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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:05
Why Resource Based Economies Will Always Fail.
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All right, up next is Rafi.
He wrote in and said, We've been trying to find abundance, reduce or end poverty, and better distribute the wealth within the monetary system.
I feel there is no solution for a fair distribution of money.
Is there a solution?
I'm presently working on building a money-free world, no barter, no trade, also known as the gift economy or resource-based economy.
What are Stefan's thoughts on this?
Hello, hello. Hi there, Stefan.
How are you doing, Rafi? I'm doing excellent.
How did you get interested in this topic to begin with?
Good question. I had sold my business in a big city, Montreal, not too far away from you.
And I installed myself in a village about an hour away.
And a year later, I'm not sure exactly what happened.
I just clicked and I said, what the hell am I doing here?
What's the reason? First of all, I sold a business in Montreal, which I was doing still not bad.
And I found myself in a smaller village, nicer people, more calm, more relaxed, more friendly, but operating in exactly the same way as I've always been, which is for 21 years.
Which is putting prices, putting specials, negotiating, bargaining, giving discounts, charging by hour and something inside me said this is not right.
There has to be a better way than the way that everybody is operating.
What bothered me most in this way of traditional way of doing business is the lack of connection that I had with the customers.
Then I started going deeper in the philosophy of my way of thinking and I said, why don't I charge my kids to repair?
I'm a shoe repair. I fix shoes, boots, handbags, everything.
So why don't I charge my daughter to fix her boots?
Why is it free for her?
Why is it free for friends, for family, for loved ones?
And I charge to strangers, to customers, as we call it.
And I stayed with this way of thinking.
Then I wanted to find a way to respond, to fulfill the thing that was missing in my life, the thing that wasn't right, that didn't feel right anymore.
So I had the idea of putting my costs on the items.
I felt by doing that, I would create a better relation, a more connected relation with everybody else besides my loved ones.
I would show them that I'm open-hearted and I want to...
Basically, my idea was to eliminate bargaining and putting specials and the customer would decide what price they're willing to pay and to learn also at the same time To gain confidence between humanity, between me and others.
And I had the idea.
I didn't do it. I stayed with the idea for about a year.
So about a year and a half ago, I dove and I started putting my costs on every single item.
And for the repair part, if the price is too expensive, I tell my customers to give me whatever they want.
I'll still do the job. And it's been a year and a half now and I've transferred my life.
In the mornings when I wake up, I no longer think about the bottom line.
I just want to live the experience that I have to live that day.
And it's been an ongoing thing.
At the moment, I'm in two different movements of creating the free world, which is the free world charter and Ubuntu contributionism.
I'm very excited about this direction in my life.
I've never been this excited and clear about where I'm headed and the way I see the future.
I would like to have your thoughts on this.
Well, I like it.
I think it's great.
I'm not going to sit there and say everything needs to have a price tag while handing out podcasts like candy and asking for donations.
I run on a gift economy.
I mean, there's a little bit of freemium.
You get a couple of bonus podcasts and books if you subscribe or donate.
But the vast majority of people consume without donating.
And even those who do donate, not everyone, but even those who do donate often donate less than what I ask for, which is 50 cents a show, which I think is pretty reasonable.
And I give away the books for free, and I have conversations with people.
I've never charged anyone for my time to have conversations, even if it never becomes a show.
And so I steadfastly refuse to put a price stamp on it.
And of course, churches run the same way.
I mean, you don't... You don't get a little cross stamp when you go into the club and you've got to pay a cover fee.
I mean, you donate what you feel is worthwhile.
I mean, some people, some religions do have sort of suggested donations.
I think there are membership fees for synagogues.
But a lot of the really important stuff in the world is not priced, right?
As you say, you don't charge your daughter for fixing her shoes.
You don't, you know, if you go and take care of someone else's kids, you might charge money, but you don't charge your own kids money for taking care of them.
So Wikipedia, of course, is largely a volunteer organization that accepts donations and has become, I think, one of the top destinations in the web.
And the degree to which ads are costs is debatable.
You know, time is money, but, you know, even on Facebook and with AdBlocker and stuff like that, you can manage this sort of stuff a lot.
The degree to which ads are prices, it's sort of debatable.
