Edit: Alright everybody I’m taking off for the night. Lots of good discussion, has gotten me thinking a bit and seeing what else could be done to combat exploitation. See you soon!
To start: everything exists the exact same way it does now, but now it’s just “free”. I don’t like the word free as free is attached to wealth/money so you can say everything can be given away. ALSO, this will not happen instantly, it would take time to slowly make the change happen
It would take time, but I’ve been thinking for a couple days the effects of a society where the dollar or euro or any type of monetary value is removed.
What if we didn’t need money at all?
What if food, water, shelter, and electricity—the four things every human needs to survive—were unconditionally available to everyone, for free? Imagine a world where no one is forced to work just to live, where survival isn’t tied to a price tag, and where people are free to contribute out of passion, purpose, and care rather than fear of going without. In this world, we wouldn’t be racing to earn just to afford what should never have been sold in the first place. We’d be building, giving, and living—not just surviving.
Of course, the first response people give is fear: “Won’t people get lazy? Won’t food run out? Who’s going to do the hard work?” But these fears are based on a world that’s already failing us. The truth is, people don’t hate work—they hate meaningless, exhausting labor done under threat. People volunteer, create, and help all the time when their needs are met. The world already has enough food—we waste nearly half of it. Crime and looting don’t come from abundance; they come from desperation. When you remove the fear of starvation, eviction, and powerlessness, people don’t turn on each other—they start showing up for each other.
This isn’t just an idea—it’s a system reset. One where we stop selling life to each other and start sharing it instead. We’re not talking about utopia. We’re talking about real, local, practical action: community-run food hubs, free water access, public shelter cooperatives, and clean energy shared openly. We already have the resources, the technology, and the people. The only thing missing is the belief that it’s possible. But once that belief takes hold—once even one neighborhood, city, or region decides to stop charging for life—everything begins to change.
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The world would definitely not function the same. If it was just money that disappeared, things would get worse until we create something new to replace money.
If the very concept of something “costing” something just completely vanished from all of our minds, that would be weirder to imagine.
“What if food, water, electricity snd shelter were unconditionally available to everyone?”
Do you mean “there are infinite amounts of everything, and not logistical concerns in moving them” (i.e. complete sci-fi post-scarcity) or do you mean “they exist as they do now, but we just make them all free”? Because you will get wildly different answers depending on which you mean.
It’s an interesting concept and, one day, we may get closer to it but it would require a hell of a lot of automation. I have a hard time imagining people working in a steel refinery or a zinc processing plant just for the fun of it. Perhaps someday those things could be automated, but then someone has to build the machines which do it automatically.
This is Star Trek. Star Trek works for two reasons.
1.) Replicators, powered by unlimited matter/anti-matter power remove scarcity. Virtually anything you need or want can be created from energy. Scarcity has been removed from the Federation.
2.) From TOS-ENT, it’s strongly implied that the WW3 and the Post Atomic Horror brought about a fundamental change in humanity.
We still live in a scarcity world, and you can’t eliminate that by simply saying stuff doesn’t cost anything. You’d moe likely than not end up with a barter economy or people would begin to develop their own “unofficial” currency.
“Crime and looting don’t come from abundance; they come from desperation. “
Rich people commit crimes too.
it would be better as we would all have to stop being greedy and share what we each have with eachother. make our own things and trade with people, using goods and resources instead of money. it’s ideal but i’m not sure if it’s possible
this is just communism with less steps.
in reality im actually pretty far from anti communist, i think a system closer to it than capitalism would absolutely be ideal.
however, stores of wealth are economically efficient. if i grow soybeans and another guy has a cow, he may not need the cow and i may not need my soybeans, but does he want more soybeans than a lifetime could handle when the cow could be frozen and feed a family for a year?
the barter system implies that you have something someone else wants. money fixes the this problem because they can then spend that money to buy anything
Ownership would be a huge problem. Debt would cease to exist which would mean a whole bunch of disputes and claims that would have to be mitigated and we just don’t have the people to do that.
