Bitcoin Forum

http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/2006/03/my-summary-of-why-i-live-moneyless.html

Thoughts?

I truly respect this guy.

Not gunna lie that is pretty amazing.

 ::)

"For the first time, I was seriously realizing I could live totally moneyless."

Um yeah... because you hitch hiked off other people's generosity, and used clothing and tools created by the money-society you are pretending to reject. And then took a flight to Thailand and India, using a plane built by thousands of years of human ingenuity and progress which was enabled by trade and exchange, which was in turn facilitated by money... and then reported about it on a computer.

The dude is a 'tard. Wanna live off the grid? Fine, that's cool. But unless you're crafting tools from wood and stone and living in a shelter made of logs with clothes made from grasses and deer skins, then you're just fooling yourself.

A moneyless society is a society of starvation and utter poverty, and a world without trade, production, and exchange is a world without the leisure time one might desire for the purposes of reflecting on such fantastical notions as "a world without money."

Money's only use is to reward corruption, so i approve of this

Does he ever define what he means by money?

Idiot, what makes you think a world without money is a world without trade, production and "exchange" ?

Calling someone a 'tard then come off as a completely idiot is priceless - (or should i say moneyless? )

Money makes trading more efficient.  Trying to operate in a modern world without money is complete lunacy.

Ah, the irony.  :D

Money is just a tool/invention to make it easier to trade services and stuff.
Instead of having to carry your stuff around, you sell it and carry the money around, money is easier to divide.

Lets say you have a car and you dont need it. You need food for several days, a bicykle, different kind of clothes.
Now with money you sell your car and can than go and get the other things when you need them.

No need to trade the car into 5 bicykles, trade one of the bicykles into books (you dont need) than trade the books into some clothes which does not really fit.

If you think money in itself is the problem you don´t get what money is. Money is just a thing like a book. But the book only have value to the person who wants to read it. You are making it harder on you if you try to find the person who does and can give you clothes for it.

Its just easier to trade with the things we call money since we can agree on the value everyone has use for them for anything.

Sure you can live currency free but why make your life difficult...

ITT : Well trained slaves try to justify themselves against the ones that got out of a corrupt system

You don't need currency in a resource based economy. Money is the mechanism we use to justify denying people the necessities of life.

I think often when people talk about living 'moneyless' they are seeking a way of having more control and resilience in their day to day lives whilst still enjoying a modern standard of living.

A lot of this is about capital and savings and lifestyle choices.

Imagine I work and save and, from my savings, put solar panels on my house or boat.
My electricity is now 'free'. No electricity bills.  I am one step nearer being able to live 'moneyless'.

Take it one step further: you buy an electric bike, that you can recharge from your solar panels. Now you do not really need a car. In the UK even a cheap car costs £3000 a year to run. Substitute an electric bike for a car and you no longer need to earn £3000 a year net. (that is £5000 gross in the UK). One step nearer living 'moneyless' and more systemic resilience in your life.  You also no longer care about the price of gas/ petrol.

Chris Martenson expounds this philosophy very well here:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse (http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse)

A resource based economy is a step in the right direction, but still rewards corruption

I would prefer an honour based economy, you get EVERYTHING from the start (ACCESS to everything, not 'ownership') and lose access to things if you are a drain or otherwise harmful, the basic needs a person has would be the minimum a person gets and that would be for never doing anything helpful or actively being harmful, the people that do a 40 hour work week (or whatever is needed from everyone) would never lose anything - working would be about maintaining your current life, instead of swimming against the current to try and get a 'better' life, people that do more than is required could build up 'honour' and go on a long vacation that doesn't affect what access they get.

Most crimes would be changed to just lower 'honour', prisons would be for the murderers, rapists and people that had kids just to steal from them as a way to avoid working (among others i am sure, but only the most destructive need be removed)

I can not see this working with a human run government, so we either need robotic government or some way to decentralise human government

Well, firstly people would have to give more of a shit about each other.  Honestly, people would prefer to be cut throat rather than distribute wealth, so that everyone gets "everything" from the start and then reduced for bad behavior or non contribution.  As most know our systems largely operate on ownership aka greed.  But we are hardwired to compete against each other and throw each other off cliffs when the moment presents itself.

Seems to me limits on ownership rights would have to be implemented to move in this direction.  If greed motivation can be reduced it might have a shot.  But then this is the planet Earth and that wont happen.

It is money that has promoted greed, it is not hardwired but programmed into us, no one is born greedy, at the invention of "the economy" it was meant to help people, to minimise waste, but it has not, it has failed and it is time for a new "system"

I think you've got it backwards. Everyone is born greedy. Just witness two toddlers (who have no understanding of money or economics) fighting over a toy. Money doesn't promote greed, it just lets people act on their greed more efficiently (which is why money was invented in the first place). And greed is a good thing. Rather than using violence to force people to do what is required for society to function, all you have to do is offer them enough money and they'll do it voluntarily. And it's easy to define what is "necessary for society" by whether or not people will voluntarily pay money to make it happen. It's a good system. Maybe not perfect, but certainly far better than anything devised by any government.

This ^

Money is not something that was invented. Currency is.

That's just bad parenting. My children did not do that. I was teaching them to be Communists.  ;D

You're confusing the motivation of greed with the expression of intense interest. Give them two identical objects and they can each interact and learn about them individually. And if your argument is that we should maintain a childlike mindset by engaging in this convoluted monetary system, then that is an incredibly low bar to set for ourselves. Let's move it up.

Some people here are confused about living without money. It's living in a gift economy. Many economies in the past were based on gift economies. It's an economy without money but not without barter. The barter happens mostly informally, based on assumed debt relations.

In fact I know a guy fairly well who has lived without money for at least a year now. He doesn't have a bank account, a credit card, nothing. He has traveled all over the world hitch hiking, mostly around Europe though. At times his life is tough ethically but it's not like he isn't giving something away when he travels and meets people.

He is a really smart and nice guy so of course he will provide company. He will help with all sorts of things in return for some food and shelter. It helps that he has a very large social network of friends so he can basically go to any country in Europe and meet people there.

Recently I talked to him about Bitcoin. He was very suspicious but I convinced him that Bitcoin is actually a very good tool for a gift economy. He doesn't support anything else than a gift economy but he thought that Bitcoin could work for something like that. So he is now setting up a Bitcoin donation address on his blog page as I instructed.

Bitcoin is actually used quite a lot for all kinds of donations and tips which is gift economy in action. Bitcoin makes it very easy to give valuable gifts.

The power of giving is always better and healthier than the power of taking. Keep that in mind.

Division of labour is good, and having a common medium of exchange brings more opportunities to trade. There are no downsides to money.

