Joesub007: Money is politics in concentrated form. As a form of exchange it is worse than barter.
Barter = goods or services deemed equal of value by two parties with no intermediaries are exchanged.
Money = the political enslavement of another party with less money usually with the intermediaries of banks and government taking a cut from the exploited and with police, law courts and standing armies enforcing this exploitation at the point of a gun.
danberkeley: Why would you trade X for Y if they have the same value? So money isn’t the most common medium of exchange?
Joesub007:
Simple: Candy bar A has peanuts, Candy bar B doesn’t
Barter situation:
A guy with a peanut allergy can barter candy bar A for candy bar B. equal value is exchanged since both are perishable goods.
Monetary situation:
I have money. I’m lazy. I like a candy bar. I’ll use my money to rent workers to pick cocoa nuts. If they don’t like it then I’ll rent soldiers. I’ll “pay” them with paper which they can then “pay” for food which I also own because they can’t eat the paper I “pay” them with.
You exchange something you have for money, and then you exchange the money for something you want. Instead of direct barter you have two-steps indirect barter.
The idea that if you have no money you can’t hire soldiers is beyond silly. You can pay your soldier with stuff. Or the soldiers can simply steal what they want.
As you’ve alredy begun doing, point out that there is no exchange of “equal value”. It’s only because there is a reverse valuation of goods that exchange is possible.
As has already been pointed out, the belief that money constitutes enslavement is beyond silly.
I know it’s silly. That’s why I’m speechless. Voluntary employment == slavery!!! Arghh!!! I think the problem with the resource-based economy utopians is that they define a “reseource-based economy” as being perfect in every aspect. But they refuse to admit that it impossible because they redefine common economic terms to fit their utopia.
There’s a simple challenge for him: why did people adopt money and whey do they continue to use is. Mises’ regression theorem rules out the possibility that money can be implemented by government without some preceeding voluntary form of money and Georg Simmel stipulated that in order to money to function as money people must have trust in it. I don’t see any other way in which money can arise, other than that a few people began using money voluntarily and forced it onto others, in which case the burden of proof would be on him by this point to show that this was indeed the case and to demonstrate how this state of affairs came to be.