Egos would absolutely explode and be so freaking lost. So many narcissists would be slapped in the face with the reality that they thrive from explicitly trying to have more than everyone else and their souls would be crushed.
Explain to me why I’d bother getting out of bed and going into the office if I didn’t need money.
Then, explain why the farmer growing my food would bother heading out to the field and growing.
…and the factory worker putting my car together
I think we exchange our labor for value and if we lost “money” we’d really need to start from the ground up trying to figure how how to make civilization work.
Becky Chambers takes a stab at creating this kind of world in the book A Psalm for the Wild Built. The premise is that we rebuilt our society, and there is still a form of currency, but that people give each other “money” when they have contributed in some way, whether to you or someone else. So if a musician plays in the town square and you listen, you would reward them. That person then might reward someone for helping them carry bags to their car. So kind of a pay-it-forward culture rather than direct exchange of money for services. I’m not explaining it well, but it’s a short, cozy hug of a book that explores the themes you brought up, and I recommend it.
I love the idea but there are always greedy people who will want more for themselves. There would still need to be some kind of trade system. Or some system
That’s essentially the story of Star Trek. The replicator tech coupled with unlimited power led to the abandonment of a capitalist economy. People like Picard still farm their family’s vineyard, but it is less for economy and more for love and honoring traditional labor.
Someone has to do the work to grow food. Someone else has to build and fix houses etc.
What system can you set up to let people trade their labour for other people’s labour that doesn’t look like money?
There’s a lot of problems with this, and it kind of ignores the fact that money is a way to deal with scarcity and to understand demand.
Scarcity
Scarcity isn’t just the amount of physical resources spent directly on a problem (i.e. how much fuel you need to power the tractor), but it’s also TIME and more abstract resources. So, how much time should I spend on maximizing a certain crop?
Everything is scarce on some level even in an infinite universe because we are finite. The common pop culture example of positive scarcity removal is Star Trek, where the Federation has largely abolished material scarcity by way of infinite energy and therefore virtually limitless physical goods. People are then left to simply pursue personal goals and betterment of humanity as a whole.
But even in Star Trek, you see forms of scarcity all throughout: replicator credits, careerism, scarcity of quarters on starships. Scarcity exists, but it’s less in terms of basic needs. But as Lower Decks teaches us: junior crew members get bunks while senior offers get quarters. Scarcity remains real, even in the Federation.
But the most important thing that most people ignore as a scarce resource is time. Would people trade time for dangerous, even undesirable tasks if they weren’t incentivized to do so somehow? Questionable.
Money as a Signal for a Society
Money is useful not only as a way to deal with scarcity, but it also tells us what society needs and wants. Without some kind of way to measure aggregate demand at a population level, how does a farmer know what people want? Does the farmer send out a Google Survey and people just tell them what to grow? With money, there’s a feedback mechanism that says “we want more almonds!” pretty quickly. Arguably it’s better to have SOME kind of feedback mechanism in place, otherwise we just get either too little of something or too much. Too little food is obviously VERY bad, but too much of something also is wasteful (and even if money isn’t scarce, water and land will be.)
Look up the history of money. It’s quite interesting. Put simply, the reason money exists is to allow people who work on things that are “not compatible” with what they need (for example, you make a pair of boots a week and need flour to make your food daily) to get their needs met.
Also, if you want to take a modern society, do you have any IDEA how very many people have to do their part for it to function? There are definitely jobs that need to be done, like waste removal and processing, that NOBODY wants to do. Why would anyone do them without compensation?
Prices allow for the organic and spontaneous allocation of resources without bureaucracy or administrative overhead.
