A Wealthy And Abundant Society Without Money Or Markets

Title link - The Incan economy thrived without either money or markets.

Let me reiterate a very powerful reality that is completely underappreciated or not understood.  If the world of nations, society, community or individuals have the ability or know-how to accomplish something that is needed by the world of nations, society, community or individuals, and we have the able bodies and intellectual capital available to  accomplish those objectives, that “thing” is achievable.  Right now!  Period!  Money?  Money has nothing to do with anything.  In fact, the lack of money available today to address global, social and citizen needs is simply validation that money is the  artificial, limiting factor in human, social and democratic development.  

That people say there is no money to do this or there is no money for that or this or that nation is broke because they have no money or too much debt-based money are truly ignorant.  That dumbing-down or ignorance is very dangerous to the rest of us, to the human race and to the planet.  Especially when that ignorance is violently forced down our throats by the political and corporate class of predators.  

The United States, as just one example, has over 100 million people either unemployed or in underemployed make-work, doing-each-other’s-laundry jobs.   We have a vast, talented labor pool and the ability/intellectual knowledge/technical-know-how to solve every major social issue facing our nation today.  That includes homelessness, childhood hunger, lack of access to healthcare, a good education. sustainable energy and economic initiatives, pollution clean-up of toxic dump sites, garbage recycling and on and on and on.  That we don’t solve those issues because political idiots and private profit-driven capital doesn’t wish to - because they see no way to control it or profit from it - shows how ignorant our society’s corporate and political leaders truly are.  How dumbed-down our society has become.  And, mind you, corporate and political bureaucrats are wildly ignorant and that they are in control reflects on the ignorance of our society.   Bureaucrats are some of the most incompetent people in our society.   Class and its use of money to control others destroys the freedom of the human mind, the free exchange of knowledge and the mind’s ability to impact and change the world for the better.  We are choking on the ignorance, tyranny and repression of the dumbed-down corporate state.

“What is the chief end of man?--to get rich. In what way?--dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. God and Greenbacks and Stock--father, son, and the ghost of same--three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.” – Mark Twain, The Revised Catechism

It’s amazing how many people don’t realize money is used as a form of violence to control society and the people in it.  And how gold would make that control even more violent by allowing the very few who have it, or control it, to deny those who don’t.   

Does anyone in Detroit or East LA, where unemployment and underemployment is running at 80 or 90% in some areas, care about whether money is backed by gold?   All they know is that someone else is controlling money and they often have to do anything and everything to get enough money just to survive.  They spend their lives focused on money rather than focused on making their communities more livable, making their children more educated and making their lives more empowered. 

In many ways our current monetary system mimics a gold money standard;  those who have the money decide who gets it and the system steals from the poor and gives to the rich.  How again does gold democratize money?   Gold is honest money?  Meh.  Show me a time in history when gold was honest money.  It doesn’t exist.  Gold takes us back further into the gilded age of excess by the elite capitalist predators and the birthright aristocracy while their serfs run at a frantic pace on the hamster wheel to scrounge for enough money to survive.  Of course, all for the profit and benefit of our masters.

Money is an institution of the ego.   Thus, its existence is predicated on fear and control.   I have written on here ad nauseam that one day money will die.  Forever.  That money is a relic of times gone by that serves no purpose to a free mind and free society.  To the contrary, it enslaves the mind as Mark Twain noted above.   No man can serve both money and truth.  

The day that money disappears won’t certainly be an act of virtue by the state but more likely foisted upon the world as some unrecoverable crisis destroys the usefulness of money on a broad and complete scale.  I certainly don’t know if this cycle will be that time but as I have noted, more and more evidence is unfolding that we might be living through the end times of money.   We see crises everywhere that cannot be solved because money no longer serves a broad purpose for the needs of humanity, community, democracy and society.  We have young, energetic minds, unemployed minds and underemployed minds all capable of sharing so much with society yet there is no method for them to do because they have no money.  And those that are employed most often are not serving their own needs or the needs of their community.  So, instead we are choking on easily solved problems and human progress has turned into human devolution.  Why is money needed to solve social and citizen needs?  It’s not. 

