Kava wrote:Razor One wrote:You seem to be labouring under the point that money is worthless (trust and confidence are not worthless in a modern economy) and that taxation somehow removes money from the economy (it doesn't) and that people profit from the results of their work instead of because of their work (they don't).
What worth does money have? Trust and confidence aren't necessary, either, but do make things easier since otherwise it would probably take coercion.
Trust and confidence have value. They are absolutely necessary in giving fiat currency value, as fiat currency with neither are considered worthless. See the Zimbabwe Dollar for a contemporary currency that has neither, as well as for an example of a failed state incapable of waging war on anyone.
Beyond that, money is a system for equitable exchange. I do work worth X dollars. I can exchange those X dollars for Y foodstuffs. I could work for foodstuffs, but what if I then also wanted water? Would I then need to work for water? Would I have to then trade food for water? What if the water trader does not want food, but blankets? Do I have to renegotiate with my employer to be paid in blankets temporarily so I can afford water?
Money has value because we say it does. The same way that life has meaning, because we say it does. Or that we convince ourselves that what we do matters, because we say that it does.
If you insist that money has no value, I will insist that you send your worthless money to me. If indeed it is of no value to you, surely you will not miss its presence in your life.
Isn't it possible to destroy money that is taxed? I don't see why money can't be stopped from being circulated on a whim.
That defeats the purpose of printing infinite money. Creating money only to destroy it after one circulation through the economy and back into government coffers is pointless and wasteful. You may as well print only the money you need to replace damaged or destroyed notes and recirculate it back into the economy. Government spending on the economy has a large stimulus effect, creating jobs, wealth and prosperity, growing the economy and thus your ability to make war if push comes to shove, or averting a war entirely because your enemy does not dare risk the devastating trade sanctions you'll impose.
As I explained in my prior post, money is the oil of the economy. Remove (or add) it without due consideration and you gum up the works.
Why would someone profit because of their work instead of from the results? Working can create something worthless. A company can go under and fail to pay its employees' salaries.
Let's say there are two jobs on offer. One is to make wooden toys, the other is to sell them. The toy making job pays by the toy. More toys, more money. The toy selling job pays by the hour. Both jobs have pros and cons. The toy maker can make a lot of money if his toys are good and he makes a lot of them. The toy seller makes a fixed and predictable income, no matter how many toys he sells.
This example is of course ridiculously simplified. Put simply, not everyone can produce toys, produce them in the quantity they require to survive, or make them well enough to entice buyers to part with their money, to say nothing of supply and demand. Customer service and retail don't actually make anything physically valuable, but their jobs are necessary, valued by customers, critical for their employers, and they must be compensated... thus they profit because of their work and not from the results. A person working in accounting doesn't make money by balancing the books. He gets paid to to balance the books. He profits because of his work, not from the results of his work. If, in any case, the work they do is shit, they get fired and replaced by someone competent.
Companies go belly up all the time. Companies that produce nothing of worth are usually scams (illegal, unless we're getting into a 'true value' argument) or soon to be insolvent and in receivership. The usual solution for the former employees is to clear their desks and find a new job ASAP, or failing that, apply for welfare to support them until they can find a new job. If the insolvency issue is bad enough, the employees could issue a class suit against the former companies receivers and attempt to extract their due from them, though that's usually a long and drawn out legal battle, and more often it's just called a loss.
Most jobs will compensate their employees at a fixed rate by the hour or via salary. Some do it by commission, with mixes and matches depending on what field of employment you go into. The people that profit from the results of their work are artists, writers, real estate agents and so forth. Often these people sell a product (a painting, a book they wrote, a portion of the profits they made etc.) to enrich themselves. The people that profit because of their work include people working in retail, IT support, help desks, factory workers, journalists, waiters*, the military and the police, secretaries and so on. Their work often enriches others, and those others will compensate their work in turn or risk their valuable employees walking off the job for more gainful employment. The pay will vary depending on many factors, from unions to supply and demand and labour laws.
So... in short... generally people profit because of their work because it offers a stable and reliable income that they can budget with. People who profit off the results of their work have unstable incomes and cannot budget as well.
In an ideal world, Arioch would be doing Outsider full time and would be a millionaire on the profits he reaped, profiting from the results of his work. In reality, Arioch works a full time job for a stable income and does Outsider in his spare time, and occasionally gets supplementary income when or if someone feels like donating because they like the comic. The stable job lets him put food on the table and a roof over his head, where otherwise living from the donations would have resulted in him starving to death long ago.
In an even more ideal world, nobody has to work period, since we'd be in a post-scarcity society and would want for nothing. Any work you would do you'd do because you enjoyed it. Money would be obsolete in such a society and would thus actually have no value, even in trust and confidence, since anything anyone could want could be gotten for free and in whatever quantities you want. Short of developing a cornucopia device though, this is nothing more than a mildly pleasing fantasy. We live in a world where resources have finite limits, from iron to skilled labour, from software to scientific knowledge, thus money will always have a place as a medium of exchange for those resources that cannot be directly converted from one into another.
*Unless you're in the United States, where you get paid in tips, which is absolutely disgraceful.