But if you look at your day, I mean, you can very easily go through a day or a couple of days without paying for anything directly, you know, sort of in the moment, pay for your rent or whatever and so on, right?
A lot of the most important stuff in life does not have a price tag on it.
I mean, things still cost money.
I mean, if nobody paid you for anything, you would not be able to survive, at least in sort of current environment.
But I really like the idea and the degree to which we can measure quality through the gift economy.
You know, I've always sort of thought that movies would be better if you paid afterwards what you thought.
Right now I know you can pay to go in and I think within like half an hour or whatever you can leave and get your money back.
That's pretty rare. A lot of people are just like, well, it's comfortable.
I bought popcorn. Maybe it'll get better.
There's that optimism. No self-control.
And, um, I like the, the degree to which things could be made and after the fact gift economy, um, you know, does that still involve money?
I think it would involve something, but of course what, what I talk about in terms of money is, is cryptocurrency and, and so on, which would not have much to do with existing currencies as they're known.
So, I think the tipping after the fact, and this could just be because I was a waiter for so long, and if I got the tip before I was serving the meal, I doubt it would have improved the quality of my service knowing that I got the tip afterwards, made me, you know, make jokes and chat with people if that's what they wanted and so on, right? Let me make one thing clearer, Stefan.
When I talk about gift economy, I... I don't have in mind of an alternative monetary system.
I'm talking about totally gifting everything.
Life would be free. Everything will be free.
No, no, no. Hang on.
Don't start using the free word unless you're running for office.
Things aren't free.
Almost everything takes resources to produce.
You can't just wave around free because that's Unfair.
Because then it's saying that somehow people are stealing when they're charging.
You say everything takes resources to build.
Yes, but money is not a resource.
Why is money not a resource?
Because money is not real.
It's invented. It's a belief.
It's a religion.
We don't need money to build a house.
We need materials. We need resources.
Money never builds anything.
Well, I mean, saying you just threw a whole bunch of stuff in there, right?
Money is, ideally, right, it's supposed to be a way of measuring apples and oranges.
And so it's a way of measuring human preferences, human desires, human needs.
And it's a way of allowing people to trade if they don't have what the other person directly needs, right?
So if I want eggs and You want milk and I have milk and you have eggs, we can trade, right?
That's the same as money. No, that's not the same as money.
That's direct trade.
I also include trading and bartering as the same as the monetary system because if you're trading eggs, the egg becomes the monetary system.
It's also an alternative way of trading.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
If you're saying that direct trade is money, then you can't say you want to get rid of money or money is a religion because that would be part of what your system would be, would be trade, right?
The way I phrase it, it's a non-accountable trade.
No, no, no. Don't start giving me new language.
I've got a problem already and that could be my lack of understanding.
Okay. You said you want a society without money.
Uh-huh. But that would involve trade, but then you say that trade is a form of money.
No, that wouldn't involve trade.
So there'd be no trade? Gift economy is not trade.
Gift economy is just giving.
We just give away our services.
And we expect that others will eventually give when we need it.
So it's not a trade. It's not a direct trade.
That's why I call it non-accountable trading.
Let's say you give me something.
If you give me a dozen eggs, I'm not going to keep track.
I owe you something in return with the same value you have a dozen eggs.
That's trading. That's bartering.
The gift economy is not about that.
You're going to give me a dozen eggs and whenever you need something from anybody, either me or somebody else, you'll get it for free.
So we're not going to calculate how much you gave, how much you received.
Just like we do with family members.
If I buy a pair of jeans for my kid, I'm not going to tell her, okay, you owe me a pair of jeans in the future or the same value to it.
That's not trading. That's gift economy.
You have to get the definitions right.
Gift economy is about giving, not trading.
Okay, I think I understand.
I mean, family analogies don't work too well.
Right? They don't work too well.
Why not? Because I don't change your diapers because you're an adult.
I change my own kids' diapers because they're helpless and dependent and not independent, right?
They can't go do their own thing.
So if I don't feed my two-year-old, my two-year-old starves to death, right?
Okay. Yeah, but if my daughter is 18 now and I'm not changing her diapers anymore, I'm still giving away my stuff.
Well, are you saying that you will treat your 20-year-old daughter exactly the same as when she was two?
In regards of giving away stuff, yes, exactly the same.
I would still repair her boots as if she was two years old for free.
