Do you think if everyone had healthcare, plenty of food, and sufficient shelter we could do away with money as we know it?

It’s called Scandinavia (consistently some of the happiest people on Earth). They still use money though I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding it.

@gorillapaws Isn’t Scandanavia running into problems in countries that are having a lot of immigration? Plus, would you agree that being such a cold climate, a far distance from developing nations, that they have less troubles with people wanting to immigrate there? Would the whole world need to be on the same system for it to really work?

I actually live in a place like I described here in the US (not exactly as I described, but very close for practical purposes) but it works because it’s a retirement community. Money is still money, but there is a huge social system here. Ironically, the place is founded and run by huge republican contributors.

Yes, it will work.

The pros are pretty obvious and abundant, to me. I think most of the world’s suffering has a foundation in the idea that they and/or their children may have to be hungry, homeless, outcast, and/or no one will care for them when they are ill or infirm. Most of the shaming and fear and exploitation rises out of that.

The cons I see are mainly about the transition and the chaos and resentment and resistance it will meet from the people heavily invested in the thinking and meanings and emotions of the old system. Even try to talk about these sorts of ideas, and many people resist with ideas using language like “reality” and “human nature” and/or become angry, which indicate that their belief systems and emotions are deeply invested in the necessity of the system of ideas we’ve been suffering under. Money-oriented people don’t like the idea that their lifetime obsession might be rationally considered unnecessary, and they currently have a whole lot of power and agreement and our laws and economies and governments are organized heavily around money. A lot of advancement will need to be done in terms of culture, education, and mental health, and of course most of our corporate/government structures will need to be reorganized.

I don’t think the “average work week” would necessarily be shorter. I might be longer, as it’s less fatiguing to do work that you choose and like to do, and there’d be no stress about needing to be sure to be able to pay bills on time or else go hungry or lose one’s home.

@JLeslie It does work that way in Scandinavia. They live a very rational way of life. And, yes, they do have a problem with refugees from North African and Middle East victims of instability and war, like every European country right now. But that has nothing to do with the intention behind their systems and their success up to now. This is an unforeseen, extraordinary circumstance.

The cold doesn’t seem to influence refugees’ choices on where they would like to relocate. At the moment, there are over a million Syrian refugees in camps in Greece. When the Greek government polled them recently, the most popular place to relocate was Norway.

By the way, I’ve been to the Villages twice to visit a friend’s mother. I was thoroughly impressed. Nice choice.

Currency should never have been invented. Without currency, giving someone what they need would not be charity, it would just be good manners.

I feel I was born too late. By about a thousand years. I adore the concept of tribal collectivism. No money needed – everyone needs wheat or oats or rye, so everyone makes sure everyone has enough. In early Medieval Ireland, wealth was measured in the number of cows you owned. The vast majority of people owned exactly zero cows, and that didn’t stop any of them from having plenty of milk for butter and cheese. Not providing hospitality to someone in need was against the law.

Yeah, I know my dream system doesn’t work in our hypermodern dog eat dog day and age… I can still dream though.

There is clearly a need for discretionary choices in any society, and these choices are best and most efficiently accommodated through a common medium of exchange. Money! Human nature being what it is, once money is introduced the competition for its acquisition requires obsession with this motivation to exist in but a scant few individuals before the entirety of the society itself is driven toward the acquisition of money as the defacto motivation underlying all else. The process is insidious as the struggle for money becomes ever more arduous with the concentration of money in ever fewer hands. This is particularly true as those accumulating the wealth strive endlessly in convincing all combatants of the primary dictums that 1: you can never have enough and 2:disregard of 1 is tantamount to misery and failure. Resistance to participation in the game becomes all but futile as the consequences of defying the rat race become ever more pronounced through the necessary degrading miseries inflicted on those unwilling or unable to “play well”. Thus the clear and unchallenged requirement for destitution as incentive to those foolishly contemplating escape from the treadmill.

I understand that we all want a world with no pain or strife but there are certain realities that we can’t simply avoid. We have tried supplying food and shelter with disastrous results. Look back at the projects in Chicago, remember Cabrini Green? We all hate things like Corporate Farming and GMOs but we can’t supply enough food to feed the world with out them. I supose we could just let people die until we got back to a population that we could feed with plows and oxen but I’m not willing to go there. In you panacea where everyone throws garden parties and weaves baskets, who scrapes the sewage disposal tanks? There’s a certain dignity to working and supporting yourself that humans need. You can’t get it by having everything given to you. Personally I would hate to live in a world where nothing is cherished nor effort rewarded. But maybe I’m just senile.

