Why do you wish to sustain 'markets'?
Wouldn't it be better if all the workers of the world just kept working, but stopped paying?
We already do all the work, why are we buying it back?
With the big box structures to serve as distribution we just keep the shelves full.
Then we can look at the near earth bodies for exploration.
Imagine nasa open sourced and not restricted by 'budgets'.
Resource restriction will still exist even if market/monetary system does not exist, so 'budget' restriction will just get new names in other mechanisms of resource distribution, consumption, and development. It's inevitable.
I agree that only so much copper comes out of the ground, but if you got the money there is no shortage of it.
We simply replace demand with dollars.
When enough inventory is on hand, the workers move over to something else.
If there is not enough supply, bring in more workers.
If there is not enough on the planet, then I can see no better reason to mine the near earth bodies.
"We simply replace demand with dollars."
Exactly. So we will alternatively just have other representation of 'demand' replacing the monetary system. The monetary system helps quantify demand, which beyond basic needs and community needs are much harder to quantify. Who can objectively quantify and prioritize one person's desire for fancy cooking equipment, compared to another person's desire of some gym equipment for their personal use? Money is one of the most efficient ways to quantify such demand.
Beyond our basic needs (some/most of which only exist in artificial scarcity thanks to the wastefulness of capitalism), humans do have the aforementioned conflicting 'desires' which are not necessary for survival but improves their life and requires time, space, and material resources to satisfy and produce. Such distribution cannot just be satisfied only through 'bringing in more workers', but also requires prioritizing where to spend our limited human/material/space/time/etc resources at. There's only so many workers and so much time in the world, but there is infinite demand. We cannot satisfy all these arbitrary demands, so we could only try to satisfy as many demands as possible.
We could have majority voices, consensus, local communities, representatives, and other forms of bureaucracy controlling supplies.... A monetary system w/ a proper redistribution mechanism to prevent abuse is a mechanism that could help and ease the distribution of resources by assigning specific values to them, without the need of complicated bureaucracy. Everyone having a certain money/resources to trade in have a direct voice on what they want. They could increase the weight of the demand by increasing the price of products in relation to the cost of the supply. Suppliers could then directly assist in satisfying demands with higher weight of demand, even if they are geographically distanced and does not know their customers.
I think life is about balancing our self-autonomy and ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met when we obviously have the resources to at least satisfies everyone's basic needs. Bureaucracy might be necessary at times, but there's also a benefit in having the ability to directly vote through money/resources/trade goods/etc.
Basically, the main reason is that I like Georgism and Universal Basic Income, along with other redistributive schemes, like progressive taxation. It's easier to equitably distribute the excess wealth of society if you have a means of quantifying wealth and doing accounting. As Ludwig von Mises observed: "without markets, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." Accounting and mathematical/scientific approaches to distributing wealth would go out the window with the abolition of money/markets. Furthermore, I recognize that there is a certain utility and efficiency to money that barter and communism often lack. For instance, if our Food Not Bombs group needs a car, we can do fundraising to get a car. We can get a bunch of people to each contribute a little and then go buy a car. It's easier to do a fundraiser to get cash to exchange for an item like a car than it is to throw a benefit concert with a description that just reads "somebody please give us a car." And the easiest way to contribute to a cause from a distance, whether a social movement or disaster relief, is to send money. The people there on the ground know what they need more than I do; they're better off if I send them money than if I send them sneakers. I also like schemes for mutual insurance and social credit.
I think that money can be redeemed. I think that a monetary institution can be established in such a way that it eliminates all of the negatives that are generally association with money and markets but retains the benefits of them.
This economic calculation that soooooo trips up the money lovers could be simply solved by good inventory control, only order what you need to replace what you got.
Really, this one is soooo simple, if you need shoes order some, if there is too much supply stop making shoes, really simple,...
Any solution that leaves money in charge leaves you a slave of those that have more.
