Money is not motivation...

Obviously, it’s far more complex - in many ways - which way are you thinking of?

Humans naturally engage in economic activity. The most ‘natural’ is bartering; many monkeys and apes (including humans) have instinctive intuitions about what constitutes a ‘fair’ trade, though to my knowledge only humans engage in spontaneous exchanges of goods. As someone has already said, money is just an abstraction of bartering, allowing the value of exchanges to be saved up or divided, and allowing people to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges even if they couldn’t make a direct exchange of goods.

It’s actually possible to re-appropriate monkeys’ economic instincts to get them to use a abstracted means of exchange:

For Hegel, the unhappy consciousness is divided against itself, separated from its ‘essence’, which it has placed in a ‘beyond’. Marx used essentially the same notion to portray the situation of modern individuals—especially modern wage labourers—who are deprived of a fulfilling mode of life because their life-activity as socially productive agents is devoid of any sense of communal action or satisfaction and gives them no ownership over their own lives or their products. In modern society, individuals are alienated in so far as their common human essence, the actual co-operative activity which naturally unites them, is power-less in their lives, which are subject to an inhuman power—created by them, but separating and dominating them instead of being subject to their united will. This is the power of the market, which is ‘free’ only in the sense that it is beyond the control of its human creators, enslaving them by separating them from one another, from their activity, and from its products.

Columbine High School? Oklahoma City? Virginia Tech? Thats only the beginning.

You will get alot more: “I woke up one morning, and I didn’t like where I was” scenarios, as the human psyche continues to break down even further.

Merry Xmas

Somebody did not get what they wanted for Christmas where instead they decided to take it out on others by depriving them of life itself. :-k

Increased public killings having a correlation with that of stagnation and individual repression within society?

Nah, that cannot be! I read the news earlier today where it told me that everything was all well in the world where all I need to do is keep shopping, working, and take the occasional sedative in order that I blissfully keep paying my taxes for the greater management of government.

That sort of talking is distracting me from my blissful daily programming and indoctrination where I am completely unaware of the world around me as I graze in the local suburban pasture. Bah!

In the next 11 years look foreword to violent group insurrections starting everywhere. My, this is so much fun!

What is economic activity?

Explain.

As far as I know human beings are the only species that enslave one another.

Fiat money is no longer worth it’s own value of exchange in bartering where anymore it’s used as a symbolic instrument of power in a service based economy. It serves only as a behavioral controlling mechanism.

Laborers do not even receive their equal value of wealth back in return for their services rendered in creating products, goods, or commodities.

This is how money or currency has left its traditional origin of bartering.

:laughing:

This is empirically dubious. For all that people can be divided by class and wealth, increasing exchanges tends to increase peace and mutual prosperity. Countries that trade do not fight each other, and people who trade generally have good relationships. The reason is that the exchanges are mutually beneficial: both parties trade a good they value less for a good they value more. Neither wants to jeopardize the relationship.

You blame money for the predicament of those unsatisfied with their lives, but few take the risks necessary to find a better paying job, or to gain the skills necessary to make themselves more valuable in the market, and more proximately few make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate a savings that would buffer them against the risks of a transition. Other loci of blame are the cartels that fix pricing on services, that prohibit trade, that over-regulate markets to the detriment of the fluidity and freedom that make the market work. The market economy has clearly created a lot of good, why condemn the whole system over the imperfect margins?

Humans have innate economic intuitions, meaning that they appraise the fairness of exchanges without being taught to do so, or even told to do so in a given instance. This is true of many if not all apes and monkeys. Humans also spontaneously engage in exchanges, trading one thing of value for another. By “spontaneously,” I mean without being forced to or instructed to or how. Children begin trading e.g. food items from a young age. This is a direct rebuttal to the claim that “[h]uman beings are not naturally inclined to work for others”: “work[ing] for others” is just an exchange of values, with one party offering goods (or their abstraction) in exchange for the time, energy, or skill of another. There is nothing particularly “unnatural” about this exchange, and it is founded on instinctive economic mechanisms.

I don’t think that’s true. Ants and bees are slaves to their queens. If you discount this form of slavery, I think it would be because you include in slavery certain mental characteristics that will exclude any non human animals not by virtue of their conduct, but by virtue of their limited cognition.

Equal value as defined by who? If no one is willing to give a person more than x for a certain good (where x is a quantity of goods or an abstraction of their value), in what sense can it be said that the value of the good is greater than x? The value of a good is not an objective quality of it; it’s defined economically relative to other goods by a collection of exchanges.