@Jaxk I also used to give the argument regarding the dignity and pride we get from work. From earning a living. It’s why I argue for higher wages rather than low wages and food stamps.

I was having a discussion with someone about the universal basic income theory, and I brought up that earning an income is good for people psychologically, that being productive is also good for the psychological health of a society. I see this especially among teenagers. I think working helps them tremendously to move through adolescence. His argument is there won’t be enough work for everyone going forward. More and more robotics will be a major reason why. Then he pointed out that we, he and I, live in a place where the majority of the population doesn’t work, is on Medicare, and they play tennis, swim, make baskets, play cards, and go dancing every day, plus hundreds of other activities. Everyone gets up, showers, shaves, puts on their clothes and runs around to their various activities. People aren’t just laying around doing nothing.

It’s very nice. You should come visit.

I do keep in mind that the people here did work at one point, they are retired from various professions, some still work.

I’ve been thinking about it more and more. Maybe retirement will get earlier. Maybe work weeks be shorter. Maybe there will be more job sharing.

I take it one step further and I begin to wonder if the value of money will change.

Everyone here has a certain amount of money to buy their homes and pay the monthly charges. The homes go from $90k to $1.5 million. Most are $200 to $400k. Everyone pays the $145 a month recreation fee and that takes care of all common grounds, all rec centers, pools, golf courses, courts, and all the admin costs for running it all. It’s all free to use, included in the $145.

It can’t work as well in a community where people aren’t retired, because they are too busy working to do the volunteer stuff. Unless of course they are working shorter hours.

When everyone is “volunteering” and you can easily afford to live a nice life in a nice place, then you’re more inclined to volunteer too. You do what you love to do, and other people get to enjoy it too.

@Jaxk “We have tried supplying food and shelter with disastrous results. Look back at the projects in Chicago, remember Cabrini Green?”
Supplying some needs and not others to some people and not others in a giant city with a mostly-abandoned ethnically-descriminated population had bad results, which was not due to what was given, but to what was withheld and not addressed, I would say.

“We all hate things like Corporate Farming and GMOs but we can’t supply enough food to feed the world with out them.”
Massive corporations and investors don’t hate them. And yes, actually we could supply enough food to feed the world without them, if we reorganize and/or dismantle the for-profit megacorporate agricultural monopolies and replace them with for-good sustainable agricultural practices. The reason people starve is that they don’t have access to food, not that enough food doesn’t exist. The main thing GMOs accomplish is increasing profits of huge corporations, and allowing them to “own” crop breeds and stipulate how they can be used, and to eliminate non-megacorporate ownership of non-GMO seed.

“I supose we could just let people die until we got back to a population that we could feed with plows and oxen but I’m not willing to go there.”
Good thing that’s not a necessary dilemma.

“In you panacea where everyone throws garden parties and weaves baskets, who scrapes the sewage disposal tanks? There’s a certain dignity to working and supporting yourself that humans need. You can’t get it by having everything given to you.”
By people who want to contribute and receive more than their basic needs. Abolishing the broken economic models also means we can reward work appropriate to how much it needs to be done and how little most others want to do it.

Also, part of the necessity of abandoning “work or starve” economics is that more and more tasks can be done by technology to the point that it’s no longer economically viable to employ people to do things.

“Personally I would hate to live in a world where nothing is cherished nor effort rewarded. But maybe I’m just senile.”
No, you’re stuck in a way of thinking with false dilemmas.

@Jaxk While I do agree that there is an important good in supporting yourself and having a useful purpose in society, and that full-blown communism isn’t a viable solution, I also think that Reganomics has proven equally disastrous. If tax cuts for the 1% were effective in improving the lives of working-class Americans we would all be filling our bathtubs with Dom Perignon. Flat taxes, regressive taxes (for the investment class) and corporate welfare are just as bad for average Americans as Maoism. Half of working Americans make less than $30k per year. Tax cuts and “small government” has been a disaster for this country.

The happy middle are countries like Norway with a strong social safety net, guaranteed healthcare, but also the ability to succeed through hard work and ingenuity.

@JLeslie – It’s fun to envision a world where robots do all the work. We’re not there yet and I think it’s quite a ways out. We’re already having problems with Medicare and Social Security simply because the group paying into it grows smaller while the group receiving it grows larger. Whether you consider this income or simply services you receive (housing, food, clothes, etc.) where does it come from? The village you live in is comprised mostly of retired people. People that have worked all their lives and saved for retirement. They have a work ethic that they’re used to with obligations they need to meet. What happens when they don’t have that work ethic and have never had obligations to meet. I’ve heard many people talk about some commune that they lived in or heard about that was paradise. I can’t help but wonder why they no longer live there. It’s fun for a while but begins to break down over time.