The sort of geoist/mutualist municipal socialism that I recommend would be structured in a way that doesn't allow for anyone to accumulate very much more than anyone else....there's redistribution mechanisms built into the structure of my Anarchist Social Democracy. There would be no private property over land or industry, so the money from land value and industrial/commercial profits would be collectivized and divided up in an egalitarian fashion and redistributed back out to all the people as a citizens' dividend or universal basic income. Also, banking and monetary institutions would be collectivized, so the wealth would be redistributed in an egalitarian fashion. Profits would never accumulate into the hands of private individuals. And, there would be a system of voluntaryist progressive taxation built in, as well as a differential tax on the transfer of real estate, so excessive accumulation would be penalized and wealth would constantly be being redistributed downwards so that the society always remained egalitarian. Nobody would be “enslaved to those who have more” because nobody would have much more than anyone else. (This all makes more sense if you read my writings on “Anarchist Social Democracy.” Those writings can be found on AnarchistSocialDemocracy.com)
The "good inventory control" idea doesn't seem like a good enough answer to me. For one thing, how do you know how many shoes need to be made? How do you know how many should be kept in supply? But you could always just choose an arbitrary number and things would work well enough. The real problem is knowing how to best allocate resources.
Suppose we want more billiard tables in Blaville but they want more foosball tables in Yadatown. And suppose that the same materials are needed to produce both products, and that the materials are too scarce to supply us with as many of both as we would like. Then we must choose how to allocate resources. Under communistic arrangements, you have to do a lot of research, discussion, and deliberation to determine how those resources should be allocated. The appropriate way to allocate scarce resources is difficult to determine along communistic lines. If there is a scarcity of necessary resources, then it should go to democratic deliberation. But there is no scarcity of necessary resources in our society, so there's no need for full communism as long as we ensure that everyone has enough money to buy the things they need. Billiard tables and foosball tables are both luxury items. No one will die or suffer much because of a lack of either one. Consequently, there’s no real ethical crisis that demands communism in this situation. The easiest way to figure out how to allocate the resources is to let the people in Blaville and Yadatown each bid against each other. The demand for these items is reflected in prices, so the price signal signifies how resources could best be allocated. Not much research is needed. Then, since productive industry and commercial industry are collectivized under Anarchist Social Democracy, the profits from the sales are simply redistributed back out to all people in an egalitarian fashion. No one is accumulating excess wealth from sales, but the market is still functioning as an easy way to allocate resources without any effort.
Also, you suggested that “When enough inventory is on hand, workers move over to something else” and “When there is not enough supply, bring in more workers.” But this ignores specialization. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to just move workers from one industry to another willy-nilly like that. I would like my dentists to be dentists, my doctors to be doctors, my carpenters to be carpenters. Some degree of overlap is okay, but shifting workers around too much would be inefficient, as they’d always have to be trained on their new jobs and it would take a while to learn to be proficient at the new job, and then they might be moved to something else. Specialization of knowledge has its benefits. I don’t want my surgeon to forget how to do heart transplants correctly because he spends too much time working in other fields.
Furthermore, I think that we should strive to automate everything so that there are no more jobs at all. I want a fully-automated society where everyone gets paid simply for existing but where no one is able to accumulate excessive amounts of land, money, or anything else. Labor should be abolished and replaced by leisure. When people work, it ought to be because they found a hobby or something they enjoy doing, not because of economic necessity. So I look forward to a post-scarcity and fully-automated society, which I think would be possible in the near future. I also fall into the anarcho-transhumanist camp and think we should be striving to develop science and technology in order to extend human life, eliminate illnesses, achieve biological immortality, reach the singularity, and overcome all human limitations.
I guess I just have a tendency to read a lot of different schools of thought and see the strong points in each. I can't force myself to embrace any single ideology or school of thought or model of reality. I can only embrace the unique synthesis that I come up with by taking the good ideas from all the stuff I read and throwing out the bad ideas.
Thanks. I'm still working on a longer post with a more thorough critique of property.
Why do you wish to sustain 'markets'?
Wouldn't it be better if all the workers of the world just kept working, but stopped paying?
We already do all the work, why are we buying it back?
With the big box structures to serve as distribution we just keep the shelves full.