People have a hard time visualizing what they have never experienced.  So, the general comment I receive when talking about this issue is that will never happen, or your views aren’t practical or there is no way the economy can operate without money.   That’s all nonsense.   What isn’t practical is relying on some artificial control mechanism, money, that is stopping society and its citizens from intellectual accomplishment or personal empowerment because they are spending every waking moment worried about having enough money to survive and then retire.   Do you need money to build a public transportation system?  Money to educate your children?  Money to build a house?  Money to perform brain surgery?  Money to grow food?  Money to solve any of the social needs of our society or the world?  The answer is clearly no. 

Not only did the Incas not have a monetary system but they apparently didn’t have a market-based economy either.   The only way these dynamics can exist is if society’s leadership has a moral code and value system that is well more developed and sophisticated than modern corporate capitalist society and its false gods of markets, money and associated hyper-consumption.   Free markets is a code word for looting and stealing democracy.   In fact, corporations and elites do anything and everything to avoid markets, competition or work.   That’s for the poor sonofabitches who do their bidding.  Feinting markets, competition or work seems to be serving the aristocracy quite nicely.  Why not let the rest of us in on the club?   

Does society want an economy where forces serve the needs of markets and corporations or the needs of society?  If it’s the latter, then society needs to tightly define those markets in ways that serve democracy and then regulate them.  Otherwise, private and corporate interests will define markets for their own benefits.   Like Wall Street’s creation of derivatives markets that serve no use to society but serve a great purpose to corporations that use them to steal from the public. 

Competition for food, shelter, healthcare and economic freedom turns the world into a dystopian reality.  Cooperation, on the other hand, builds a successful society where all people who wish to participate then benefit.   If you don’t want to participate, that’s fine as well.  But it is participation, cooperation and selflessness that has allowed humanity to exist and evolve.   Darwinism’s utility does not define the human condition.   In fact, Social Darwinism of class-based corporate capitalism destabilizes the human condition. 

Forcing people to compete for their own economic survival destabilizes humanity yet benefits our masters.   That is why corporate capitalism is collapsing.   It is Godless.  The human condition is not evolving under capitalism but instead is actually devolving into some dysfunctional, dystopian, hyper-competitive, consumption-crazed existence.  It places our minds in a constant state of fear.  We see evidence of this destabilization everywhere. 

We need a merit-based economic system not one that forces us to compete for survival.  Where merit, responsibility and empowerment are rewarded.  An economy forcing people to compete to stay alive is simply an extension of state violence.  It is no different than other forms of forced state violence like money, war, taxes, welfare, capitalism, communism, socialism, etc.   We need competition for ideas on how to solve social issues, how to best deploy those ideas, how to best educate all of our children, how to employ best practices in organizational structures used to solve social problems and provide to society, how to employ best practices in producing what we need and want and how to employ best practices innovation and research into science to fuel needs and solutions for society to name a few.   Much of these efforts can certainly be private efforts or local efforts or both rather than a big, bloated, repressive government mandates or big, bloated, repressive corporate mandates as is the case today.    

Public capital with a primary intent of human development and to provide for the needs and wishes of democratic society are the future whether that involves the use of money and markets remains to be seen.  By the way, public capital would lead to an unprecedented boom in private investment that serves the needs of individuals, community and society, if that is what society wished; something that has never happened under corporate capitalism.   Corporate capitalism exists to seek rent.  Not to invest in the education and empowerment of citizens, community or democracy.   Under this economic system, if there is no profit, there is no demand to solve social or democratic issues.  So, we simply end up with a greater and greater supply of needs and unresolved issues.   Of course, there is always someone seeking to profit or extract rent from the disadvantages and suffering of others.  So, social issue are often turned into profit-driven excursions because that the only method through which investment can occur; ie if someone can make money off if it.   Again, these dynamics are created through the artificial limiting factor of money that again leads us down a bifurcated, class-based society of those who seek rent and those who pay rent.  

A wealthy and abundant society does not require money or markets.  And no massive global trade apparatus; the vast majority of which is completely unnecessary.  The requirement of money and markets simply is a result of brainwashing of a dumbed-down, control-driven corporate state society.   If we seek to employ money and markets to identify solutions for democracy and for the individual needs of our citizens, then we need to democratize them.  And that means that they first serve the needs of our citizens and not the corporate state.