@Zaku – So the problem with Cabrini Green was that we didn’t give them enough. Other areas of the city were given nothing and did quite well but Maybe you’re right.

Corporate farming and GMOs actually serve a purpose other than rewarding those that invented it. Pest and disease resistant strains Provide much greater yields with less chemicals. The better the yield the less deforestation required for farmlands. It’s a ‘pay me now or pay me later’ kind of scenario.

More and more tasks are being done with technology but that technology creates more jobs as well. Our current problem is that the jobs created are created overseas rather than here at home, not that they’re not being created. And remember that work or starve was eliminated in Cabrini Green. May we didn’t give them enough but they had a home and food to survive. I think it may be you that is stuck in a fantasy land with dreams of utopia.

@gorillapaws – I know it is popular to bash Reagan but really he ushered in 20 years of growth and prosperity. The workforce grew and wages grew while unemployment shrank. As for small government, you can’t say it doesn’t work since we haven’t tried it. As for countries like Norway, They are good at producing tall blonds with blue eyes but not much else. I do admit however that they are very very good at that.

@Jaxk Who said everything will be done by robots? I still talked about work and business and maybe shorter work weeks and earlier retirement.

@Jaxk I’m no scholar on the matter of Cabrini Green or the Chicago projects in general, but having lived in Chicago for a few years and having read a bit about them, it’s clear to me that the problems were vastly larger than the housing projects addressed, and no doubt were not about the housing projects themselves, but about Chicago being one giant majorly screwed up city in terms of crime gangs, poverty, and gigantic swaths of the greater city that are nearly abandoned by white and well-off people and their services (notably police) and where white strangers-to-town are regularly warned with some urgency not to go and certainly not after dark for fear of attack. The housing projects were a small drop in a giant bucket, and the fact that they got overrun with crime wasn’t because some people were taken care of, or if in some twisted sense it was, it was because so many others had been neglected and because of the existing massive problems with crime gangs and so on that didn’t go away and no doubt found things to resent, envy and take advantage of when some poorer people were being given some of their needs but without the level of protection given to more affluent neighborhoods.

Surely you don’t suppose the sniper attacks from the project roofs after Martin Luther King Junior’s assassination were created by bored indigent welfare recipients who had saved up their welfare and used it to buy rifles and ammo out of ennui who if only no one had been given any welfare, would have been busy working to earn their keep?

As for farming, it appears to me that there are also sustainable ways to grow food effectively that do not involve heavy chemical use and that don’t require deforestation. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/advance-sustainable-agriculture/sustainable-agriculture.html

As for technology jobs, you seem to model the problems very differently from the way I do. I don’t see the US workforce being able to shift to being mostly technologists so they can all have jobs so we can keep playing “everyone needs to be useful to a corporation or starve”. Sure some, and more than before, can do some technology jobs, but with the idea that everyone needs to earn their keep in the free market dominated by international megacorporations whose goal is to maximize profits, I don’t expect that game to have a happy ending for most people unless some major changes to the economic system happen. I don’t find Cabrini Green relevant, as above, except that it shows that tiny inadequate measures won’t magically change things, and that they will be used as counter-examples by people attached to the idea that the earn-your-keep model was somehow vindicated by their failure.

@Jaxk The real problem with Cabrini Green is that it was in reality an experiment based on the isolation then concentration of poverty in the most heavily segregated city in the world. There were noble and well intentioned aspects to a plan which basically provided housing and government stipends to people denied the opportunities for employment assumed normal for white folks. The thing that is NEVER considered nor commented on regarding situations like Cabrini Green is that even given the horrors around the failures of such places, life within them was paradise compared to the former existence in Mississippi or Alabama. It was the failure to appreciate the fact that housing projects are defacto holding pens for people you can legally deny decent jobs or housing in more favorable neighborhoods. The thing about such environments is that while there is a trickle of residents who do manage to escape the place through obtaining decent employment, there remains no shortage of people prepared to risk existence in such hell holes as a step up from life in the South. The folks in Chicago, even in Cabrini Green, those are the ones who “made it”.

@Jaxk “I know it is popular to bash Reagan but really he ushered in 20 years of growth and prosperity. The workforce grew and wages grew while unemployment shrank.”

Growth and prosperity for whom? The real median wages for Americans was on a steady rise (lockstep with productivity increases) until Reagonomics. Since then productivity has continued to increase while median real wages have flatlined. The wealth never trickled down as was promised. There is no greater proof of what a failure supply side economics has been than that. Communism is fantastic if your Mao or Fidel, and Reganomics is great if you’re a Koch brother, but neither system is good for the median citizen.

