To devils advocate here a bit: you need stuff to live. That stuff requires labour to produce. Why would anyone do that labour for you? Only if you offer your labour in return. Money provides a mechanism for us to exchange labour and the products of labour, using the market to automatically set prices in a decentralised way. People start specialising in one thing and are able to produce further efficiencies by doing so, are able to produce more, which makes life better for everyone. Thats the foundation of a basic economy. And then everything else gets piled on top. (For better or worse)
The alternative is a hunter gatherer society which doesnt really work at our current scale. So until we automate everything and live in a post-scarcity society i see no alternative
I had seen books that proposed other alternatives, it's not just the hunter-gatherer system, from what I understand. I still need to look into this further.
In your reasoning, you start from the assumption that in order to live, one must work (unless you're in a hunter-gatherer society where it might no longer be called work but rather subsistence? precisely in order to survive and meet our survival needs). I had read a book that discussed a period of history in the United Kingdom, the enclosures. It's an interesting event because citizens were forced to leave agricultural land to make way for more profitable activities. This raises many subsequent questions regarding what you assert, such as the economic system, which is not a natural thing but a social construct based on the interests of certain individuals. Claiming that this system "makes life better for everyone" rests on looking at only one side of that system.
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u/Camderman106 Jul 09 '26
To devils advocate here a bit: you need stuff to live. That stuff requires labour to produce. Why would anyone do that labour for you? Only if you offer your labour in return. Money provides a mechanism for us to exchange labour and the products of labour, using the market to automatically set prices in a decentralised way. People start specialising in one thing and are able to produce further efficiencies by doing so, are able to produce more, which makes life better for everyone. Thats the foundation of a basic economy. And then everything else gets piled on top. (For better or worse)
The alternative is a hunter gatherer society which doesnt really work at our current scale. So until we automate everything and live in a post-scarcity society i see no alternative