I’ll do two hypothetical situations to try to explain. The first, the birth of the automotive industry. After discovering this technology car companies began making many new cars. They made sedans, convertibles, trucks and more. They made them from plastic, wood, steel and tin. People, individual consumers, evaluated these differences and made choices accordingly. Overtime companies learned from consumers what features were more highly valued, what the value of durability was, they learned the value of fabric vs leather seats, the value of speed vs efficiency and more. They did this rapidly because it just happened organically, naturally, and spontaneously. Over the course of 100 years vehicles have improved a massive amount, with very little effort from government besides some safety and environmental regulations. Compare the American automotive industry to Russia, where government bureaucrats decided what kind of car the people of Russia would want. Their cars sucked ass, innovation existed only by badly copying the trends of German, American, and Japanese automakers. Their failure to care about prices and their belief that a few select people can make choices for consumers at large kneecapped their potential and strangled innovation. Prices and money had a huge positive effect on the automotive industry.
Now Consider a darker scenario, a famine. Perhaps Russia enters a Civil War and can no longer supply the world with fertilizer. I don’t know the actual numbers but let’s say global fertilizer production falls 50%. In a world with prices, though it would be chaotic, agricultural companies, grocery stores, restaurants, and consumers will quickly adjust. Each individual will make choices about price and quality and will balance different choices. Products that people don’t want will fail, products that continue to thrive will succeed. Fertilizer will be allocated to those products people want the most. In a nation with no money, no markets, responding to this fertilizer shortage would require bureaucrats deciding which companies get access to this suddenly scarce resource. Not only is this inherently less efficient, but bureaucrats are likely to make mistakes because they cannot possibly understand the individual needs of every family. Additionally, it’s a huge opening for corruption. Without price signals determining where scarce fertilizer should go, can we trust bureaucrats to do their job fairly, even if they can do it competently? No! Some of these people are going to scratch the back of friends and family or political allies.
Prices are very important and money is a fantastic, decentralized method for allocating resources. It’s not perfect of course, it’s a large and complex economy no system will be perfect, but there is a reason that currency and trade have always existed… they are very, very useful.
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>But these fears are based on a world that’s already failing us. The truth is, people don’t hate work—they hate meaningless, exhausting labor done under threat. People volunteer, create, and help all the time when their needs are met.
Bartering and coerced labor have existed far, far, far longer than either capitalism or fiat currency.
No, the world would not function the same at all; in fact, it would collapse.
You may want to read from the science fiction series The Culture, by Iain M. Banks. It imagines a post-energy scarcity, spaceborne utopian civilization of humanoids, administered by benevelent AIs and drones, who are all equal citizens with the biologicals. It is technically an anarchy, but social pressure and the ability to do virtually anything one wants keeps crime to practically nil except for the occasional “crime of passion”. Just avoid the first book, and begin with #2, The Player Of Games.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/49118-culture
That can’t work in the world we have right now. Critical resources are not infinite, they are finite not just that, there’s a limit on production rate of goods, so even renewable stuff like food that can be grown is limited.
Humans are greedy. This means that demand will outstrip supply, so sure, things might not cost you anything, but they won’t be available to huge numbers of people, worse than where we are today. You’ll basically have a hugely segregated society, those that got in first and took everything and those that missed out and have nothing.
It’s also now impossible to fix. Those that have everything have everything they could ever want, so have no incentive to work. Those who have nothing will die of starvation and be unable to work, even if they can scrounge the bare essentials of survival they’re not going to work for no benefit.
Until we have enough resources and production capacity that it’s inconceivable for demand to ever outstrip supply we’ll still need some form of trading system, and money makes this so much simpler.
Gene Roddenberry attempted to answer this question with Star Trek to a large extent. He not only imagined a world with space travel but a world with replicators and infinite energy that made it possible for civilization to function without the need to work. Star Trek: The Next Generation exemplifies this where their goal is simply to discover and promote arts and science.
However, if you look at how long and what it took to get there you’ll notice civilization completely collapsed in the face of these technologies and resulted in hundreds of years of wars before civilization came to terms of a life without money.
The turmoil of the wars that followed involved a lot of factors including religion and power struggles, but at the crux of it was how unfit people are to think of a reality where their purpose was theirs to define.