I wouldn't even think twice of charging her.
That's exactly how I wish.
But she's your genes, right?
I mean, this is what genetics does.
This is what kinship does.
It's that you want to put resources into – this is how evolution works, right?
You want to pour resources into the genetics that are closest to yours, right?
I agree. That's a good point and that's the answer that I came with initially when I asked myself, how come I don't charge my daughter?
I charge customers' genes, right?
That's the obvious answer. But that still doesn't answer though, Stefan, because – It does answer the questioning, but let's go deeper on the answer.
When you say genes, what is genes exactly?
Is it because I feel more connection biologically to my child, right?
That's partially part of the answer also.
If we dig even deeper, what happens if we evolve and we become more conscious and the oneness, we feel more connected with the universe, with people, with strangers.
You feel really the connection through the heart.
By doing that, are we increasing the level of connection with others?
You feel connected with others way more than the average Joe does.
So are we towards connecting with each other just like we are connected to our kids or our friends?
The gene argument doesn't stand because how come I don't charge my good neighbor or my best friend?
I don't charge them either. There's no genes involved there.
How come I don't charge them? What's your explanation there?
Well, they're proximate to you.
You have a personal relationship.
But here's one of the things that money provides that is, I think, of real value.
Which is, money is a way of restraining the near endless number of human desires.
So I'll give you sort of an example.
My daughter has her own money.
You know, she does chores.
She gets an allowance. So, you know, she's used to Wanting us to buy things for her.
And the great thing about this now is she can buy them for herself, right?
So she wanted two packages of crayons the other day.
And she was like, Dad, I want you to buy me two packs of crayons.
It's perfectly fine. We talk about this kind of stuff.
And what I did say was I said, well, you don't have to ask me because you have your own money.
And she's like, oh, right. And then she started to say, ooh, that's kind of expensive, right?
Because now she's spending her own money rather than my money.
In other words, it was not free to her.
Now it cost her something, so she began to limit what she wanted.
And that's one of the things that money does, is it limits...
We have to make choices, right?
I mean, if I have X amount of dollars and I have...
A near infinity of things that I'd like to have or could have, I have to allocate and it limits my consumption, which of course is good for the environment and lets me help me prioritize and so on.
It's one thing that's important.
The other thing too, and this is an ancient economic problem, which is that if you need surgery and you can give the surgeon some eggs, I guess, but maybe he's already got eggs.
Maybe he doesn't want more eggs.
And so you have to find someone who has something that the surgeon wants and I know we're talking about a gift economy like you just give a bunch of stuff and then you go to the surgeon and say operate on me for free and so on and that The problem with all of that is the stuff that is free gets over-consumed, right? The moment you reduce the price of something to zero, it gets over-consumed and you end up with huge shortages.
The third thing that's important, and this is not to say that this can't work.
I mean, if you want to get together with people and give this a shot, I think it's fantastic as an experiment.
But the third thing is, how do you know without money if what you're doing is actually valuable to people?
And this sounds like it's materialistic, but it's really not.
So if I give you a painting that I did, you're probably going to take it, right?
It's free, right? So if I just keep doing paintings and handing out paintings, and I never charge anyone any money for them, I don't actually know if people like what I have or really care about what I have.
I mean, they may say all these kinds of nice things, right?
Here's a tape of me singing Ave Maria.
Okay. Or here's an MP3. Fine, you know.
But I don't know if I'm actually applying myself to that which is most useful and valuable and important to others if they're not bidding for me.
And this is sort of underappreciated, and I don't mean by you.
Maybe it's well appreciated and thought of by you.
But... How do I know if what I'm doing is of the greatest service and value to others without price?
So if I open a restaurant and everything's free, people will come through and eat and so on.
But if I charge and then people never come, it means that they don't really want my restaurant that much.
So as far as Not knowing whether what you're doing is valuable or not.
Money gives you these incredible signals.
So if petroleum engineers, there's a shortage of them, then of course the price of petroleum engineers goes up.
The salary of engineers goes up.
And then more people will become engineers and they drive the price down.
So that is a signal.
The price signal is saying, this is important to people.
This really matters. People really want this.
And from that standpoint, I'll stop in a sec, but from that standpoint, it really is important to recognize if I'd been handing out my novels, then I would still be a novelist.
