My biggest problem with #capitalism is that it forces everyone to make earning money their primary objective.
Not to provide valuable services for society.
Not to make sure that people don't suffer.
Not to preserve our environment.
All these things are just optional side effects to the main objective of making money, and will be easily discarded if doing the opposite turns out to be more lucrative.
Money on itself is just a tool to represent value which makes it very useful for the exchange of goods and services. The classic barter suffers from the issue that offered goods and demanded goods are often not compatible for the persons involved. For example, a fisher may want to exchange fish with a baker for bread, but the baker hates fish and so wont accept fish as a payment. Money solves that issue as the baker gets money that he can use to buy whatever he wants.
Money can be seen as a unit of value for allowed ressource consumption.
Living even a modest life requires sustained ressource consumption. No way arround that without literally dying.
Humans - given reasonable external circumstances - are capable of self sustaining themselves. This is however often less efficient time and effort wise.
Simple said, someone farming 8 hours a day will produce more food in that time than someone who spends the same amount of time as a hobby farmer. Technical progress has only made this gap
larger. Buying larger fields and efficient machines only makes sense if you require a lot of work to be done in a relative low amount of time.
This is true for the production of pretty much any service and any good. And this leads to specialization. We end up with farmers, blacksmiths and countless other profession that are really good at one thing... and dont - for work - do anything else. Because why would a blacksmith go farming when the farmer can do that many times better? Bonus points for people having different skills and interests... and people are always better at doing something that they enjoy.
So the bargain between the farmers and the blacksmith is going to look like this:
"We produce the food and you produce the tools we need"
This simple bargain becomes a very complex bargain in a modern large technological society. And thus the importance of a common value denominator becomes very very large.
Money is simple the tool used to designate value.
To sustain themselves,
humans need a certain amount of allowed ressource consumption. This consumption requirement can be expressed in money.
Any family, any society and any economy can only sustain itself in the long term, if the amount of created ressource value (which can be expressed in money) is at least as high as the ressource drain.
Nuff said, if you eat 4 plants a day but only replant 3, you will run out of food ultimately.
So we need to both
limit ressource withdrawal
and
incentive ressource production
to avoid unsustainable overconsumption.
In very basic terms, this means that a society - small or large - needs to create at least the amount of ressources it consumes to be sustainable longterm.
There is no way arround that in the end. Because ressources are always somewhat limited, they always need to be an incentive to create more and a disincentive to consume beyond the sustainable means.
And again.. money is just a unit of value for that.
And I would fully agree with you, that we often
have a very dubious distribution of the generated ressources/money and value some things well above and others well below their realistic value.
However one cannot ignore, that even with all unfairness in resource distribution fixed - we still cannot escape the cold basic truth that
ressource input =/> ressource drain.
And for people to be willing to part with their ressource allowance/money, you have to offer something they value at least as high as the money they part with.
And that is the large questionmark in your
"provide valueable service for society"
Who decides what value something has? For necessities, this is pretty easy. Everyone needs to eat and so food will never be without value.
Moving onto more complex things however, opens up a wide and personal value dissonance: People dont value the same things equally beyond basic needs. For a soccer fan, the expensive tickets for a game of his team may have quite a high value... for another person however, the value of those
tickets can be as low as zero.
So how do you value something like this somewhat fair?
Supply and demand offer at least a good indication. The more difficult something is to create, the lower the supply of it is, because most stakeholders are incapable of producing it for themselves. At the same time, this inability to create something for yourself also increases demand, so low supply goods which are seen as valuable tend to be expensive.
That system is not fair and has quite some flaws, but remains a good source of giving something a certain value. If nobody wants something, its value is going to be very low.
Daniël Franke 🏳️🌈
Adrian