Even though I support money (when done right) I still think that there are a hell of a lot of downsides to money. Earning and hoarding money promotes greed and it has been proven by scientific studies that richer people are less moral, meaning that they care less about other people in general. Personally I think that one of the strongest attributes of Bitcoin is that while it's a better type of money in itself, there is actually a fairly strong gift economy spirit in the community. People give away a lot of coins as donations and tips, which is just great. That enhances a sense of community and caring for other people.

I do not remember myself as a toddler, but none of my younger siblings have been greedy or knew greed until they went to school and learned it, it is a basic truth to me that the more i help people the more they help me, abd that is how i personally live with minimal money, i would love to be moneyless but i am not there yet...

by money i do mean fiat money, not bitcoins

+1

This is the spirit of the gift economy, which Bitcoin is actually very suitable for.

Greed by the way is a product of scarcity. A simple test with small children demonstrates it fairly well, if you put 2 children in the same room and give them one set of toys, they will eventually start fighting for them. If you give them two identical sets of toys, they will be quite happy.

In fact many of the problems in the world today would be less costly to solve by just giving people what they want. The costs of crime are fairly high overall. :)

Anyway, it's great that Bitcoin can be used in different ways. Even though formal trade is probably necessary for many things, such as good manufacturing, don't underestimate the power of a gift economy. If you give to the world, it will give back.

Things don´t loose their intrinsic value just because you can´t pay with a currency for them.
The purpose of currency is to be able to move wealth around. There is nothing wrong with that.
It´s a tool that can be abused, of cause. But then stop the abuse, rather than abolish the tool.
On the other hand, if that idea is sustainable let it live, it will grow and overtake sooner or later.

Shortcut: I think it´s an astoundingly stupid approach.

Thanks for this! There is plenty to think about on his website. Quote:

Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorney or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We were in a really bad way before the white man came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without the basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.
-- Lakota Sage Lame Deer

https://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney

A world without money IS a world without trade, production and exchange. Money is impossible to avoid when people trade with each other, for they begin by bartering, and soon discover that certain goods are most easily bartered for (grain becomes easier to trade than bicycles, even if the other person doesn't want grain for his own consumption). Thus, you quickly discover that certain goods in the barter economy become traded very commonly. And voila, that's called money.

In other words, in order to have an economy WITHOUT money at all, there would need to be a law that you could only trade for things you would personally consume or use, and nothing could be traded twice. If a society actually had those rules, I suggest that trade, production, and exchange would be rare, inefficient, and burdensome.

Thus, I think my point was a fair one. Without allowing for money, an economy is not an economy. Whether the money is grain, cigarettes, seashells, gold, pieces of paper with leaders' faces, or Bitcoins... money ALWAYS emerges when people trade with each other. Money is intrinsic to exchange - they cannot be separated.

Fair, if your definition of fair is utterly stupid.

First of all , "A moneyless society is a society of starvation and utter poverty" is completely false. You are pulling crap out of your ass.

While a moneyless world would make trading inefficient, it doesnt mean its an inferior world in anyway. Trading originally is a way to share resources and transfer wealth. Its now an exploitation of modern slavery. In a moneyless world, trading is not necessary.

Moneyless world is a world without production? really? You're such naive to think its money that gives ppl incentives to work and produce.

Well now. My kind of thread on a Saturday morning.  :)

First, on human (animal) psychology/hard-wiring:

Humans (animals) consume. If you don't consume you die. Period. I won't delve into the subject of being born greedy, but instead explain the fact that humans are hard-wired to survive. Put any human in a situation where they begin to die from lack of something needed to survive (like food, oxygen, etc.) and they will begin behaving more instinctively and animal-like. For example, life guards are trained to know drowning victims will instinctively pull them underwater in effort to push themselves up.

The only way/reason gifting type economies work is when basic human needs are otherwise always provided for. See what kind of hospitality you get when the society around you is food-less.

The second thing to understand is that resources on Earth are finite. That's not to say they can't sustain a very large population, just not an infinitely large one.

The third thing to understand is that humans/animals are also born to procreate. This is intrinsically hard-wired as second priority after basic survival needs are taken care of.

The fourth thing to understand is humans/animals are hard-wired to, in general, be lazy. I suspect due to physics... The Law of Conservation of Energy; and an object at rest tends to stay at rest (Newton's 1st law). This is not to say all humans were destined to be sloths, only to explain their physical tendency when unmotivated.

Taking all this into consideration it should be easily seen why a capitalist society (when done right) is logical for many reasons and fair.


Exactly, @Kettenmonster.

As for the reflective quote by Lakota Sage Lame Deer, such a moneyless society/culture is nice I'd agree, but doesn't lend itself much to advancement. For example, an entrepreneur/inventor or dreamer among them might imagine escaping the gravitational pull of the Earth and reaching the beautiful glowing orb that presented itself every night, but the fact is such an undertaking requires many things including, primarily, capital. The naysayers and the uninterested couldn't block such a visionary in a capitalistic society.
 

The one thing that people often do not realize about being lazy, is that it isn't actually something that needs fixing by offering outer incentives. Thing is, laziness is the main reason people develop technology, to make things easier. There are countless of examples of this, one of them is how Linux (the operating system) came to be. Basically Linus Torvalds just wanted a better OS, that's it. Then he made it. There were no monetary incentives involved. This is just one example among thousands.

In fact monetary incentives are often counter-productive. There is a brilliant book called Drive, by Daniel Pink, which goes through the contemporary science of motivation. Monetary incentives are not useless however, it's just that their role and importance is widely overestimated and the biggest problem of all is that they're sometimes used as an incentive in ways that is actually counter-productive.

Real incentives are based on curiosity, a need to make life easier, a need to better ourselves at what we're interested in, having the right kind of challenges, having a purpose that matters and of course autonomy, the ability to be free, to choose when to work, what to work on, with whom and where. Monetary incentives are useful as well but often overestimated especially in modern types of work.

I totally agree with this for the most part, especially the last paragraph.

But you have to understand that the right environment must first exist for such opportunities to flourish. Basic needs must be taken care of;  your surrounding and personal circumstances cannot be of concern. For example, would you ever expect a Linus Torvalds to have come from Iraq?

Politics (which includes monetary policy) is just how humans organize themselves to live together.

That reminds me of a thread from a few days ago:


All the money that was spent sending a few people to the moon could have saved many, many people from starvation instead -- which one is more important?

That is a strawman.

First, removing NASA from world history would not have removed starvation from it.

Second, I'd much rather it was Thomas Edison (or similar) that made our moon landing possible. Entrepreneurship appears to be the way we are going for our first landing on Mars.

Inefficient to the point of starvation and utter poverty. I consider that inferior, but you're welcome to disagree with that judgement.

You did not address the point of my prior post - that money is intrinsic to exchange. If you are opposed to money, you are opposed to exchange, because money is just the name given to that good exchanged most commonly.