Then we can look at the near earth bodies for exploration.
Imagine nasa open sourced and not restricted by 'budgets'.
Resource restriction will still exist even if market/monetary system does not exist, so 'budget' restriction will just get new names in other mechanisms of resource distribution, consumption, and development. It's inevitable.
I agree that only so much copper comes out of the ground, but if you got the money there is no shortage of it.
We simply replace demand with dollars.
When enough inventory is on hand, the workers move over to something else.
If there is not enough supply, bring in more workers.
If there is not enough on the planet, then I can see no better reason to mine the near earth bodies.
"We simply replace demand with dollars."
Exactly. So we will alternatively just have other representation of 'demand' replacing the monetary system. The monetary system helps quantify demand, which beyond basic needs and community needs are much harder to quantify. Who can objectively quantify and prioritize one person's desire for fancy cooking equipment, compared to another person's desire of some gym equipment for their personal use? Money is one of the most efficient ways to quantify such demand.
Beyond our basic needs (some/most of which only exist in artificial scarcity thanks to the wastefulness of capitalism), humans do have the aforementioned conflicting 'desires' which are not necessary for survival but improves their life and requires time, space, and material resources to satisfy and produce. Such distribution cannot just be satisfied only through 'bringing in more workers', but also requires prioritizing where to spend our limited human/material/space/time/etc resources at. There's only so many workers and so much time in the world, but there is infinite demand. We cannot satisfy all these arbitrary demands, so we could only try to satisfy as many demands as possible.
We could have majority voices, consensus, local communities, representatives, and other forms of bureaucracy controlling supplies.... A monetary system w/ a proper redistribution mechanism to prevent abuse is a mechanism that could help and ease the distribution of resources by assigning specific values to them, without the need of complicated bureaucracy. Everyone having a certain money/resources to trade in have a direct voice on what they want. They could increase the weight of the demand by increasing the price of products in relation to the cost of the supply. Suppliers could then directly assist in satisfying demands with higher weight of demand, even if they are geographically distanced and does not know their customers.
I think life is about balancing our self-autonomy and ensuring that everyone's basic needs are met when we obviously have the resources to at least satisfies everyone's basic needs. Bureaucracy might be necessary at times, but there's also a benefit in having the ability to directly vote through money/resources/trade goods/etc.
There we could cut out the 6 comment nesting problems.
Are you on steem.chat?
Not currently. Interesting that someone developed steem chat, though.
There's an article on my website where I address that question, among others: http://www.anarchistsocialdemocracy.com/pdf%20Documents/Anarchist%20Social%20Democracy,%20Structure%20&%20Theory%20(Zine%20Format).pdf
You'll have to copy that and paste it to the browser because the link isn't catching the ".pdf" at the end so it won't work right.
Basically, the main reason is that I like Georgism and Universal Basic Income, along with other redistributive schemes, like progressive taxation. It's easier to equitably distribute the excess wealth of society if you have a means of quantifying wealth and doing accounting. As Ludwig von Mises observed: "without markets, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." Accounting and mathematical/scientific approaches to distributing wealth would go out the window with the abolition of money/markets. Furthermore, I recognize that there is a certain utility and efficiency to money that barter and communism often lack. For instance, if our Food Not Bombs group needs a car, we can do fundraising to get a car. We can get a bunch of people to each contribute a little and then go buy a car. It's easier to do a fundraiser to get cash to exchange for an item like a car than it is to throw a benefit concert with a description that just reads "somebody please give us a car." And the easiest way to contribute to a cause from a distance, whether a social movement or disaster relief, is to send money. The people there on the ground know what they need more than I do; they're better off if I send them money than if I send them sneakers. I also like schemes for mutual insurance and social credit.
I think that money can be redeemed. I think that a monetary institution can be established in such a way that it eliminates all of the negatives that are generally association with money and markets but retains the benefits of them.
This economic calculation that soooooo trips up the money lovers could be simply solved by good inventory control, only order what you need to replace what you got.
Really, this one is soooo simple, if you need shoes order some, if there is too much supply stop making shoes, really simple,...