But the market gave me stronger indications that philosophy was more important and more valuable to people than my fiction writing was.
Let's go point by point.
Let's take the overconsumption theory that you mentioned.
I call this the money mindset.
I've had this conversation with maybe a few hundred people for the last year and a half.
That's why I call it money mindset.
We try to take the idea, The new lifestyle which the money-free world will bring and the new mindset.
And since we're not still in that mindset, we integrate the money world with the new money world and we try to jam it together and we say, it won't work.
Yeah, but it won't work because we're still in the money mindset.
So the overconsumption thing, just think about it, Stefan.
I mean, you're a super smart guy.
A world where everybody...
I mean, the whole world will be working for free.
And first of all, overconsumption is usually – I mean, we don't overeat.
I mean, obviously, we don't overeat healthy.
We eat whatever the body needs naturally.
Wait, wait. Are you saying – hang on, hang on.
Are you saying people aren't fat?
Yeah, people are fat in the money world because in the money world, food producers produce food not for health reasons but to make money.
So when money is out, what's the incentive for the person to make junk food?
What is the incentive? There's no more incentive anymore.
So that's going to go out the window.
Who's going to work to make people unhealthy when there's no money involved, when it's a gift economy?
Yeah, the question then becomes who's going to get food to anyone, right?
Well, that's another point.
We'll go to that first of all.
But for the overconsumption thing, just removing money will be also removing a bunch of stuff that the money world has brought to humanity.
Overconsumption is one of the factors.
I'm just going to throw out my way of thinking and I won't go deep in it because I could talk just about this for half an hour.
You said the value of something.
I'm sorry, but it is materialistic.
Again, it's a money mindset. We've been taught from birth that money has value.
Everything we do, we get rewarded with money.
It's almost in my blood, this way of thinking.
It's been many, many generations we function this way.
Money does not bring value.
It does, but it brings false value.
It brings artificial value.
Real value will come in the free world.
And how will we know what's valuable or what is appreciated or what's not appreciated?
We'll know through our relations.
We don't have relations anymore.
We're not connected with each other. Everything is through money.
Everything costs something, as we say.
And our whole focus, our whole...
How do you call it? Point of reference is with money to know value.
I mean, it's a very true and also a very sad statement.
And that's one of the reasons why I'm working so hard to go outside of the money system.
Okay, so let me just understand that because, I mean, that's...
In a small community, I mean, I think you're entirely right.
I think a smaller community would work on a gift basis.
I mean, if you look at how the Amish put up their barns, everyone gets together and...
They put together a barn, and they don't charge each other for it.
It's just, you know, I'll do this for you, you do this for me, whatever, right?
Neighbors are like, oh, you're away, I'll pick up your mail, and then, oh, I'm not going to charge you for any bill, right?
So where there is localized community, I think that's exactly how things work, and there's nothing wrong with that, but that's reciprocal, and it's with people you know, and it's arm's length relationships, and that, I think, works out very nicely.
My question is, how am I going to get bananas in Toronto?
How are you getting it now? Well, I buy them.
They organize everything to get the bananas from South America, Central America, wherever they're grown.
They send them up here in order to get the money and I value bananas more than whatever else I could spend that money on and I defer or don't spend whatever else I would spend on to spend the money on the bananas and that's why they organized to get the bananas to me.
Well, you buy them, but it's not your money that's the people who are working on producing the bananas and the shipping, delivery, and the stores who are selling it.
Up to that point, it's not money who's doing all that work.
It's probably the belief of making money and the value behind money is motivating people, but the motivation that people will have to produce at least the essential needs will not be money anymore.
It would be No, no, no, no.
You're not understanding my question.
So I divided our relationships into local proximal relationships.
And then the reason I chose bananas is that there's nobody up here who can grow bananas, right?
I understand, yeah. So why would somebody in South America send me bananas?
Well, that's exactly what I was saying.
The same people who are producing the banana and shipping it here with the motivations of money will not be motivated with money anymore.
They will become humanitarian.
No, but there's a limited number of bananas.
How are they going to know who to ship them to?
Order, just like we do now.
So I would just go and order bananas?
Not you personally.
In each community, in each region, there will be people in charge of food.
So they will take care of the distribution of bananas.
Each person will order bananas.