In Star Trek they come to an agreement that is their prime directive when they come to a civilization that isn’t as advanced as theirs they should never intervene or share their technology as it will only result in complete collapse of civilization.
I guess that’s my long way of saying, society would collapse, we’re not ready to think of our lives without it.
This could be a very fundamental economics question. But in truth, we need a concept of money as a universal way to compare, differentiate and trade. Money has this connotation of being an entity of its own. But when laid bare, actual money (that is liquid assets, but not all assets whose worth is defined in monetary terms) is nothing more than tokens to express value. We would find other tools to replace money. Money disappearing would not fundamentally change rent-seeking behaviour or the way people make essentially economic choices because we live in a world with limited availability to information, limited rationality and constrained resources
Subsistence impoverished community living.
Money does a lot of good for a lot of reasons. If nothing else it is a way to store the value of labor.
Scarcity won’t go away, and the need for things change over time. Money helps facilitate all that.
Our standard of living is based on a lot of people doing a lot of things they don’t really like.
So one baker makes 100 loaves of bread per day, and another baker makes 150 loaves of bread per day. Is there a kind of “compensation” for that? Do they each get their “needs” met in the same way from whomever is making stuff to meet their needs?
based on the sheer volume of available workers the suggestion that NONE of them would be willing to spend a few hours a month helping to grow food for the community seems unlikely to me. Farmers still exist, folks exist that are employed in certain jobs only because of the pay and would rather spend that time gardening.
outside of watering and some occasional maintenance most crops are only really hands on in the planting and harvesting phases. we are not even talking 9 to 5 x 5 days a week. I’m certain there would be enough willing labor.
While I understand where you are coming from, I’ve read your responses, and there is a huge problem with your system. There currently needs to be people to provide that “free” stuff. What you are describing is a post scarcity utopia likely created by robotics and ai. We are far from that, and it might be impossible to create.
You seem to be demonizing money when money is not the problem at all. Money is just a simplified form of accounting in a society prosperous enough to allow people to specialize. So instead of us all foraging, hunting, making our own clothes… we let people do those things when they are better at them. Eventually, this gets so complicated that bartering becomes impractical, so money is invented.
To get rid of money, you’d either have to be technologically advanced to the point that we essentially have robot slaves or become so poor that simple bartering becomes viable again. As it stands now, we are in the middle. I’m a great example of this. I have bartered with my massage services in the past, and it’s a bad system. It limits who I can trade with and when. It creates problems like how much of my skills are worth how much of your skills. What happens if you provide me a high value item and we fall out before I give you enough massages? Money simplifies this by converting my services into a quantifiable third category that you can then barter with someone else. Money is not evil bad or wrong. It’s efficient.
The people who have been in power would attempt to keep it by force. Not everyone has access to nuclear warheads and if they did they would be used almost immediately by bitter, resentful people. People have been working and sacrificing their time and energy to get into positions of power in order to control others- it gives them great pleasure. To participate in a game and win. In a world where everyone is winning there would still be a struggle for power and control over others. It’s hardwired into our brains to compete for resources and to obey for access to resources- even if it’s just a pretty girl or great friends/associates. We would be serving whoever has their finger on the button in order for them not to press it.
Personally, I would hate to be that guy. I wouldn’t get any sleep knowing people want me dead because I want to control them and their livelihood or else I will destroy the planet. That’s why many of these people already don’t reveal their intentions; it doesn’t bring them any closer to what they truly want which is full control.
Money and costing are different. Costing will always exist in a reality of scarce resources. In the cave man days you can bet if a guy brought back a dead deer to the cave he would trade pieces of it for vegetables. Money was just an innovation that made it easier.
Everything would immediately cease and all transactions would become bartering and super inefficient. At least 50% of the global population would die out within a year.