And please explain how "trading is an exploitation of modern slavery"?  When I trade my eggs to Bob in return for several loaves of bread, which of us was exploited? Also, was money involved... were the eggs money, or the bread? Has either of us done something wrong by agreeing to the trade? Now... what if instead of eggs I actually traded Bob a small bar of silver for the bread? Has exploitation occurred? Is silver money... or is bread? And one step further, what if the silver is cut into round circles. Is silver money yet? What if... I actually previously traded my bar of silver for a deposit receipt from a man who promised to guard the silver from bandits, and then I trade the receipt for the bread?  Any exploitation occurring yet? Did I use money?

My point is this: money is not anything weird or separate from barter. Money IS barter. It's just the name given to the most commonly bartered item. And again, if you're opposed to money, you must necessarily be opposed to barter, and thus trade, and thus exchange. And if so, you are condemning man to live with only what he is able to produce himself. This is a world of poverty and starvation, and if you don't think that's inferior, then we can disagree on that point.

if I do a trade with bitcoin there's a lot of effort in the pricing.
if I do a trade with gifting it comes more naturally and there's more lee-way. its more what we are used to genetically if not socially.

giving is the more efficient transaction but it doesn't scale beyond 120 people.

I'd like to live in a small community and trade a limited amount outside with btc, that would be a compromise

Money is one of the greatest inventions ever!

Only 2 forms of economy can exist without money, barter or communism, and both suck balls. Exchange enables the division of labour, money enables it to its fullest extent.

As another poster said, poor people are less selfish (outwardly), but then isn't every bum gonna convert to altruism? They have nothing to offer anyone!

What people have to realize is that capitalism does not prohibit gifting.

You guys are completely oblivious to the wealth you enjoy due to the vast division of labor around the world. A society limited to 120 people would not be a society anyone on this forum would enjoy living in, I assure you.

You would spend your days toiling for food, and die before you were 45 years old, if you were lucky enough not to die as a child.

An no, jago25_98, it is not "more natural" to trade via "gifting" than via money. Again, for the thousandth time, "money" is just that good which is most commonly "gifted" within a community. There is no difference between "gifting" your neighbor a dozen eggs or "gifting" your neighbor a gram of gold or a bitcoin or some US dollars, save that gifting with the later examples is far more convenient and permits a less costly transaction and thus more wealth for both participants.

Try to REALLY live without money entirely... just trade things you have for things you want (without using any intermediary like dollars, btc, or bullion) and you will discover it is not the romantic, peaceful, pleasant thing you imagine it to be. You will impoverish yourself swiftly, for you are surrendering the utility of one of man's greatest technologies - money.

@evoorhees - I think you are misunderstanding what is meant by "gifting". The fact that it's a gift makes it the opposite of a trade. To give a gift means you don't expect anything in return.

That is what @jago25_98 says is more natural, not that I agree.

Tell me, how do I find the people who will gift me the components of a car, and who will gift me the service to build it? What wonderful act have I bestowed upon all these laborers that they will toil away on my behalf and yield my automobile?

"Gifting", in the sense that you mean it, could not even put a pencil in front of me. In fact, an entire community of 120 people living so graciously in their gifting-only community could never produce a pencil, let alone the computers being used by us all to engage in this conversation across thousands of miles instantly.

I agree. I didn't say I thought gifting could come even close to achieving what capitalism does, only what @jago25_98 meant by it.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification.

A gift economy in modern context is mostly a supplement to the good producing capitalist economy. It can certainly get you a pen if someone wants to give you a pen. The production of the pen itself is unlikely to be very practical using gift economy methods. This is an important clarification, gift economy is a different layer of the economy, I don't think many think of it as a serious replacement for lower layers of the economy.

I agree.


You haven't talked with many (naive supporters) from the Occupy movement.

What do you do when 99% of all labor is "divided" into the responsibility of robots, automation and AI? What kind of economy do you expect to have then? Shall all 7 billion people continue to compete for the remaining positions of labor just to live? What kind of sickness are you people promoting who still cling to the ancient and useless ideas of pre industrial society and economic theory? Why don't you start recognizing what is actually happening and start participating rationally?

How is this different from a Luddite fallacy?

If nobody works or needs to work because machines are doing everything then you're already living in utopia. What's the problem? Isn't that the whole goal of the Venus project you're so fond of? A fine goal, but the thing is without money you have no way to do economic calculation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem) and so no rational way to allocate resources to where you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. You get more scarcity, not a magical post-scarcity utopia.

What humans are going to do in a world where robitics provide all goods/services if they are expected to justify their existence does seem to be a fair question. Are they all to become personal servants of the owners of the roots, doing arbitrary tasks for their amusement or something? Will it be a status symbol to be served by human bodyservants rather than robots? Are those who the rich do not consider attractive enough to be seen with to be deprived of sustenance or what?

-MarkM-

The 'poverty' argument is circular.  The word poverty can mean different things (impoverished how?) but obviously if you define poverty as a lack of money, then you will always determine that a world without money is an impoverished one.   Would you suggest that it is impossible to not have any money but have ample food and shelter?

Money is NOT barter.  Bartering/exchanging is a process, money is not.  Money is not intrinsic to exchange.  "Hey, here's a stick I found on the ground.  I'll give you this stick if you give me that pebble."

By the way, there's a positive correlation between money and mental illness given that mental illness is more prevalent in industrialized nations. 

I've seen you say some brilliant things, but I must admit I'm pretty astonished to read your argument.

Money is what a GOVERNMENT says it is.  Silver is NOT money in any market and it hasn't been since blue-seal notes were utilized.  It is a commodity.  Legal tender notes and gold are money (gold is money because the government still allows debts to be paid with gold).  Take a silver eagle into a store and try to buy something with it.  You will find that you will receive face value for your coin and not the value of the silver content as suggested by commodity markets.

How do you build a house without money?

You produce wool. The brick maker needs a jumper. So you trade. How many bricks can you get for a jumpers worth of wool? 3? 10? not enough to build a house. So what do you do.

The brick maker might need some eggs, but you don't make eggs. You can trade wool for eggs with the egg maker, then trade those eggs for bricks, but then eggs would be MONEY! And that's against the rules.

You could make your own eggs, but the brick maker only needs a few for his lunch. So now you have 20 bricks. long way to go.

You just could make everything the brick maker desires until you have a house worth of bricks. But now you have, by definition, removed specialization from the economy.

You may have food and shelter, but it won't be "ample".


yes, but as soon as I trade that stick for a leaf, that stick is money.


That proves it!


If you define money as "what the government says it is" then sure, we can have a great economy without money.

It's funny that you are astonished by evoorhees argument, because I'm pretty sure you have no idea what that argument is.