Any solution that leaves money in charge leaves you a slave of those that have more.
The sort of geoist/mutualist municipal socialism that I recommend would be structured in a way that doesn't allow for anyone to accumulate very much more than anyone else....there's redistribution mechanisms built into the structure of my Anarchist Social Democracy. There would be no private property over land or industry, so the money from land value and industrial/commercial profits would be collectivized and divided up in an egalitarian fashion and redistributed back out to all the people as a citizens' dividend or universal basic income. Also, banking and monetary institutions would be collectivized, so the wealth would be redistributed in an egalitarian fashion. Profits would never accumulate into the hands of private individuals. And, there would be a system of voluntaryist progressive taxation built in, as well as a differential tax on the transfer of real estate, so excessive accumulation would be penalized and wealth would constantly be being redistributed downwards so that the society always remained egalitarian. Nobody would be “enslaved to those who have more” because nobody would have much more than anyone else. (This all makes more sense if you read my writings on “Anarchist Social Democracy.” Those writings can be found on AnarchistSocialDemocracy.com)
The "good inventory control" idea doesn't seem like a good enough answer to me. For one thing, how do you know how many shoes need to be made? How do you know how many should be kept in supply? But you could always just choose an arbitrary number and things would work well enough. The real problem is knowing how to best allocate resources.
Suppose we want more billiard tables in Blaville but they want more foosball tables in Yadatown. And suppose that the same materials are needed to produce both products, and that the materials are too scarce to supply us with as many of both as we would like. Then we must choose how to allocate resources. Under communistic arrangements, you have to do a lot of research, discussion, and deliberation to determine how those resources should be allocated. The appropriate way to allocate scarce resources is difficult to determine along communistic lines. If there is a scarcity of necessary resources, then it should go to democratic deliberation. But there is no scarcity of necessary resources in our society, so there's no need for full communism as long as we ensure that everyone has enough money to buy the things they need. Billiard tables and foosball tables are both luxury items. No one will die or suffer much because of a lack of either one. Consequently, there’s no real ethical crisis that demands communism in this situation. The easiest way to figure out how to allocate the resources is to let the people in Blaville and Yadatown each bid against each other. The demand for these items is reflected in prices, so the price signal signifies how resources could best be allocated. Not much research is needed. Then, since productive industry and commercial industry are collectivized under Anarchist Social Democracy, the profits from the sales are simply redistributed back out to all people in an egalitarian fashion. No one is accumulating excess wealth from sales, but the market is still functioning as an easy way to allocate resources without any effort.
Also, you suggested that “When enough inventory is on hand, workers move over to something else” and “When there is not enough supply, bring in more workers.” But this ignores specialization. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to just move workers from one industry to another willy-nilly like that. I would like my dentists to be dentists, my doctors to be doctors, my carpenters to be carpenters. Some degree of overlap is okay, but shifting workers around too much would be inefficient, as they’d always have to be trained on their new jobs and it would take a while to learn to be proficient at the new job, and then they might be moved to something else. Specialization of knowledge has its benefits. I don’t want my surgeon to forget how to do heart transplants correctly because he spends too much time working in other fields.
Furthermore, I think that we should strive to automate everything so that there are no more jobs at all. I want a fully-automated society where everyone gets paid simply for existing but where no one is able to accumulate excessive amounts of land, money, or anything else. Labor should be abolished and replaced by leisure. When people work, it ought to be because they found a hobby or something they enjoy doing, not because of economic necessity. So I look forward to a post-scarcity and fully-automated society, which I think would be possible in the near future. I also fall into the anarcho-transhumanist camp and think we should be striving to develop science and technology in order to extend human life, eliminate illnesses, achieve biological immortality, reach the singularity, and overcome all human limitations.
I guess I just have a tendency to read a lot of different schools of thought and see the strong points in each. I can't force myself to embrace any single ideology or school of thought or model of reality. I can only embrace the unique synthesis that I come up with by taking the good ideas from all the stuff I read and throwing out the bad ideas.