What if we did away with money?
A mad idea, perhaps.
What is money? Well according to the dictionary..
‘A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, including among its forms a commodity such as gold, an officially issued coin or note, or a deposit in a checking account or other readily liquefiable account.’
Sounds a bit complicated, to be honest it is a tool we use to pay for our consumption and much more.
It is a culture, it is a thing we crave, a drug, a thing we chase in return for our lives.
We have been trained to go to work, in exchange for money. In return for giving our lives to the mechanised world, we have gladly accepted vouchers to use to buy stuff and pay bills. Mainly, these trinkets that we buy, do not enrich our lives in any shape or form.
The US now owes $18 trillion! Wow, it’s so big a number, look, $18,000,000,000,000, it is difficult to comprehend.
Will they ever pay that back? Will all of debts in the world be paid back? Has the current system now gone wrong?
What if we had a giant global ‘write off’, reset all the balances, wiped out money? Made every human being equal. Is that such a radical idea?
If you started from scratch to build something better, you could perhaps consider the idea of all of us being of equal value.
After all, why is an hour of work by a plumber any less worthy than an hour of work by a lawyer. A lawyer can not leave a leaky pipe in her house. Does the plumber need a contract?
You could replace it with a more simple system of trading an hour of your time for a credit, that you could use to get a service or hour of someone else’s time – like say the time bank Echo
You could take that further into a community based culture, where we trade our skills with everyone in return for ‘community credits’. This would bring about a huge social change, it would mean we could work less hours, be more community spirited and genuinely give other humans real help.
We can share resources, for example, how many lawnmowers, ladders, tools, cars, etc does any community need to own individually. Why not the community own a few and then we share. Well the reason is, that we have built an industrialised world that requires us to all own one or more of everything ourselves. After all producing more and more stuff has meant we all get more money, that enables us to buy more stuff!
We would have more time to spend with our families, more time doing meaningful things. Instead of working to earn money to consume more stuff we do not need.
Our current system of money is so deeply routed in the culture of the industrialised world, the greed model of over-consumption to make more money. So by replacing it with another system, you are doing so much more that just renaming money, you are putting in place a system based on equality, based on the community, putting people first and eliminating needless consumption.
It’s a mad idea at the moment, but one that is worth exploring.
Philip Dodson 