1.)  Regardless of what you consider to be ample shelter, none of what you posted has anything do with the circularity of the  "no money = poverty" argument.

2.)  No, the stick is not money.  Seriously, are you going to go so far as to say that the oxygen you breathe is money because there was an exchange taking place between you and plants?

3.)  The comment about the correlation between mental illness and money doesn't 'prove' anything, nor was it intended to.  Actually, what I said was circular too -- mental illness is defined by industrialized nations and so naturally it is more prevalent in industrialized nations.  This was stated to demonstrate how the "no money = poverty" argument is absurd.

4.)  Money is what the government says it is because we do not have a free market.  The economy is governed.  Where money functions in a centralized economy, it is determined by the centralized authority.  If you want to go around calling sticks and oxygen money, then go for it, they can be money to you -- now go into a store and see what you can buy with them.

1.) What I posted was an attempt to show that without money, there is a huge impediment to trade. Since free trade is what creates wealth, there will be allot less of it. Of course, you differ on the definition of money...

2.) Money is just a medium of exchange. So, yes; the stick is being used as a medium to exchange a pebble for a leaf. If you have an alternate definition, please present it clearly. Otherwise we are just going to argue over definitions.

3.) Sorry, I know. I was just being a dick.

4.) Yeah, we don't have a free market. This is why the world is so fucked.

I don't think we could have produced this advanced society without the efficiencies attributed by money (as I define it). The earth could never support this population without the technology that the market has produced.

Asdf,

Ironically, I posted this today which correlates very well.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79755.msg884319#msg884319 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79755.msg884319#msg884319)

The stick example mentioned by a few people is actually close to truth. For hundreds of years, tally sticks were used as money.

Yep.

The three characteristics of money are:

1. Store of value
2. Medium of exchange
3. Unit of account

There have been occasional variations and exceptions throughout history, such as fungibility being an aspect of money, or money lacking a store of value function, which is common among fiat currencies. The earliest money was fiat unit of account money in ancient Mesopotamia. Ancient Egypt had gold ingots for units of account and stores of value, but there was no gold medium of exchange. Coins came much, much later, probably in ancient Lydia.

Then oxygen it is.

1.)  Store of value --> without it, you die; oxygen provides energy.
2.)  Medium of exchange -->  yep, inhale/exhale
3.)  Unit of account -->  O2.

Surely, money is more than these 3 things.

No, that's what currency is.

And it's not that simple.

The definition of money is something debated among monetary scientists. There are two consensus opinions of what money is: either my aforementioned 3 aspects, or that "money is that which extinguishes debt," which precludes modern currency (but not some historical currencies).

Bitcoin is interesting not because it is deflationary or digital or decentralized, but because, unlike all modern currencies, bitcoin is not borrowed into existence.

Not sure if trolling or.....

Basically, you're confusing an economy with breathing.

I would explain this, but I think it's self-evident.

Economic calculation is an abstraction and distorts our perceptions and values. This ideology has run rampant for decades and we can plainly see the results. In a resource based economy, we measure things scientifically, empirically and rationally. We don't need to distort, hide or ignore reality to fit our preconceived economic notions because we would recognize the danger in doing so. It's time to stop living in the past and embrace the technological and scientific realities of our time so that we can all benefit from them. Clinging to ancient economic religions leads only to your detriment.

But you realize you're not actually saying anything meaningful? Unless you can take a more reductionist approach to your explanations you're not going to convince anyone, except people who also think the way you do. You're just speaking in this meaningless holistic way that makes no sense to someone who knows to use methodological individualism as a basis for the explanation of social phenomenon.

Evoorhees has explained with methodological individualism the Mengerian account (http://mises.org/daily/1333) of why money is a naturally emergent phenomenon that serves an actual purpose, and how it would come about naturally even to a society of people who have no prior concept of money. He's not even really being prescriptive about it; he's being descriptive. It is explained by reducing the account to simple non-controversial statements, i.e. so that the explanation doesn't even assume some hyper-rational cooperation of people to come up with it. It just comes about on its own by individual humans being merely rational actors, and that is to say human action isn't just arbitrary action but goal-driven. Now, this isn't a rejection of the existence of collective groups -- of numbers of people lower than Dunbar's limit at least -- but it's just saying that any form of collectivism isn't even necessary explain money in a sufficient way.

And the Wikipedia link on economic calculation explains -- again using methodological individualism -- why money prices are needed for profit/loss accounting, and why profit/loss accounting is needed for a society to rationally economize and allocate resources, and for entrepreneurs to coordinate, on a macro scale. Prices actually mean something; they're not just arbitrarily set things (at least in a free market). They're a bottom-up reflection of the intersubjective valuations of things to the people in an economy, and of the availability of such things. Without prices you lack the necessary information to be able to calculate what is economically profitable to produce and what isn't. You won't get that information any other way than through the emergent processes of the price system. Certainly no central computer could have it because it doesn't have access to the dynamic minds of everybody in the society. So when you say 'Economic calculation is an abstraction and distorts our perceptions and values', I don't even know what that means. I'd say it's the complete opposite, but I'm not merely asserting it like you're doing. You can't just holistically dismiss any inconvenient economic explanation outright that comes your way as being some mere historical baggage. You actually have to criticize it, and use the same reductionistic approach to explain why what we're saying isn't actually true and why the Venus project ideas are right :)

Lecture: Calculation and Socialism | Joseph T. Salerno (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alqUqdbfxhk)

Individualism is a fraud used to promote economic theories. We behave, think, believe and promote that which is prominent in our environment, both physical and social. You can't even form the basis of the most rudimentary community on the ideas of individuality. We must share similarities with others if we are to survive as individuals, period. Appealing to such baseless ideas is what perpetuates the abhorrent behavior we see today.

"Full employment" is again, another artifact of a monetary system. In a resource based economy, human labor is diminished purposefully by utilizing automation to the fullest extent possible. Recognizing the liberating effects of science and technology is a key distinction between such an economy and all previous human endeavors.

That's not what methodological individualism (http://mises.org/humanaction/chap2sec4.asp) means; don't confuse it with a sort of prescriptive individualism of going off by yourself and being selfish, etc. And you absolutely can explain community by methodological individualism, by explaining that man is a social animal and has instincts that lean that way. In fact that is the whole point:


The economic calculation problem explains, with money and the price mechanism (both of which have an even more reductionistic explanation), how entire societies -- and even the entire world now -- are able to cooperate together well beyond Dunbar's number, economize on a macro level, and how this cooperation would not be possible without those price signals. After all we are not linked by a hive mind: we are fundamentally still individuals, and groups only form when individual action coincides to make groups form. You still have to give a satisfactory explanation of why and how that happens, and a holistic one isn't sufficient.

