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Re: [ox-en] Apple trees (aka capitalism) are bad. What about barter exchange?



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On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:

Hi Evgeni and all!

Yesterday Evgeni Pandurski wrote:
The biggest problem with money is that it basically introduces artificial
scarcity of one
particular good - the money itself.

No. Money just encodes the scarcity an exchange based system must
introduce to make exchange necessary at all. If you have abundance
then you don't need exchange. You can not sell an abundant good (like
Free Software).


There is a *BIG* difference between global scarcity and local scarcity. If
I buy something from you it is obvious that I am somehow scarce of it. But
this a local scarcity (me only). Local scarcities are pretty natural and in
fact
their existence is the sole motivation from the existence of exchange.
Things
are getting much nastier if we have a global scarcity. This means that
everyone
is short of some particular good. Although global scarcity exist in nature,
this
kind of scarcity are edge cases which should not define the way people
trade.
Unfortunately introducing money we switch the exchange of goods to mode
in which trade is globally limited by the artificial scarcity of money.



Given the productive capacity of today we already could have abundance
of many, many things. The exchange system prevents this and must do so
to continue it's operation.


No scarcity - no need for exchange. Hopefully someday we will get there.




I propose a kind of generalization of barter which I call "Circular
Exchange
Trading System" or
CETS. The ordinary barter is a special case of circular exchange of goods
where there are
only 2 participant in the exchange. General idea is that lots of people
declare what
they have for sale and what they seek to buy and the computerized system
offers them
appropriate circular barter transaction.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^

You are just introducing money. What is appropriate? You can not
compare the use value of totally different things. The use value of a
computer is completely different from the use value of a trip around
the world. There is no such thing as "appropriate" here.

If you want to compare incomparable things you need to introduce a
common measure. In today's exchange based systems this is the abstract
labor that is materialized in the good. This is in fact the beginning
of the road to hell.


I explained this in one of my previous mails - I introduce value measurement
but peers do not need to actually have money (or any other globally scarce
good)




I would
be glad to hear from you all possible critiques of the idea I presented
to
you.

My cent. If you want to know understand this better then just read
Marx' capital. The first few chapters should give you a better idea of
what you are thinking of.


I think sooner or later we have to obtain a better understanding of money
and trading
than Marx's. I personally have not read Marx and probably never will. If all
we would to have
read the same books we all would have the same thoughts and nothing new
would be invented.


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