Just like stores. We call it stores now.
There will be distribution centers.
Let's say we call it that way.
No, no. You're just putting words in and you're saying it's going to be exactly the same but with no money.
But what I'm pointing out is that there are Close relationships, because you keep saying, well, my daughter and my neighbors, absolutely, and I agree with you about all of that, but those are close proximal relationships of reciprocity, which I don't have with some guy who is picking bananas in Chile.
So the question is, why is the guy in Chile going to send me bananas?
Well, you say that you don't have the connection with the guy in Chile.
First of all, maybe because you don't know him.
He doesn't know you. He's far away from you.
I can't know that many people.
Yeah, I know. But do we have to know people to feel loving towards them?
Do we have to know them personally?
I mean, they are human beings.
They have the same needs and same fears as us and same dreams.
Everybody wants to be happy.
How close does somebody have to be physically for me to love and feel connected to that person?
You follow me? You're substituting an economic question of rational allocation with a Hallmark card saying, kumbaya, we all love each other.
But the problem is, even if the guy in Chile who's growing the bananas loves everyone, How is he going to know who to send his bananas to?
He can't send a banana to everyone in the world, right?
Well, like I said before, people in charge of community distribution centers will call them and get the order in for free.
And everyone's going to say we want bananas and there won't be enough.
Yes. If there's not enough, then they will have...
No, no. There's not going to be enough.
All human desires are infinite.
All resources are finite.
Now, you can tweak that and say, well, people won't want more bananas than they want or whatever.
But people throw out.
Like a quarter of Americans spending on food just gets thrown out.
It's insane. And this is when people are spending their own money.
If it's free...
Yeah. Like this is when people are spending their own money.
They still throw out a quarter of what they buy.
Horrible. Yeah.
And what you're saying is if it becomes free, then people will only get exactly what they need.
But that's never happened before.
The moment you lower the price of something, the demand goes up.
And that happens with rats.
And rats have no concept of money.
That happens with monkeys. I mean, this is biological.
We all want more resources because we don't know when there's going to be famine.
This is just how our bodies have evolved, how our desires.
And you can say, well, I want a different kind of species, but I think that's starting to look like a Soviet new man argument, which doesn't really work out that well.
But the question is, How is the guy going to know who to send his bananas to because everyone's going to want them and he doesn't have enough?
Okay. The question is how – not that how he's going to know.
How he's going to know is people will call and get the order.
The question is if there's not enough, what will we do, right?
There's not enough. There won't be enough.
Okay, there won't be enough.
There's not enough bananas for everybody.
First of all, one solution would be to reduce the orders.
But before we come to that conclusion, can't we produce more bananas?
There's not enough? I'm asking a general question.
It's not fundamentally about bananas.
I understand. There won't be enough for everyone.
Everybody would rather drive a Lamborghini than a Pinto.
Most people, right?
Yes. And everybody would rather have some high-end tablet than some junky whatever, right?
And if the swimming pool was free, how many people would want the swimming pool?
Well, a lot more.
And so even if we could keep people's desires to exactly what it is now when they're spending their own money and their desires are restrained by their own money, even if we could somehow remove money, make everything free and not increase people's demands, there still wouldn't be enough bananas for everyone.
And so just saying, well, we'll make more of them is magical thinking because… Everyone who then goes to start making more bananas is taking away from something else.
Then they're not growing cocoa or corn or whatever it is that they're growing.
So you can't just sort of magically increase everything to infinity.
Otherwise, we're in some Star Trek universe where economics are no longer necessary.
Let me allow me to deviate the questioning before coming to this question.
When we talk about A proposition of a new world, of any new proposition that involves big changes.
Our first instinct is how we're going to do this, how we're going to do that.
Is it doable? Is it good?
Does it solve anything?
Does it solve enough? Before we come to the questioning of the new proposal, why don't we question the system we have at the moment?
You can't possibly be accusing me of not questioning the system that we have at the moment.
I mean, I'm an anarchist for having sex, right?
Let me throw out this question before we come to the new world solutions.
First of all, do you think that within a monetary system or any type of monetary system, do you think there's a solution that we will eliminate poverty completely on the planet?
I don't see how that could possibly be a goal that would be moral.
It's not a goal that will be moral?