You think in terms of 'societies' as some fundamental unit, and as such your understanding of them is always going to be flawed because you have your own assumptions about what societies are, and those assumptions really have no basis behind them. Methodological individualism gives a basis for what societies are, but you're just stopping at the group level and assuming that it's just a thing that exists and is something that can't be reduced down further to individual action/motivation/behaviour/nature. So you don't understand the limits of social cooperation: that it's not just a 'given' that vast swathes of unrelated people just mutually come together and agree on things, and commit to do massive social projects together. But that isn't a given at all. You have to explain, in a more fundamental way, how and why those things happen, and what is necessary for those things to happen, otherwise you're just being lazy about it.

You just assume that the problems you see in today's society are attributable to what you don't like, and you assume this on an instinctive, common-sense level, but you can't really explain it in a more compelling way. I admit that it's somewhat intuitive to think that the 'money system' is somehow structurally problematic, and complex division of labour. We evolved in small human-scale tribes where cooperation and collective ownership is easy and natural. People for whatever reason have an instictive reaction (or maybe it's just cultural baggage, not sure) to think of 'making money' as a bad thing, and people think too highly of inefficient not-for-profit organizations just because profit is a dirty word. But the holistic, common-sense answer isn't always correct, as we can see by the monty hall problem (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhlc7peGlGg). And to me it sounds like you're giving the reactionary, holistic, common-sense answer to the monty hall problem as 50% (which practically everybody thinks when they first hear it -- even brilliant mathematicians like Paul Erdos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)). And when it is shown to you in a reductionistic way -- by explicitly mapping out the probabilities -- that the answer is really 66%/33%, you simply assert 'nope' without explaining where the reductionistic explanation went wrong. Hopefully you can see with this analogy why what you're saying is not compelling at all.

As an anarchist (of the ancap pursuation), I think that when I attribute problems to the state I can explain it as being how the state interferes -- with aggressive violence -- with emergent market mechanisms (like the price mechanism), and this makes things inefficient and wasteful, leads to less social cooperation, etc. I think there's a complete chain of descriptive explanation there, going back to individual action, and even the existence of states (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mqx6FJewfY) is considered with methodological individualism, so it's not exempt from it. And I do believe that we can all be as fantastically wealthy as the venus projectors think (though I wouldn't go as far as to say 'post-scarcity', because human desire is unbounded). It just won't happen without money and prices, because as I believe I have explained that would cause more waste and more scarcity and poverty, and wouldn't occur naturally anyway without violent intervention from a state.

I like your beautiful ideas of moneyless societies, robotic governments and so on. But please, please, don't force me into this. Let people like me free to live as they wish, exchange money if they want, trade a they see fit between free and responsible adults,...


That's the only thing I ask: don't thread on me. I hope it isn't too much to ask.

Hey, if someone can pick up a stick and say it's money, then for damn sure oxygen could be money.

I'm being serious when I say this, but I've thought of starting a bottled-air business. I'm sure there'd be a whole bunch of people that would be interested.  Want a sealed bottle filled with air from Antarctica?  Or maybe a bottled that was opened and sealed on the Moon and flown back to Earth?  Or maybe air from your favorite celebrity's bedroom?

I see no reason to believe that air couldn't become money in the way that you have defined it.

I'll try to get a hold of Adriana, but we tried a few with Megan and she melted the bottles :(

I'll keep you posted.

@the joint - regarding your quote "Money is what a GOVERNMENT says it is."

Actually, that is what fiat money is, not necessarily real money. The only time you get real money is when the free market picks what it is. If the government doesn't pick what the free market would then the declared money is artificial, and will eventually self-destruct as has happened throughout history because governments can't resist debasing it, whether we are talking about Romans and diluted metals, paper currency (Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc.), or tally sticks. For thousands of years the free market has determined commodities like gold and silver, for example, are real money and return to these upon failure of the artificial money. We are once again in the early stages of this cycle, but unfortunately it's worldwide this time.

You are right, however, that @MarketNeutral missed one, actually the main, characteristic of money which is it is what people AGREE to accept as money. That is the only time you get money, and why fiat money is usually dangerously artificial.

My next post will deal with @LightRider's view about robots and automation etc. for a money-less society.

I've been putting off coming into this thread because the thread's title seemed absurd, and now that I've finally gotten around to reading the OP's link, I have to give a +1 to evoorhees here.

LightRider, I want to understand exactly how this resource based economy works. Robots collecting resources and building things and meeting human needs sounds nice and all, but who is going to build these robots and why would they bother? Also, how does a resource based economy produce food if the robots break and nobody feels like fixing them? Or if nobody knows how to fix them anymore? What is the incentive for humans in your society to bother getting up out of bed? Who is deciding how the resources will get distributed as well, like what is this scientific method that is going to decide who should eat exatcly what food, and then what if the people who are told 'this is what you are going to eat' are not entirely happy with those scientific determinations? And what if there are more than one society here on this planet competing for the same resources? What kind of protocols will they use to get what they want without destroying the whole planet in a scrap over it?

I fail to see how a rather undefined and meaningless concept of a 'resource based economy' can even have the word economy attached to it, or have anything to do with the fundamental human action that would be required to bring such a thing into existence. Just remember, I'm not going to repair that robot unless I get to decide who eats the food it collects.

Money is whatever you want it to be, as long as it gets you the resources you want to live your life the way you want it. There are no hand-outs in life, and a resource-based handout economy will not happen, because those with the brains to build the robots and stuff will be quite content to watch everyone else starve. Sorry.

It is interesting to note that every major, seemingly impossible achievement in the course of human scientific endeavor has been accompanied by the few but vocal individuals that cry out how they are impossible and not worth attempting.

But you are obviously the lone voice of unassailable reason that is totally correct on this particular issue. How wrong I was. I shall report back to the others and we shall cease our efforts.

Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.

While I was gathering my thoughts for reply to @LightRider's automated moneyless robotic society I read @BladeMcCool's reply which touched on some of my points.

@LightRider - Since the idea sounds noble I tried to extrapolate it using best case scenarios. There are problems.

TL;DR: the world is not ready for it; even if it was the results are not pleasant due to limited resources.

So the idea is to switch from competition to cooperation, right? And utilize our technology and intelligence to freely sustain all. In a way, the Earth is like a giant petri dish, and humans take part in an elaborate experiment. What happens when humans (or any organism) are freely given conditions to survive and procreate? That is what they do.

Do you know why there are always poor and starving people? It's because the poor and starving continue to procreate. But now robots will gather food and build houses to freely give humans as fast as they come into existence... The world population would then explode, unless you take a Chinese-like policy of limiting by force procreation (including murdering newborns). But surely such an egalitarian society would be pro-life.