I have come to the conclusion some off shoot of society will figure it out and everyone will be watching. And when those people are reporting high levels of happiness hopefully more people demand that version. It involves having a city that can ferment or indoor grow all its food and protein, make all its water from air collection, and make all its own power. Imagine growing scallops as big as a rib eye? Yay.
Social engineering is the real problem. I think it would be some version of communism and abundance. Like if you are a doctor or you landscape and keep things beautiful, you both get an equally nice place to live. Some people like me never stop learning. Others just want to do something helpful for society but then chill. The issue is giving up a lot of the things we really don’t need, and making more things locally again. Artesian furniture, or whatever. Clothes are made from fermented fibers snd maybe people make clothes again for their neighbors. Design studios that build you a simple wardrobe as a service as a citizen. And maybe you don’t have infinite choices on a couch because all units are designed by designers and prefurnished.
I imagine Apple Park campus, but you live there. Maybe you ride a bike 2 miles to where you work in the food growing division. Etc etc. you still need teachers, and plumbers, and all that. Also…. Once stuff is built, you don’t need those builders, unless they move on, society may need to have adaptable vocational support. Maybe I spend 5 years building the next park, but then I get trained as a nurse so I live there. I think society needs better central planning. Most people have terrible taste anyway. Haha. 🤣
This society has no cars. Only bikes, small electric vehicles, street cars and trains. It’s gotta be something like what Saudi is doing with the line, but hopefully not dystopian. And I really doubt their stuff equalizes equity. It will be a class system as always.
Currency is just resource management. It allows me to trade something of value (my time) to person A for something of value (currency) and then trade that something of value (currency) to person B for something else of value (food, goods, etc).
It’s a middleman that keeps me from having to know and do every skill – it allows specialization.
For instance, a laborer needs food everyday. A grocer needs general labor every day. You can trade your general labor for food every day.
But some days, the grocer needs special labor – a plumber, or an electrician. The plumber needs food every day, but can’t always trade his labor directly for food. However, others need his service, so he trades with them for money, which he then trades with the grocer for food.
>To start: everything exists the exact same way it does now, but now it’s just “free”.
This is a contradiction. Things now aren’t free – they cost time to produce. If you waved a wand and made everything free, things would just definitely not exist in the same way, since the magic spell would have to completely and fundamentally shift the nature of our reality to achieve this.
Just a friendly reminder that we already “pay” for stuff with things other than money.
We wait in line, using our time as payment.
We pay with pro-social behavior. A billionaire is still getting kicked off the plane if he harasses the flight crew.
Offering my Aunt cash for Thanksgiving dinner would be extremely rude but offering to do the dishes would be a kind gesture.
Other examples welcome.
No. Are you going to trade someone ten million potatoes for a bmw?
It works in small groups with relatively inexpensive transactions.
It would not work now
“Crime and looting don’t come from abundance; they come from desperation” is a comforting myth that excuses bad behavior by pretending it’s always born of necessity. But history and current data tell a different story.
Desperation alone doesn’t cause crime—opportunity, social permissiveness, and lack of deterrence are far more predictive. If desperation were the driving force, the poorest countries would have the highest looting and crime rates. But many low-income communities around the world maintain strong social cohesion and low crime precisely because they have intact cultures, moral frameworks, and consequences for criminal behavior.
Meanwhile, plenty of looting and organized theft in the U.S. happens not from the hungry or destitute, but from opportunists—groups coordinating smash-and-grabs wearing designer clothes and driving away in Teslas. The 2020 riots saw people stealing flat-screen TVs, sneakers, and luxury items—not formula and diapers. That’s not desperation. That’s indulgence under the cover of chaos.
Looting is a choice. Rationalizing it as “desperation” is not only inaccurate—it insults the millions of people who are truly struggling but still choose to do the right thing.
So you just walk into a Ferrari dealership and drive off with whatever car you like because the concept of paying for it doesn’t exist? Nobody has an incentive to make Ferraris anymore, or iPhones, or groceries, or anything else.
Are you going into work if money doesn’t exist? Thought not. Nobody else will either.