution that don't rely on a central decision making party. The key issue with money, and why it leads to the emergency of fascist ideology imo, is when money pools with a powerful class of people that or filthy rich, somehow 'own' entire organisations including the media, and then become politicians as well. Concentration of power is the actual evil here, not private ownership. So what should we change? - Wealth tax and high inheritance tax tied directly to monetary redistribution mechanisms such as a basic income - 100% income tax above a certain level of income but lower or no takes on most income - Taxing of inhuman productivity (if elegantly possible) - No owning of land, just renting it from the state. - Price-based mechanisms to account for negative externalities such as greenhouse gasses - Limits to allowed pay disparities in companies - Company types that disincentive value extraction and financialization - Limits to stock buybacks - Limits to the complexity of financial products - Hard upper limit of how much you can own lol - etc. Long story short, what [Social Market Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy?wprov=sfla1) was originally intended to do
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@Bassman1805@lemmy.world 2026-04-08 19:23
I mean, the earliest known currency is almost exactly as old as the earliest known cities. Farmers would deposit a large amount of grain at the local temple (which were effectively the tax collection sites of the time) and were given clay tokens on exchange, which could be used in place of actual goods at tax time. This system was set up because of the nature of farming: you make a lot of product in a short time, but most of the year you're just waiting for your crop to grow. These tokens allowed farmers to pay their tax duties up front, and then have physical proof that they'd done so when paying taxes outside of harvest season. But it was only a matter of time before people started trading those tokens amongst each other. "Give me a goat and I'll give you these tokens so you don't have to pay tribute next season." Before that, villages were pretty much just hand-to mouth communities of just a few families. Surviving, sure, but not in the kind of complex society where one needs to draw equivalence between extremely different forms of labor.