Would cultures like the Chinese, who are way ahead in population, then begin competing to ensure their own cultural dominance, possibly out-breed the rest? Language and culture are, after all, as important as money for influence on society.

Putting aside that issue, what about quality of life? In a money-less, free society nobody owns, but rather shares everything, right? Since nobody has to work I imagine people would opt to take lots of leisure time. Places like beaches, parks, and forests would likely be popular, perhaps too popular? Since our population is now rapidly increasing I imagine overcrowding would go from noticeable, to annoying, to intolerable, everywhere. And how is geographical preference divvied up, anyway? I imagine very few would volunteer to live in Antarctica, while warmer more temperate land space would be in high demand. But, alas, everywhere would soon feel the overcrowding, even with a clever turn-based system implemented.

It becomes apparent to me mankind would have to expand beyond Earth to continue this model. But now where to go? The next best planet for humans to inhabit is Mars which has only about 15-25% of the natural living comfort of Earth, even if we figured out how to get there in less than 5 years. What we would need is another Earth-like planet, really Earth-like for habitability, so we'd have to search beyond our solar system. Getting to the next closest star is a monumental challenge, even for such an advanced civilization, and even then there is no guarantee of finding something like Earth, which is quite a jewel as far as planets go. And moving from interstellar to intergalactic travel? Forget it.

No, we're pretty much limited to Earth.

But this means all these different cultures, interests, and aspirations have to get along in an increasingly confined space. And what about religion? Does this society respect people's freedom of religion, or impose some subjective higher morality? A good deal of the population still believe, and are willing to die for their religious beliefs, which can be anathema to others and don't always synchronize with modernization.

And what about others, as @BladeMcCool talked about, who simply don't agree with that approach. They might look to sabotage robots and otherwise disrupt the system. How would enforcement/protection of society work?

The thing about Capitalism is that it works, effectively divides and allocates resources, and is fair. And Capitalism, as I noted, does not prevent gifting, sharing, and cooperation. People may want to pin the problems of humanity on it, but that's being naive.

We find that population growth declines in a technologically advanced and well educated society. The rapid reproduction rates found in rural, undeveloped and impoverished areas of the world would not be reflected in such a global society.

We have far more land available to us that most people think. The ability to build vertically, increase efficiency in terms of agricultural production, the ability to build cities on the ocean and other environments previously thought inhospitable will increase the physical space available to any increase in population, assuming that it even continues at rates that you are concerned about. Human beings are slightly different that other animals and microbes. Our behavior is highly influenced by social customs, education and other factors.

Human beings, in general, desire to learn and explore. As children, we desire new experiences constantly, and will constantly test the boundaries of our environment to learn about the world around us. Modern society has worked very hard over centuries to diminish that desire in us, by regimenting us into public schools, perform mindless tasks and otherwise disabuse people of their desire to be creative, intelligent and selfless. Fortunately, humanity continues to be all of these things, even at the reduced levels encouraged by the various institutions that have worked against us. In the absence of the profit motive, false authority and the crippling mechanisms of a failed monetary system, we will be free to continue our exploration, learning and creativity and be far more productive, contribute more to society and be less vulnerable to the predatory efforts of those who would seek to cripple us again. Leisure is not the goal of humanity, but the false reward that is always promised by the monetary system. I know of no person who is inherently lazy, but many have been conditioned so thoroughly by society that it is their ultimate goal to be in such a state. I challenge anyone to try to do absolutely nothing for extended periods of time and see how long until they reject the notion that remaining in such a state is satisfactory.

Related to the above, I doubt that everyone will want to live in the same place at the same time. There are so many places to visit on this planet, that it is unlikely that a person would want to stay in one location for the entirety of their life. Not everyone wants to live on the beach, or in the mountains or by the rivers of the world. With the technology to build cities anywhere, and the lack of incentive to hoard private property, we will be a very mobile society.

Regarding culture, we rely on education to promote the fact that we all share one planet, that no one nation, culture or individual is more important or deserves more or less than any other. We can take the lessons of biology and show that if the organs of your body competed for resources, you would die. So too with our species and our planet. Declaring the whole earth as common heritage for all people is fundamental to fostering the kind of scientific understandings necessary to bring about such a radical shift in society.

Technological innovation, not capitalism, is what works, and will continue to do so after we leave the old and obsolete systems of capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism etc. behind.

LightRider, you did not address any of my questions I posed in trying to understand your proposed system. I think you do not have any real appreciation for the immensity of specialization and individual motivations of the human beings involved that has brought about all the technology we have today. And yet you seem to think that going forward we can somehow forget all that. It seems like nonsense.

True, and this is the one consideration I had when I said the world is not ready for such a system. The majority of the world is not well educated. Even in the U.S., the most advanced country the world has ever seen, literacy an education are shockingly lower than most would expect. But even so, some people simply believe in large families.


That depends on when you started passing out the food and houses  :D If you did it now you'd certainly get a jack-rabbit effect.


Yes, we could maximize our existing capacity. But there is still a limit, somewhere.


Very true. Humans also uniquely appreciate the value of occasional solitude and independence.


And your proof for this is? Some of the smartest people in the world are from the U.S., a country that has certainly tested boundaries. Children are certainly encouraged to be free and explore. You're confusing us with China.


I'm not sure you are the person to say what is or is not the goal of humanity.


Sure, many would rather not be idle if they are free to pick what they are to do, but that is not work. How many would work voluntarily doing something they would rather not without being compensated?


Like I said, there is a limit on number of people. The simple fact is the more people after the same resources the higher chance of tension. It's human/animal nature. Sorry.


Yes, but how rapidly, effectively, and thoroughly will you educate? Will it be through forced indoctrination or freedom of choice? Even now under good circumstances we see high drop out rates, drug usage, and crime in the US. Removing money from society doesn't guarantee a fundamental change in human nature.


In case  you haven't noticed, capitalism is not communism, socialism, or facism. And it's capitalism that has largely been responsible for the technological innovation we see to date.

I've been following this thread to best my sensibilities can muster. Most of the arguments in favor of "natural money" are based upon a priori statements dressed up as a "theory" with nothing scientific to back it up as a theory. Money /= Greed. These terms cannot be used interchangeably. I prefer Occam's Razor to reveal the Null Hypothesis. Here it is. Humans evolved from other animals. No other known animal has ever needed money. Therefore, humans do not need money. Truth can usually be stated very simply. Complex arguments that are trying to demonstrate something that should seem simple are often filled with fallacies.

Non sequitur.

Humans do many things animals do not, like climb Mount Everest and produce sculptures.

Humans do not need to do those things either. There is no argument for need.

Some people would debate that...

But let's say you're right. Okay, then there is no need to live in houses, drive cars, fly planes or explore space either.