There are times when that mechanism breaks down, and in particular a monopsony will undervalue a good, in that the single buyer would be willing to pay more for the good, but does not have to because she knows that sellers are choosing between underselling and not selling at all. Even still, the prices must be higher than the value of the goods to the seller, or else he will just choose to keep the goods rather than exchanging them.

In any case, the existence of market failures is well known, and relatively rigorously defined. The seeming allegation in the latter half of this thread that the market always fails is untenable, at least on the scant rhetorical evidence offered in support of it.

Elaborate?

Trade only benefits both parties when it brings practical prosperity. When another has so much more to gain by exterminating the other party, they will instead do so. Especially when you are talking about governments. It’s all a silly power play for land, resources and especially currency.

Money is only a byproduct of your system. I don’t want to work within your system. I want to destroy your system like I would destroy a bad dream. By waking up from it. The market is a byproduct of a long gone era, one of which silly puppets are still deluded into thinking exists.

You’re a Crybaby.

Voluntary trade does, ex hypothesi. If people are choosing to trade what they have for something else, it is because that something else is more valuable to them than the thing they have. If that weren’t the case, they wouldn’t voluntarily engage in trade. Even if their decision is made under duress, as in the monopsony example I mentioned earlier, they have the option of keeping the thing they have if it’s more valuable to them than the thing they’re receiving in return, so they still benefit, even if only marginally.

Waking up to what? What’s the real world that you see behind exchanges of goods and services? What era ended such that a common abstraction of value no longer facilitates mutually beneficial exchanges? I certainly don’t think that the system we have is ideal, but it’s a very different thing to say that the underlying idea of money is the root of the problem. Capitalism, for all its flaws, has done a great deal to advance humanity, and replaced significantly more abusive power structures.

JAN 1 - Death of The U.S. Constitution - HAPPY NEW YEAR: YOU CAN NOW BE DETAINED INDEFINITELY - "Indefinite military detention of Americans became the law of the land Saturday, as President Barack Obama signed a defense bill that codified that authority, even as he said he would not use it. He will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law”.

JAN 1 -Hollywood On Fire for Third Night in a Row - “City officials scrambled on a busy New Year’s Eve to identify who was behind dozens of arson fires that have spooked the Hollywood area for two straight nights. The fires resembled more than a dozen set before dawn Saturday, mostly in North Hollywood, and nearly two dozen fires set in and around Hollywood a day earlier.”

JAN 1 - Iran Nuclear Program: Country Proposes New Nuclear Talks With World Powers - "The U.N. has imposed four rounds of sanctions. Separately, the U.S. and the European Union have imposed their own tough economic and financial penalties. Last month, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that the current penalties were impeding Iran’s financial institutions, saying, “our banks cannot make international transactions anymore.”

The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if Tehran doesn’t stop its nuclear program. But Jalili warned Tehran would make any aggressor regret a decision to attack Iran. “We will give a response that will make the aggressor regret any threat against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Jalili said.

Anecdote. A broader picture looks very different. The world is not crumbling, it only seems that way because we have more access to information than ever before. Paradoxically, it’s the triumph of peace, prosperity, and global connection that make it look like everything is falling apart.

I approve of this post. Destroy the system. Fuck the system and all those that either control or benefit from it.

That’s what wealthy people are along with benefiting people like yourself when confronted with in house invasions. :laughing:

Quick! Somebody call 911! Save me! I’m too important to fail or be undermined like this!

These people aren’t being fair or playing by the rules of law! Help me!

You little cry babies always want to socialize your losses even after your complaining about public socialism.

This entire system is based upon manipulation and coercion. Both are enforced heavily. Quit trying to pretend that individual independence even exists anymore at this current historical stage of society or civilization.

You know that it doesn’t exist.

People like you can fool most others but you can’t fool me.

There is no voluntary engagement. There is only coerced social interactions that people like you try to fancy up as being voluntary engagement so that nobody asks questions.

Who benefits from this system or any organization of governed markets?

You and I both know that there is no such thing as equal benefit.

The real world doesn’t exist anymore. Human beings destroyed that a long time ago in layers of concrete and mortar.

Agricultural era.

Advance who exactly?

Nothing advanced is free. It costs where you better hope you can afford it or else.

Don’t try bursting their bubble Duality. They won’t listen to you. They have already convinced themselves that their delusions is truth.

There is no such thing as mutual exchanges in modern economics.

It’s all about master slave economics anymore when it concerns manipulating people into the service of others.

By the word service I mean physical and mental bondage.

Modern economics is the complete opposite of mutual advantage.

Peace is just neutralizing, silencing, or the getting rid of opposition.

Your ‘peace’ is hollow.

