Demonetize it!

Is competition in our blood?

I wrote “The Inconvenient Truth about Competition” and posted it to several sites including OpEdNews. There I received several comments from someone called Terrilian, which led to an interesting discussion. Unfortunately, various time, comment-length, and style restrictions enforced by the publisher of that site made it impossible for me to continue to respond to Terrilian as I thought proper. I have decided to post the article that was to have been my latest response to her here and invite her to continue the discussion if she wishes.

First a little background: In the "prime the pump" comment, that is strongly preferred by the publisher of OpEdNews, I wrote,

Why must we pay to live on the planet we’re born on?

Why must we earn a living? Aren’t we already living?

Terrilian asked me to clarify because the thought I meant that none of us should have to work. So I explained:

I am pro-work, anti-jobs as we know them know. Right now, work and jobs are thought of as equivalent terms but they are not. I want to abolish jobs, which are rationed goods that are not available to all, while having people realize that work is all around them. This includes full-time homemaking/child rearing/elder care.  

I recently saw a documentary called The Economics of Happiness. Information on it is at the website http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/ It begins with the people of Ladakh, a culturally Tibetan area of Indian-ruled Kashmnir. Before the region was open to Western influence in the mid 1970s, the Ladakhi people lived off their land & traded regionally. All had spacious homes & jewelry & no unemployment or great income inequality. In fact, they did not use much money at all, only for certain luxuries that had to be obtained internationally. They were also proud of their culture.

Enter Western competitiveness & in one generation they had unemployment, poverty, & a sense that their culture was inferior to Western consumerism. We have to get back to a culture where everyone is needed & works according to their talents: builders will be builders, farmers, farmers, healers, healers, artists artists, etc. & economics will not be the center of our lives. This is what indigenous cultures have to teach us if we will only listen.

I object to the fact that we must pay, but no one need allow us to make the money to pay. We can be thrown out of the labor force, yet told it is our responsibility to "pay-our way". I understand the freedom of an individual to chose his employees or the products and services she will use. But why should a person’s ability to survive depend on being wanted by others, especially when the economy does not need everybody?

There have been millions of jobs lost in the US in the last few years. Yet do you hear of shortages at the grocery store or any other shops in your town because there weren’t enough workers to get goods to the shelves? Probably not.

To earn something means that someone else has to decide that you have deserved it. I say that no one has to earn their existence. It is given to them, either by a Creator or by an accident of biology, chemistry and physics. Jefferson was right. All men (and women) are created equal, because they come from the same source. No one on this planet has the right to say that you or I deserve what we need to survive as a biological being (food, clothing, shelter, health care) or to thrive as an engaged member of society (education, transportation, communication and the tools of your chosen trade or profession). But with monetary systems, we have some people improperly deciding the fates of others.

Thanks for asking that question.

Due to the character-count restriction, I did not point out what I will point out here. Not only are some people improperly deciding the fates of others, but they are often doing so on the basis of rather suspect criteria: race, gender, age, sexual orientation, immigration status etc.

Terrilian  then posted a reply called "We Compete Because We’re Alive"

I can’t agree with any of this. Competition is part of our reality and can’t be wished out of existence. Every living organism on the planet competes with others for space, sunlight, water, resources, status. If you try to outlaw competition in economic matters it will just morph into competition somewhere else. It’s what we do on planet Earth.

"It means that we don’t need monetary systems. If we didn’t have to pay for things we actually could do more work. Have you ever wanted to do something but didn’t have the money to buy the tools or the training?"

I certainly have, and it is dammed frustrating. But the only other option to paying for those tools is to take them. I’m a weaver. Should I be able to take a loom just because I want to weave? Should other people have to take my handwoven scarves in exchange for the resources I need to live. Do my wants or needs obligate others to fulfill them? No, and no, and no. Plunder is not a moral system.
Without money you still would have to pay something for your upkeep. Perhaps in indebted labor or in future obligations or in loyalty to the warlord who IS supplying the resources. In non-capitalist feudal times you paid for your "living" as farm labor and cannon fodder. Or by keeping slaves yourself.

I like money exchanges because they are anonymous and they don’t incur a future obligation.

Here is my response, the original "Is Competition in our Blood?" which was somehow too long for the OpEdNews’ comment section:

Competition & cooperation are both part of our lives. But we choose when to use which, & different societies have had different mixes. There is no legislating out competition but we can grow in consciousness about its use.

Your preference for anonymity & lack for future obligation (a preference shared by many Westerners, I suspect) is a cultural preference & not something encoded in DNA.

I think your assumption that either we have money or we go back to such undesirable practices as slavery, indentured servitude, warlords and plunder is unnecessarily restrictive and dualistic. We do not have to go back and forth between two equally unpalatable “options”. We can, if we open our minds, come up with other possibilities.

I can picture a community in which you, a weaver, take a loom produced by someone who likes to make them. He is also a weaver so he does not need your scarves. He needs bread from the baker, who is cold & needs your scarves, which you were able to make because you were weaving, not working in an office for money. You are on a low carb diet so you don’t take bread but you do take veggies from an urban farmer/landscaper who takes care of the loommaker’s yard, etc.

It’s not plunder; it’s sharing. It’s people in a community taking care of each other. No one is a slave or an overlord. Everyone works according to their interests and skills. Diversity of people is respected as more diversity provides more choice. Your obligation to the community is to keep weaving, maybe teaching others who want to learn, in person or through writing a book about it. In other words, to be you rather than what someone else wants you to be because he can profit by it.

See Eisenstein’s "A circle of gifts" https://endmoney.info/?p=334

If no one wants what someone does, maybe there is a related task that contributes to society. If no one likes my poetry, I can read books to children in a library, make audiobooks for the blind, or teach adult literacy & still write poetry because the point is to provide a service, not to work X number of hours. Who cares that it takes me a fraction of the time to write my poetry than it takes the urban farmer to do her work, if farming is her favorite job & she wouldn’t trade it for a hill of gold?

We can have some mediums of exchange. I have nothing against supermarket coupons. But money has intrinsic value & I find that problematical. More evil is done for money than is done for coupons.

While I was writing that comment originally, Terrilian added another comment about The Economics of Happiness. She had visited the web site and was largely in agreement with its localization message. I appreciate her willingness to be open minded and at least have a look. The first step to freeing ourselves from the violence and economic, cultural and environmental plunder that so many of us rail against daily on sites like OpEdNews is to rid ourselves of the intellectual hegemony of corporate economics, the limited politics of our own society, and habit, tradition and history for its own sake. We shouldn’t just discard the past willy-nilly–chances are that our great grandmother’s cooking was healthier than our own–but we should question what we have always done to figure out if it is still working well or should give way to something new.

I, for one, think monetary systems have outlived their usefulness. You may disagree. But to even entertain a question such as "why must we pay to live on the planet we’re born on?" means we are thinking and not just walking in lockstep down a well-worn trail, solely because "that’s the way it is." That is the difference between humans and ants.

Are you a human being or are you an ant?