The only thing humans need is food, water, and shelter, all of which can be accommodated at an extremely rudimentary level.

It seems some individuals here expect others (and themselves) to exclusively act out of pure emotional generosity; without monetary gain or otherwise.

This isn't an achievable end.

Now you're starting to sound like Maslow  ;D

To the contrary, recognizing the totalitarian nature physical reality, our shared planet and the knowledge that we can provide for every basic human need, and the knowledge that people contribute to society when their basic needs are met, it is actually an intellectually enlightened motivation that drives us towards this end. It is the monetary system that predicates its usefulness on emotional appeals to nationalism, fear, pride, lust and others.

THE debate on Venus Project VS Voluntaryism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxjwBZjADiM

They need to go first.  You know, to show us the way.

That's what good parents are for. How much did you have to pay for your upbringing?

That's like asking how much I paid the hobo who just cleaned my windshield without asking:

Nothing.

Except that I don't think the hobo loves your windshield.

The hobo may love me but that doesn't mean I owe him anything. It doesn't mean I am his slave.

Sup Atlas.

Yeah, we're here for ya, Buddy.

Great, it's this Atlas shit again.

“The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
― Maya Angelou

Several.

Huh?

even better (and much more concise):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FDbZ4mbkC8

I have been trying to get Venus Project and Zeitgeist folks to write Ayn Rand style fiction for a couple years. In that, she was a genius and her writing is certainly as inspiring as it is depraved. Like Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter S. Thompson, she speaks to our fears and entertains us with a fantasy of what ifs with no actual scientific or historical foundation. "If you take the writings of Nietzsche and remove everything insightful, interesting, and funny, what's left are the writings of Ayn Rand." - Steve Gimbel

Peter Joseph has the subtlety of a Green Beret. He hits his audience on the head with a sledge-hammer of facts, accepted theories, and a logical roadmap to understanding the complex ties between human needs social structures. What he is doing is very important, but it only inspires people intellectually. We need an anti-Rand that speaks to the emotions of love (mutual reciprocity for the nihilists). I think that's what religions tried to do hundreds of years ago. Robert Heinlein was as close as we've had to an anti-Rand, but he was mostly a science fiction/fantasy writer.

The Venus Project is working towards producing a mass market film depicting life in a resource based economy. I've been urging them to accept bitcoin donations, but they are not responsive to such requests.

There have been many, many low budget films that have won the highest awards. The new $3-4k 35mm DSLRs can shoot A camera angle-of-view and have all the other lens settings as well. And they can be edited on a $400 laptop. All it takes is someone with more imagination than fear to tell world changing stories.

Agreed. There is an independent effort going on that is trying to do the same thing, and they ARE accepting bitcoin donations! Check it out at http://www.wakingupmovie.com/.

I'll take a look at the sandbox and script. I don't like gimmickry like cryogenics any more than the static engine as a tool to suspend disbelief. This is supposed to wake people up, not make them believe in a possible world-of-tomorrow.

They should make a film about the soviet union. That would do it.

Trolololo

Many interesting ideas moving around in this thread. I'd like to further address this whole money thing... I realize there is a lot of arguments regarding "what is money" but I think that's a highly appropriate discuss for these forums, no?

On the definition of money:  Too often people think money "is" or "is not".  They say a dollar "is" money. Gold "is" money. Bitcoin "is" money. Or, they'll say gold "is not" money, or fiat "is not" money, or Bitcoin "is not" money, etc. Astonishingly, I've now heard that oxygen itself "is" or "is not" money. Enough of this silliness, money is not a binary condition, but rather exists on a gradient of utility.

Lay out all things in the world, from air to gold to steel beams, eggs, sand, human hearts, goat eyeballs, fighter jets, US dollars, and bitcoins... lay it all out in a row. While some might try to sort them into two piles, "money" and "not money," that is a fool's errand. Instead, all these things can be arranged in order of their usefulness AS money. In other words, each thing makes a superior money to something else, and each thing is an inferior money to something else as well. People don't need to agree on the specific arrangement, but it should be self-evident that such arrangement is not very difficult to do.

Precious stones are better money than sand (unless one lives where such stones are plentiful and sand is rare). Gold is better money than precious stones (because it's fungible/divisible/etc). Steel beams are worse money than cigarettes. Why? Because the value to weight ratio of cigarettes makes them far more convenient to be used as money (though steel is more durable, so perhaps you'd argue steel is the better money). Oxygen would be a terrible money wouldn't it? Because, simply, it's far too plentiful. How much oxygen would I ask you to trade me in exchange for my car? How would it be delivered and stored? Absurd!  

Do you see the point here? All things are money along a gradient of usefulness as money, and this gradient may differ in different geographic locations (on a planet made of gold, gold would be a terrible money). So if one dude is arguing that oxygen is money, and another argues the opposite - both should stop. Oxygen could be used as money, but it would suck for that purpose. That's the end of the argument. In the same way, USD can be used as money (and works very well for that purpose). Yet, it is still an inferior money to gold and bitcoin in my opinion, because it can be printed at whim. Once one has an understanding of the ordinal nature of all goods as potential money, then one can really appreciate why Bitcoin is so excellent for this purpose. It is a beautifully engineered good, almost perfectly suited for usefulness as money.

This whole argument hearkens back to the fact that money is intrinsic to barter - when you trade your eggs for a loaf of bread, and then use that bread to trade for a steak, you've used bread as money. Bread works okay as money, but it's not great (it spoils, has low value to volume ratio, etc). Thus, people who argue against money are arguing against exchange itself, as I have said before. To preclude money from society is to preclude trade.

And to say that society can exist without money is to say that nothing along that ordinal range of goods can ever be exchanged by anybody to anybody else. THAT is an absurd notion.

+100

Anyone who worries about "robots stealing all the work" doesn't realize that it's not work we want, but production, and to the extent production can occur more efficiently, means more wealth for humanity. Furthermore, every time a robot is invented to do something humans used to do, the cost savings of that production frees up new capital to be put to better use elsewhere, and employment will likely be found in that new industry.

In 1700 almost everyone was a farmer. Machines completely changed that - and food is almost exclusively produced by robots now (what percent of the population still farms??). Yet, is everyone sitting around without work? And this is with a population increase of billions of people since the year 1700!! Where did that new work come from?

Machines, so long as they are profitably employed, will almost always create more new job opportunities than they destroy. If you want more people to have a job, you should hope for more machines, not fewer.

I also highly disagree with this. Each new person, when properly allocated as a resource, is a net-positive for production. Humans, on average, each produce more than they consume in resources. A world with twice as many people will be more than twice as wealthy, I assure you.  Indeed, how much wealthier has the world become with every doubling of the population?

Do not merely look at the mouths of people and assume they must be fed. Look also at the hands and mind, and realize they can produce and create.

