Money is a very funny thing. It’s only paper, and yet you can trade it for all sorts of things worth more than thinly sliced trees.Other than the arbitrary value we assign to currency, it has no worth. What if we decided no longer to use it? I think our economy would be much more balanced if we accepted some kind of barter system.
Imagine if the desire to trade something was based on functional value. When I say “functional value,” I mean a service’s natural worth based on its purpose and its ability to fulfill that purpose.
Shoes in a store might have a monetary value of $80, but that normally doesn’t reflect how useful they are. On the contrary, a shoe’s functional value is that it protects your feet and keeps them warm. No erratic changing of the market will ever affect that. The market might affect the price of the shoe, but the shoe doesn’t suddenly become more or less useful.
The strength of trading goods and services for other goods and services lies in its extreme efficiency. The economy can never collapse, because its structure isn’t contrived from unnatural prices.
In contrast, a monetary system’s worth of goods are arbitrarily set by how much of your work will buy what you need to survive. This isn’t determined by the workers. It’s determined by those who own the means of production and pay the workers. The men in charge profit from the workers’ inability to control the means by which they get food and shelter. This process is called capitalism.
Bartering strips the business man of this power. Suddenly the economy is based on what things are actually worth rather than what someone else decides they are worth. The truth of the matter is that the economy is capable of self-regulation, and bartering allows this.
Pure trade destroys the need for money. Why do we need to assign another value to something that already has a value? No matter what anyone tells me, eating a cookie has a very definite worth. You can tax my cookie-eating all day long, but that doesn’t change what my tummy tells me as the sweet bliss of chocolate goodness enraptures my body. No matter what the monetary value of a cookie is, its constant functional value cannot be ignored. Our current monetary system insists that things have no worth other than what we give them, which is simply contrary to reality (and cookie-eating).
The beauty of bartering is that it naturally regulates the exchange of goods and services without the clumsy inefficiency of currency. It destroys the tools of those in power to subjugate those below them. The pure trade of bartering bypasses the middle man who profiteers while others suffer.