They probably wont hear anything you say because their mental stability relies on collective delusion to be able to function within the slave system. I would like them to know though regardless that there are always people waiting for any opportune moment to sabotage everything they have put in place and worked for. Love seeing people get exactly what they deserve.

Yep. I was think thinking of adopting as my philosophy the delusions of sheltered academics instead of reality, but then I realized that would make me an assclown.

You know the truth!

Please, enlighten me sage.

Why? You have already made up your mind. :slight_smile:

A person will only enlighten and teach themselves. They cannot be taught by others.

I find genuine insight is found by oneself alone.

Dial back the rhetoric. We can indirectly accuse others of all sorts of mental shortcomings, but we aren’t very well placed to judged. Instead, let’s actually compare the bases for our ideas in facts and logic, and see which world-view better captures observation. Refusing to play when a discussion doesn’t consist of mutual ego-stroking is intellectually dishonest. We’re each of us wrong about something, maybe it’s this. Entertain the idea that when someone disagrees with you, it could be you who is mistaken; I will do my best to do the same.

These claims are too strong. You’re telling me that when you go to the store and buy a soda, your decision is coerced? It doesn’t seem so, unless we give advertising so much credit to think that it controls our lives, in which case buy a Pepsi and enjoy dancing on a boardwalk with a model in roller-skates.

Certainly some decisions are coerced, like, most recently, the decision to buy health insurance. But even then, you have a choice of what health insurance: you could buy cadillac insurance, or ideological insurance that doesn’t cover birth control. Other coerced decisions are that you aren’t able to buy a car without seatbelts, or to fly in a pilot-less plane. But these are distortions of the market, not its complete destruction. In many cases, there aren’t even explicit laws defining how one must e.g. design a product. Instead, people are held accountable by law for the damage their products do, and as a result people choose to spend more time making their products safe. Does it distort a free market? Yes, but a completely free market fails when, as in this example, there is incomplete information by one party about the good or service they’re getting. If people could cheaply obtain complete information about how safe a product is, products liability would probably be unnecessary. Instead, we have a system that assigns the cost of poor information to the person most in control of the safety of the product. Coercive, yes, but coercion for the purpose of internalizing a cost not captured otherwise in the exchange.

Actually, a general argument against money, which I don’t recall seeing here, could be based on just this phenomenon:
One is generally much better informed about an abstract medium of exchange than about the good or service for which it’s being exchanged. Money thus creates information asymmetry by making the consumer less informed than the seller. This will be true in almost every exchange for money, except when money is exchanged for other liquid or nearly liquid assets like commodities, or perhaps securities like stock whose value does not derive from their utility; in these case, the variation in the value of money will be about equal to the variation in the value of the thing being exchanged for money.

This is true, but equal benefit is not necessary for there to be common benefit. If I have a red ball and like green slightly more, and you have a green ball and like red a lot more, if we trade balls we both benefit, though you benefit more.

Nor is common benefit necessary for social benefit. If I am color blind, and you are not color blind and prefer red to green, you are benefitted if we trade balls and I am made no worse off. If you and I constitute a society, the society as a whole is better off, because this transaction has improved your situation without causing me any loss, thus increasing net value.

The worry I think comes in two parts. The first is that one person may be benefitting over and over again, while the other is not, such that society as a whole works to improve one person’s well-being without improving the well-being of another. The second part is that the person who benefits more from one exchange will be in a place to rig future exchanges to increase her benefit. Together, these would tend to enhance each other, so that if the second is true, the first becomes more destructive. This I think is what you mean when you refer to economic slavery.

It’s a problem, but it’s partly why we have paternalistic governments. The best governments will help to reduce this rigging-of-the-game. But there’s a fine balance to be maintained so that government itself doesn’t become another way to rig the game. The transition from monarchy to democracy did a lot to reduce this, but it has not been perfect, and it seems that government is doing less now to prevent it. This is probably why Jefferson advocated regular revolutions to re-level society.

Further reforms can further improve the fairness of markets to maximize the spread of social benefits, and it is still the case, despite all this, that each such exchange creates more value for society, even though it means society does more for some than for others.

I think what Walker is trying to say is that, after you finish reading Carleas’ well thought-out post, you are actually worse off than you were before.

The claims are actually not too strong. They’re perfectly stated.

The evidence for which is that all you did was rephrase what he said, but in a manner of speaking which seeks to alleviate the lack of free will evident in the logic here. It’s a common tactic I see here: someone says something in a polemic/absolutist voice, and someone says ‘No, there are actually exceptions’ with that tone of voice that implies every person capable of reading this wouldn’t have realized that.

Like buying a fucking soda at the store.