As for your claim that there isn’t small government, we’ve deregulated the banks—and we got the Great Recession, we’ve slashed the top tax bracket percent, we’ve deregulated the media and telecom and now only have 6 companies owning nearly all media in the US, we’ve got Comcast, and Verizon two of the consistently worst rated companies by customers. Deregulation has lead to mergers that are bad for consumers and for Capitalism.

What makes Capitalism work is that it mirrors natural selection: lots of competition drives innovation. When you deregulate and allow for mergers, the natural tendency for big companies is to use their power to crush competitors. Having a capitalist system where everyone works for one of a handful of mega corporate conglomerates isn’t any better than working in the fields for the great leader (and may actually be worse). See the Gilded Age. See also The Great Depression that followed.

I’m a capitalist through-and-through, but it’s not capitalism for capitalism sake, it’s because a marketplace with rich competition and strong anti-competitive protections and regulations produces the best outcome.

As for Norway, I really don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about.

It’s pretty obvious to me that we’ll never agree on the damage that free stuff can cause. That’s OK but I’ll leave this with a few thoughts that I think are worth considering. Personally I’m not real concerned about robotics eliminating jobs. Think about what we actually get from robotics, mass production. The ability to place new technology into the hands or homes of everyday people. Things like phones, computers, TVs, calculators, cars. Quite often its not just a replacement but rather something completely new that we quickly come to realize is a necessity. They all need labor to invent, engineer, and produce. How many of these things are now necessities that should be provided to all Americans? Surely we all need cell phones. How about a television, a car, of course everyone must have clothes? If these things are now free, along with housing, food, and medical care, how do we pay those that are working to provide them. They’re free so there’s no money coming in to use to pay those that want to work to get ahead? It becomes a vicious cycle until nobody works and there’s nobody to build the free housing, grow the free food, or make the free clothes. Whether is capitalism or communism, everyone has to participate to keep things going.

Last point. The villages example really is comparable to the Cabrini Green projects. They started as decent apartments. Not luxury high rises but decent. They could have formed volunteer groups like they did at the villages, to wash off the graffiti and fix the plumbing but they didn’t. What is the difference between these projects. In the villages, the tenents bought their property, had ownership of it, in Chicago they didn’t. things that are acquired with no work or supplied free, have no value. People treat them accordingly.

What I see as a result of providing free, the popular notion of necessities, is a world of stagnation and decay. Not my cup of tea.

Once again, the failure of Cabrini Green has nothing to do with freeloading and subsidies. And the big embarrassing clue to the truth of this is in the exclusive ethnicity of the residents confined to the place. As I said before there were good intentions behind the establishment of the project, but the more pressing unacknowledged motivation was the requirement that the huge influx of black people be isolated from “better” neighborhoods. Now it is certainly true that without subsidies, black folks would not be concentrated in Cabrini Green, but it was gauged well worth the money to pen the “problems” up.

@Jaxk It’s a valid example to consider. I think giving away free stuff doesn’t work when it’s only to a lower class. I don’t know how to word that better, because it sounds terrible I know, like the lower class can’t or won’t take care of their things. It isn’t that. It’s that they don’t have the income to support taking care of things.

The Villages has the rec fee that supports trimming the lawns and maintaining the buildings and rec staff. It’s not all free. Plus, if you don’t maintain your property they can put a lien on your property, and probably foreclose on you.

It also is in a bubble, with rural all around, and some very small cities to the east of it. Once the suburban life stretches all the way to The Villages who knows what will happen.

I’m going to add that plenty of buildings in NY are full of tenants and everything is maintained beautifully. Moreover, The Villages has a very high percentage of tenants too. What matters is the owners make sure their property is maintained.

In Singapore the majority of the housing is government subsidized. From what I understand it works well. I know there are some negatives though.

I grew up in Montgomery Village, with a similar idea of varying incomes and community services. It has gone through it’s hay day, and it’s lifecycle is in the down swing. More crime, property values not growing as much as some areas. It’s a real shame. It was great for many years though. A good 40 years. Hopefully it will come back.

@Jaxk
Surely we all need cell phones.
No, I would prefer not to have one. I only got one late in life due to the expectations of romantic interests, and later as a platform to develop for work. I don’t consider it a necessity at all and wouldn’t think it should come under something provided to all Americans until all other more important (i.e. all) needs of nonhumans and humans were provided for, and if it’s cheap and easy to do so.