Animals use all of these, yet they do not AFAIK use money. Placing an abstract value on resources is a reified (religious) notion and entirely unnecessary.

Who said anything about abstract value? All that is important is the exchange rate - meaning the price, which is merely a ratio of one good voluntarily traded for another good.  My 12 eggs traded to you for 1 loaf of bread, puts an exchange rate of 12 eggs/1bread, and thus the market price for a loaf of bread is 12 eggs.  There is nothing abstract about that, and I'll suggest that it is not "religious", and that it is in fact wholly necessary to establish a rate of exchange before an exchange can be made.

Try making an exchange without determining at what rate such exchange will occur, and I'll cede the point.

Forgive me as I haven't read this entire thread, but I wanted to say something about money - and more specifically, Bitcoin.

The beauty of a viable independent currency is that it allows for the automatic emergence of complex order. Just look at all of the Bitcoin services that we already have, all created without any official authority or governing body.

However, if you're recommending an economy that is moneyless, I don't see how the complexity could exceed even a tiny threshold since a barter economy lacks the high-level abstractions that money provides. And if you argue that it could be done through governance you hit another wall: centralized power only works in meat-space, not in cyber-space.

So in summary, it is my opinion that without money we surely could not have any semblance of a micro-economy here in our little corner of the internet.

You are coming from an a priori argument. You posit that price and exchange rate is not an abstract notion, yet would offer nothing but an ad populum argument. Markets themselves also are not necessary, therefore money is not necessary.

What I like about Bitcoin is that it exhalts and glorifies the abstraction to the point of being ridiculous and is therefor a near perfectly designed religion for money based economies.

I disagree with this, and I wrote an article about how money is demonstrably different from simple exchange.

As I wrote in my article, money is constructed through collective agreement.  As such, it has the effect of subjectively displacing the inherent value of other goods.  The example I used in the article was as follows:  I like guitars, and in 100 out of 100 scenarios I would prefer to own a guitar -- ANY guitar -- over a watch.  I have clocks everywhere and I don't need another one.  But if the watch is made of 24k gold, I'll take the watch over a guitar -- virtually ANY guitar -- any day.  Thus, something that is said to be money (i.e. gold) effects the value of something that is not money (e.g. a guitar; a watch).  

Now, let's say people that did not collectively agree that gold is significantly valuable.  You could try to argue that the guitar I own is money and that the watch some other guy is offering me is also money, but this is foolish.  

Employing gradients of usefulness to things that could potentially be used as money does not do anything to change whether something "is" or "is not" money.  You could take that loaf of bread and say it's money, and I will tell you it's not.  Who is right?  If you paid money for that loaf of bread, then you would be saying that you used money to buy money, which could then be used as money to buy more money.  THIS becomes absurd as then absolutely everything and anything can be used as (as you suggest) and IS (as you do not) money including oxygen.

This is how money functions:
Higher syntax (money) --> Determines subjective value of lower syntax (goods).
Or...
Money --> Determines subjective value of bread, guitars, watches, etc.

In a bartering economy:
Subjective value of lower syntax (goods) --> Determines subjective value of lower syntax (goods)
Or...
Subjective value of bread, guitars, watches, etc. --> Determines subjective value of bread, guitars, watches, etc.

Money functions on a separate level entirely apart from the value of the goods it determines.  A moneyless society simply means that you are removing the higher syntax and keeping the lower one.  In other words, you are removing collective agreement of value and reverting to individual determination of value.

I'm sorry but I have no idea what you're talking about.

Money is not "constructed" and it is certainly not "constructed through collective agreement." When two people trade, they themselves agree are on the terms of the trade. When another set of people trade, they arrive at different terms. And yet a third pair of traders will arrive at a third set of trading terms. None of this is "collective", but rather a spontaneous occurrence. No two people who trade require the agreement on the value of their goods by anybody else. You have something I want, I have something you want, we come to an agreement and trade. No input from anybody else is needed.

As we see humans often trading with each other, we might notice that they tend to start using a common good for these exchanges. This good is not "collectively agreed on," but spontaneously arrived at along the course of many individual decisions. The name given to whatever people tend to trade with is money.

Your example of the gold watch and the guitar is a silly one. The reason you'd prefer the gold watch (which you don't want to use) over the guitar (which you do want to use) is because you can then trade the watch for a guitar + some bread, both of which you want. There is nothing weird about this - and it certainly doesn't indicate any nefarious property of money. I'd rather receive a helicopter than a car in exchange for my $20,000, even though I can't use the helicopter. Why? Because I can trade it again for still further goods - perhaps a car, and groceries for 50 years. In this case, I have used a helicopter as "money."

I simply do not understand what is so difficult or contentious about the idea that money is intrinsic to trade... Set 100 people in a room and give them random stuff. As they start trading with each other for things they want, they'll begin to value certain stuff for its usefulness in trading that stuff to others. It is impossible to avoid this phenomenon just as it would be impossible to avoid the phenomenon of those same people talking to each other. The only way to prevent money, or prevent talking, is to use coercive force against them.

What's the link to this article of yours, which tries to argue that money is demonstrably different from exchange?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79755.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79755.0)

The article indirectly demonstrates that money is different from simple exchange, but the intended purpose of the article is to identify a fundamental flaw with money as I described above (i.e. it displaces subjective value).

In your example about 100 people in a room, "collectively agreed on" and "spontaneously arrived at" appear synonymous despite the apparent linguistic contradiction.  Regardless, if and when the phenomenon of labeling certain things as more valuable occurs, a higher operative syntax is created in tandem which effects the perceived value of all other goods.  A man standing in the room of 100 holding a loaf of bread will find himself changing his perceived value of that loaf of bread as he now begins to consider others' valuation of it.  And, I bet it won't even matter how hungry he is...this becomes a secondary concern.  This is why people risk stress/jail/death for money -- there is a higher syntax at work influencing their decisions of which they are largely unaware.

If you click the link that I posted to the article I wrote and read through my responses to others' critiques, you will find that I clarify the point to mean that this displacement of value is something that we do have control over, but many of us choose to relinquish that control and submit to the concept of "value" as constructed through multiplied propagation.  In other words, whereas you (and pretty much anyone else) can separate these concepts and evaluate them differently, on the whole it is a largely unconscious process, and people are largely unaware of how money influences their interpretation of value -- we allow ourselves to be influenced by it.

I agree money is just a tool, and to that extent I concede money is not necessarily flawed.  On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which some other form of money including Bitcoin, gold, or anything else, would not create this negative influence (I still contend that its influence is a negative one).  So, while money itself may not be flawed, I would suggest that allowing it real-world application is a flawed decision with negative consequences.  The article I wrote calls into question whether the benefits that money has in a global economy are worth the negative consequences.