What do you mean? Well, I don't see how eliminating poverty would be a moral goal.
I don't see how it could be a moral goal.
It's immoral? It would be an immoral goal to eliminate poverty.
Explain. Well, I mean, what about monks?
You know, what about people who are really minimalist?
They want to grow their own food.
They want to build their own houses.
They don't want to accumulate stuff.
I wouldn't want to go in and give them stuff that they don't want, which would have to be taken from other people.
I mean, I don't think that the elimination of poverty would be even remotely moral because some people choose to live poor for whatever reason.
This is their approach to life.
And I mean, I can tell them that they're wrong and they have to change.
I'm not talking about monks.
I don't see monks dying of hunger.
I'm talking about poverty as poor families in the world.
There are billions. Oh, you mean like completely starving to death stuff?
Yes, starving to death or just having one meal every two days.
That stuff could all be solved in 6 to 12 months.
Easy peasy, nice and easy.
Within the monetary system.
Well, not in a government monetary system.
And not with governments.
But if we wanted to, very, very briefly, if we got rid of governments, we got rid of borders, we got rid of foreign aid, we got rid of agricultural subsidies, we got rid of all of the barriers to trade and productivity in this world, there would be no starving people within 6 to 12 months, if that.
If that. I agree with you.
But there's a big but here.
Do you see that ever happening?
Yeah, of course I do. I mean, I'm not faking it in this show.
It's not smoke and mirrors.
Yes, it can happen. And the way that it happens is, you know, we raise children well, they outgrow restrictive hierarchies, and they view government as an anachronism, and we bring down these barriers through reason, evidence, argument, and peaceful parenting.
So you think the controllers of today will ever let us take back our power?
No, because it's a multi-generational change.
I mean, the controllers of today, you know, if this were to suddenly be a giant movement tomorrow, we would see repression the likes of which we have not seen since the middle of the last century.
So no, it would not.
The rule is today. I mean, it's like any new paradigm generally requires the old paradigm to literally die off.
It's like new scientific paradigms require adherence to the old scientific paradigm to get old, retire, and die.
Okay. Well, I'm glad I asked this question.
I think this is the pinpointing where our differences is with people who see money or alternative money as solutions.
I don't see it that way.
I mean, obviously, in the perfect world, in the best of circumstances and good distribution and all you mentioned, yes, there is a solution within the monetary system for everybody.
When I talk about solution, I'm talking about everybody, not for some people, but for the whole planet.
But I don't see that happening ever.
As long as money exists, money is a tool of control.
I'm sure you know this. And we are controlled with money.
And we are manipulated with our fears.
We fear the lack of money.
So many of us do whatever it takes.
I mean, from murder to business manipulation, advertisement, you know, to get in the customers, to steal customers from our neighbors, from our competitors.
And money encourages competition.
No, listen.
Look, I mean, I don't want you to – I mean, you're preaching to the choir here.
If by money you mean fiat currency run by governments, God, yeah, it's horrendous.
It's a living cancer snaking through the brain and soul of the species.
You and I will be brothers in arms against this terrifying and terrible system of central banking and fiat currency.
The thing is that In a free society, like in a stateless society, your approach is perfectly viable.
And if you want to convince people and if you want to make the case and if you want to, through the success of your approach, draw more and more people into your system, as long as it's voluntary...
I mean, this is my argument back to the resource-based economy people.
It's like, as long as it's voluntary...
Yes. Then, you know, more power to you.
I'd love to be proven wrong.
I don't see, you know, the calculation problem identified by von Mises, like, almost 100 years ago now, that without prices, there's just no way to rationally allocate or efficiently allocate resources of any kind, which results in unbelievable wastage and so on.
But, I mean, so I don't think that problem can just, you know, you snap your fingers and economists have been working on that thing forever and nobody's cracked it yet.
I think that prices are necessary.
I don't want to force you to use money.
Or cryptocurrencies or whatever it's going to be in the future.
I don't want to force you to use it.
At the same time, of course, I would expect the same respect in return that if I choose to trade with people through a common medium of currency that I would be free to do that and let the very best system win in the marketplace of ideas.
I don't have to convince you to use money because in a free society you're free not to.
You don't have to convince me to avoid money because in a free society you're free to I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
Or whatever. In the gift-based economy, which is not really an economy, but in the gift-based economy, you will be bidding for bananas, right?