How about a television
No! The only television I watch is via dual-purpose screen through a multi-purpose computer. I know many people who don’t like, don’t watch, and/or don’t own TVs by choice. Not that they aren’t dirt cheap or zero-value these days due to overproduction and consumerist obsolescence. This would be a silly thing to list as a needed burden to a welfare system because it’s not needed or even wanted by all, and the hand-me-downs are overabundant and cheap.

a car
No. I’d rather live someplace designed for humans than cars. Suburban communities designed to require everyone to own a care are IMO poorly designed. Some degree of public mass transportation and ambulance service should be provided, though.

of course everyone must have clothes?
Yes that’s under the need for shelter, but again basic clothing is cheap and overabundant.

If these things are now free, along with housing, food, and medical care, how do we pay those that are working to provide them. They’re free so there’s no money coming in to use to pay those that want to work to get ahead? It becomes a vicious cycle until nobody works and there’s nobody to build the free housing, grow the free food, or make the free clothes.
By re-inventing our economic systems. It won’t be about how much money our computers say everyone has (our current system, under which increasingly more and more will be owned by giant monopolistic corporations, banks, and the richest of their investors). During the transition, the crazy overproduction of our consumerist throw-away production will provide more than enough TVs, phones and clothes to provide for a long time. Mechanized factories make most of those products anyway.

One enormous difference in assumptions on this issue seems to be that some people think that if needs are secure and people can do what they choose, people will naturally do very little, contribute nothing, and/or become awful criminals. Others think that if needs are secure and people can do what they choose, people will naturally pursue their talents and interests and make the most of themselves, and generally share and contribute actually more than they would if forced to find some job just for money to get by on. I certainly know that’s the case for myself and it seems to be the case for most of the people I know. For people who are dysfunctional as others expect, I think that that’s because those people have had negative conditioning from parents, school, work, drugs, victimization, whatever, but that if they got attention and good education and had their needs met, they would prefer to do something useful. And providing needs doesn’t mean providing everything anyone wants. People will still prefer to live in a nice place, be served great food, have stylish clothes and fun toys, be entertained, etc., and will most likely be quite willing to do things for others and be rewarded for that.

Whether is capitalism or communism, everyone has to participate to keep things going.
Capitalism and communism are two ends of one of many possible perspectives. But in almost no economic situation must everyone participate. The idle rich, the elderly, the infants, the indigent, the very ill – not so much. Certainly, for whatever definition of “things going” one chooses to measure, it’s generally helpful and best when many people are doing things that benefit everyone, so that tends to be good and needed, but there is no fundamental requirement for everyone, or even most people, do be working in the way we have conventional expectations in our society.

Last point. The villages example really is comparable to the Cabrini Green projects. They started as decent apartments. Not luxury high rises but decent. They could have formed volunteer groups like they did at the villages, to wash off the graffiti and fix the plumbing but they didn’t. What is the difference between these projects. In the villages, the tenents bought their property, had ownership of it, in Chicago they didn’t. things that are acquired with no work or supplied free, have no value. People treat them accordingly.
I think you are onto something important there. Behavior comes from the culture of ideas, not just the basic situation. It sounds like they gave people what they assumed they needed but the recipients didn’t respond well for whatever reasons. The culture in Chicago, particularly outside the well-off areas, seemed severely messed up to me when I was there. There were great expanses that the well-off people did not even want to think about existing, or at least that no one seems to have great ideas for how to transform that situation into something positive. No quick fix half-measure is going to turn that around rapidly and without a lot of friction.

((Gee, they basically air-dropped a bunch of people that white people didn’t want to live next door to into a segregated area with no economic opportunity in a state that still very much functioned as a capitalist economy and it didn’t work out? I’m shocked. Shocked, I say.))

There’s a massive difference between providing a basic subsistence living to everyone and choosing a handful of “undesirables” and saying “As long as you stay over here where people better than you can’t see you we’ll give you free rent”.

@Seek Exactly. That’s the argument for the UBI. Everyone gets it. No one can be accused of working the system or being lazy, because everyone gets it just for being a citizen. Or, resident. I’m not sure what status is necessary when it’s discussed.

Well we can’t get rid of it, but we can change how we allocate it.

Just imagine the new money floating around in circulation that no longer goes to banks hospitals, debtors etc.

It doesn’t matter though, our ideas are the product of our minds only. We’re nothing but a stepping stone for the more logical, less morally corrupt humans that will come after us.

People are gonna read about us in textbooks in disgust.

Wow. @Blackberry! Hi!

@gorillapaws Scandinavia has historically been the happiest countries on the planet. It was due in large part to low diversity and no false sense that tolerance is the way to the promised land. That is changing and so is the happiness factor. On a positive note, those countries have admitted they must get a handle on immigration.

No. Why would anyone want to?

Not a chance. There are just too many people who can never have enough.