Everyone needs food. Anyone can grow food. We can barter for everything under a few hundred dollars with food.
We all eat 3 times a day. We normally pay an average of $15 for a decent lunch. Anyone can open a sandwich business and pass those sandwiches out like money. Each one is worth at least $8 if it’s any good. Another guy can barter with tomatoes. Another with spices.
There is a million ways to do it and anyone can do it. There can never be inflation since the food is consumed and doesn’t last forever. It constantly needs to be replenished and since money would grow on trees, everyone would jump in on it.
If we the People ran the whole food operation, Big Pharma wouldn’t be able to poison our food (80% is poisoned).
We would have so much food production that it would simultaneously solve world hunger.
We can still use money for now but we should all start accepting food as payment to get the ball rolling.
As the Merovingian says to Morpheus in Matrix Reloaded:
"No. Wrong."
Food is a barter item; a limited medium of exchange (if you have eggs to "sell" and I already HAVE eggs, we probably won't reach an agreement).
MONEY, on the other hand, is not only a general medium of exchange but also a store of value (a 5,000 year old gold coin is worth AT LEAST as much as a newly-minted gold coin -- now do eggs) AND a means of market-information exchange and regulation.
When something is in short supply (relative to demand), the price goes up and that not only reduces demand for the scarce item but also signals to producers to ramp up production AND INCENTIVIZES THEM TO DO SO.
All of that is why screwing with the money supply is such a disaster. Fiat currency is evil.
Eggs run out fast and more is always needed. People always need eggs and foods.
Don’t go around trying to barter a tool that is used on space ships. Nobody needs that shit. Everyone needs food.
What Narg is saying here is that if one sought to pay for something expensive such as land or building materials, food is not a practical form of exchange. How are you going to come up with the equivalent of $60k worth of eggs? For higher value transactions, gold or silver was used throughout history. People who did business had their own set of scales to make sure they weren't getting ripped off by counterfeit coins.
Bartering food is a good idea and can be a practical medium of exchange for lower value things, but isn't suitable for everything.
Sure. We can use food for stuff under $100 which is most purchases. We can still barter anything including gold for big purchases.
The idea is to barter anything in the end but we need something that can be used daily and everyone can produce if they need it. Since food is perishable, inflation won’t happen. Since everyone can work to produce food, everyone can be their own boss. It’s like a win/win/win situation.
All expensive stuff can be traded for other stuff like gold or even fiat cash if people still want to use that.
Fiat money is government issued currency NOT backed by a physical commodity. That's something we shouldn't keep if we are to adopt a gold/barter system. We need to rid this world of the ever-devaluating monopoly money the government prints to make itself richer and all of us poorer.
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I didn't argue that people don't need food. Of course they do. I'm arguing that barter isn't the same as money. Gold was used as money thousands of years before NASA was even a gleam in anyone's eye. No, you can't eat gold (or shoes or lumber or most other things), but you CAN BUY food with it.
Do you realize how many problems come with physical money? Why do you think there is so much poverty worldwide?
Trading food like money removed much of those problems.
Money also allows for the modern world, like modern dentistry, food at the market and at restaurants (do you really think everyone can grow, process, and prepare their own food?), airplanes and automobiles, computers, and so on. How many chickens would it take to buy a 747 for an airline? Most of the problems of the modern world are from corruption and evil; remove much of THAT and most of the problems go away. Problems of the pre-modern world (typhus, diphtheria, huge percentage of babies and infants dying before they even get to childhood, maternal mortality, ~ 30 year average lifespan or less in many eras, etc) pretty much only get solved by Western Civilization and it's fostering of modern science and free societies. Bring that back and we're good.