And in the currency economy, I will be bidding for bananas.
And if your system is more efficient and gets the job done better, the bananas will flow towards you.
And if my, quote, system is better, then they'll flow towards me and that will work out one way or another.
So, because resources are finite, you know, there will be an accumulation or a movement of goods and services towards one area or another.
Maybe they'll somehow be split equally and so on.
If money could be eliminated as a medium of exchange and everything be hugely efficient, then that would be an overhead that would be reduced.
I just don't think that's possible.
But the great news is you can like jazz and I can like soul, and we can both get along because the music store has more than one shelf, right?
Well, resources being finite, that could be argued and even if it was true that there are many solutions besides implementing a system that encourages competition instead of cooperation.
Just because it's finite doesn't mean, okay, we stop everything, let's compete now to get that.
For me, there's not much love and connection involved in that, and I want to be headed in my procedure, in my everyday decision.
Yeah, but you see, you're not understanding what I'm saying, Rafi, is that as long as in your world I'm free to use currency, just as in my world you're free not to, we don't have much to disagree about.
Oh, of course you will be. But since we're having this discussion, To clear up some facts, one of the facts I would like to throw out is that the system that encourages competition, at the same time, that will mean it discourages cooperation, at least at some level, right?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.
No, no, the vast majority of the free market is cooperation.
Just think of how many people need to cooperate to produce a tablet or a pencil or a car.
Or a ship, you know, or a guitar pick, right?
The number of people who have to cooperate to produce almost any good and service that you can imagine is incredibly huge.
You know, there's a famous, it's Lawrence Reed, I think he wrote iPencil.
It's a famous, you can have a read of it.
He basically is saying nobody knows how to make a pencil, a pencil which you can get for a nickel or a dime.
Nobody knows how to make a pencil.
The graphite has to be mined and the wood has to be cut and treated and the paint and the little gold ring with the eraser.
I mean, nobody knows how to make a pencil.
And that's one of the simplest and most ancient of implements that you can get for a nickel or a dime.
And nobody knows how to make it.
The amount of cooperation it takes just to produce a pencil is truly staggering.
And the amount of competition...
In a free market is relatively minor compared to the amount of cooperation because you can't compete without a massive amount of cooperation in order to produce whatever it is that you're competing for.
You're talking about limited cooperation.
I'm talking about worldwide cooperation with everybody else.
For example, in my Calber shop, if there were to be another shop opening up next to me or in the same village, would I be in cooperation or in competition with that shop?
Obviously, I would be competing.
I would have to probably offer better services.
I already do the maximum anyway, but I probably have to be careful with my pricings.
You've got this binary approach, which the free market doesn't really support.
For instance, in Toronto, there's two streets that intersect, Yonge and College.
If you go west on Yonge and College, at least you used to.
It's been a while since I've been there.
But if you go west on college, you come across a huge number of computer stores.
And they're mostly mom-and-pop outfits.
I don't know if there's any big box stores there, but all these mom-and-pop outfits, you go in and they have like, I don't know, back in the day, EVGA cards, which used to be a big deal and so on.
How many colors? 256?
I'm blind! And they all move there.
And they all move into the same neighborhood.
Now, why do they do that?
I mean, you'd think that if it was some brutal competition, you'd want to move away from all of the other computer stores, but they don't.
They all try to move together.
Why do you think that is?
Because the money is there. People go there to get that product, that service.
That's where people go. That's where the money is.
That's where they go. Because they cooperate.
Because they all go there to draw people in who want to buy something.
And then they, oh, of course, you know, maybe they'll only buy from one store or maybe they'll buy one thing from another store and another thing from another store or whatever.
But that's a huge amount of cooperation.
You know, they compete in the end, but they cooperate all cooperating together to bring the maximum number of customers who are interested in computers to the same place.
Yeah, it's called coopetition.
I don't know. You can look it up and there's lots of economists who talk about this kind of stuff.
I understand.
I mean, in the shopping center in a mall, I used to be in a mall for 21 years.
I understood the fact that there's like five other stores Offering the same products as me.
In a way, we're also cooperating because since there are a multitude of choices, customers will come in that location rather than going to another mall where there's only one choice, one store offering.
So I see the cooperation there.
