Comments on: can we eliminate currency if….?

By: kristenlena

kristenlena — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Umm no. We are already losing jobs to "robots" or machines or we are outsourcing the work to cheaper labor in poorer countries. And no workie means no pay checkie.

By: Zinfandz

Zinfandz — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

No because the humans who need to maintain the robots need to be paid, usually in currency. Also even though the robot labour would be free/cheap the raw materials they utilize in construction projects will need to be paid for, usually in currency.

By: Spotty J

Spotty J — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

You are missing a vital point. Even if we could build robots to do any job (and one would presume you could build robots to do the job of building and servicing other robots too, btw), there needs to be some mechanism for deciding how to allocate resources — All resources are scarce (including the robots), so we need do determine how to deploy them, and how much of what products to make, where, and when; and how to organize all the vast and complex supply chains behinds products and services.

That’s what money and the pricing mechanisms do, combined with free markets — they provide a system to communicate and compute the efficient allocation of resources. It is consumers spending money and producers charging for products and services that make it all possible. So you’d still need money even if there were no human jobs — and some system of granting the money to the lazy nonworking humans so they can spend it.