It's involuntary and limited cooperation.
That's not the cooperation I'm talking about.
I'm talking about not competing at all, at any level.
Right, but then you just run into the reality that resources are finite and you can't get everything to everyone and it's going to have to be prioritized somehow.
It's either going to be prioritized by price or it's going to be prioritized by some sort of central planning, which is going to inevitably be coercive.
And that's where this love and share and free dissolves into a horror show of central planning and coercion, as has happened with communism, as has happened with fascism, as has happened with some of the left anarchism that occurred in Spain in the 1930s.
So if you keep saying, well, we could just have everything for free, you know, I think that that's not going to be quite enough to take away the natural reality and restrictions of the fact that resources are finite.
And they're going to have to be prioritized somehow.
And the market does a great job of prioritizing them.
And it's not that everything, some people buy stuff so that they can give it away for free.
Right? So some people go and buy a bunch of food so that they can open a food bank and share it with everyone.
So it's not like it means that.
But again, I don't want to continue anymore on this simply because we don't have any fundamental disagreement.
You have a form of social organization that you find compelling, and in a free society, you know, more power to you.
And I am skeptical about it, but there's really no reason for us to have any disagreement.
I mean, in the realm of non-coercive endeavors, Empiricism usually wins, right?
So if your system is great and productive and fantastic and everyone's happy, people will gravitate towards that system and it will end up dominating.
And if it's not, if it doesn't work, then people will gravitate back to prices and we'll see, you know, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
So I don't think there's any reason for you to convince me or for me to convince you any more than it would be for, you know, me to say, you should buy this kind of food and you to say, well, you should buy this kind of food because we feel free to exercise our choices in a free society.
But we both share the same enemy at the moment, which is a powerful central planning government system.
We're on the same team, that's for sure.
One last point before you go to the next caller.
Talking about limited resources, that's not my strong point to argue that point.
I think it's very arguable if we are limited or not.
One example I'd like to give you before I leave you.
You talked about having everybody would want pools.
That's a good example, swimming pools.
I'm sorry, everybody would want what?
Swimming pools in their houses, right?
I mean, not everybody, but many people would order swimming pools in the free world because everybody likes swimming pools.
So what would happen in a free society is that people who do that job, who are qualified to build swimming pools, they would say, hold on a second.
There's no way I could provide 50% or 75% of the houses with swimming pools.
First of all, we don't have the resources, the material probably to build that many, and we don't have the manpower to do that.
So what would happen in that case is we would create community swimming pools.
Not one, but maybe 10, 20, or 50 community swimming pools.
Instead of building thousands, we'll build 50 really nice high-tech swimming pools in which everybody can go and swim.
And that we have the resources to do that.
So there are solutions.
But see, that's exactly what a monetary system would do.
Because the monetary system would say, okay, it's going to be $30,000 for you to have your own swimming pool, but you can get membership at a community swimming pool for $100 a year.
And people would say, oh, well, it's too expensive for me to build that.
So again, if that's the rational thing to do, the price system in a free society would handle that as well.
But I'm going to move on, and thank you so much for your call.
It's always stimulating to look at alternatives to what is, and I certainly have always enjoyed that process.
I mean, I've got... Free books, freedomainradio.com slash free.
There's practical anarchy, everyday anarchy.
There's lots of ways of thinking about what could happen in a free society.
The gift economy is...
A very noble and foundational part of the economy as it stands.
I read a book, probably seven or eight years ago, on the free economy and how big it is.
It's huge, the economy of things that you don't pay for, at least certainly through cash.
It's absolutely enormous. It's one of the top 15 economies in the world, if I remember rightly.
So it's definitely underexplored and underappreciated, and I would love to see just how far it could go.
So we're certainly on the same page as that.
Now, as far as things that aren't free, well, that would be my otter, bladder, wax, mustache, and semi-pirate goatee treatments.
Massively expensive, of course, but I need that lush foliage wherever I can get it these days because...
You know, you go to the hairdresser when you're over 40, at least in my state, and it's like, well, I can't do much about the top, but would you mind trimming the ears and the nose and the neck beard on the back and, you know, whatever else is growing that shouldn't be.
But, yeah, so if you could help us out, freedomainradio.com slash donate, we'd really, really appreciate it.
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Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
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