[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

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OK. If you changed that to say that one of the functions social mechanisms like contracts happen to implement are money-facilitated transactions, then that would've been fine. But by proposing the 5 principles I did, I was attempting to answer your question of what a society might look like without (or with drastically fewer) money-facilitated exchanges. I know we can go a lot farther than we have, including relying more on co-ops and less on for-profits, including drastically increasing contractual tools (like the "plain language" movement), like adding ethical sections to standard artifacts like research publications, ensuring publicly funded research is freely accessible to the public that funded it, etc.

Can we push that to an ultimate limit where no money is ever used? IDK. Just because I can't yet envision its practical details doesn't mean we can't build it up from principles. I'd enjoy doing that and Dave's provided a good start by outlining prior cultures, even if those particular ones don't scale. Would we want to completely eliminate money? Probably not. I don't toss obsolete tools from my toolbox just in case they're not as obsolete as I thought. 

The question is less about eliminating money and more about relying on a reductive hyper-focus on money and being led by our noses into ad hoc responses like UBI. UBI is like tossing a hammer to someone who needs to change a tire. Wrong tool, dude. But thanks. Maybe I can trade it for a lug wrench?

On 5/10/21 11:35 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Sounds like we're not disagreeing too much. You wrote, "By saying the purpose of contracts and laws is to spell out additional details of money-facilitated transactions ... that that's the purpose of laws, etc. is putting the cart before the horse. We've gone too far, put too much emphasis on the money and not enough emphasis on the otherwise mediated relationships between various parties. Money is a means, not an end, a tool, not the purpose to which a tool is put."
> 
> If I said, "purpose," I should have said "function." 
> 
> Laws typically trump money: OSHA, etc. A company can't (honestly) buy its way out of providing safe working conditions or selling contaminated food. I think that's appropriate. It's not clear to me that I'm "putting the cart before the horse"  as you say. 
> _
> _
> __-- Russ 
> 
> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 11:15 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     No, I'm not *quite* complaining about the reduction of money to a quantifier. My objection extends further to the ability of any particular money (e.g. wooden chits) to stand in, as a mediator, for what it helps trade. Your espresso machine is not *merely* worth $1000. That is the reduction I'm complaining about, a reduction that the accumulation of capital relies on.
> 
>     And, as I've qualified several times, mediating value stores *do* facilitate transactions, perhaps even to an extent that we will *never*, could never, eliminate it. As I've said since the beginning of the UBI thread, I don't *know* if we can eliminate money. But it would be useful if we could reintroduce more diversity into our media of exchange.
> 
>     But, I object to your assertion that we have contracts, laws, etc. to flesh out the details that money doesn't cover. That's not *why* we have contracts, laws, etc. We have those things to support the larger *foundations* of society. That they support money-facilitated transactions is a symptom, not a cause.
> 
>     Socially responsible mutual funds are one example of reintroducing variables into the calculus by which we accumulate capital. Pressuring Georgia-based corporations into making public statements about voter suppression in Georgia is *another* example. Actually attending annual shareholder meetings for publicly traded corporations, and expressing your opinions about the company's activities is yet another way. Carbon offsets are yet another example. Dave's mention of shunning is another. The examples of introducing these variables are everywhere. That you don't acknowledge them when they're pointed out is worriesome. You asked how we can trade contracts without money. I provided an answer. You go on to cite a definition of money. Weird. It's like a laser-focused attention on money to the exclusion of all else.
> 
>     Anyway. My only point, here, is to push against the tendency to do what you've just done. By saying the purpose of contracts and laws is to spell out additional details of money-facilitated transactions ... that that's the purpose of laws, etc. is putting the cart before the horse. We've gone too far, put too much emphasis on the money and not enough emphasis on the otherwise mediated relationships between various parties. Money is a means, not an end, a tool, not the purpose to which a tool is put. And like any tool, it sits in a (large) equivalence class of particular tools, each of which can play the role. And which tool you choose biases what happens as a result. And if you don't deliberately *choose* the tool, just fall into using it by accident, then you'll be biased in a cryptic way.
> 
>     If you still don't see how a complex society can get along with *fewer* money-facilitated transactions, then I'm tilting at windmills. How many fewer? I don't know. But some, at least. Asserting that because we can't eliminate it all doesn't argue that we can't eliminate most of it. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
> 
> 
>     On 5/10/21 10:34 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>     > As a medium of exchange, I think of money as something like a ruler. You can use it to measure things, to compare the measurements, and to exchange things for tokens of units of such measurements. Certainly, such a measurement is not a complete description of the thing measured. Is claiming that a measurement of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself what you are referring to as reduction? I doubt that anyone would take that position. So if you are arguing against that, I think it is something of a red herring. No one seriously takes such a position.
>     >
>     > Still, money is extraordinarily useful for facilitating exchanges that would be very difficult to arrange otherwise. Of course, if it's a complicated exchange one generally needs more than a ruler. That's why we have contracts, laws, etc., to spell out the additional details. I certainly agree with you about that. But I still don't see how a complex society can get along without something like a money-like ruler as a way to establish basic comparisons as at least the starting points of many if not most exchanges. 
>     > _
>     > _
>     > __-- Russ Abbott                                      
>     > Professor, Computer Science
>     > California State University, Los Angeles
>     >
>     >
>     > On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 9:21 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>>> wrote:
>     >
>     >     Using wooden chits *and* US dollars limits overly reductive conceptions of money. It's fine to play word games and point out ambiguity in the usage of the term "money". But it should be clear that, like with languages, having diverse types of money is less reductive than 1 type of money. I'd no more want to rid the world of Yen than I'd want to rid the world of, say, Farsi. Here lie many of our disagreements about hooking one nation's money to another nation's money.
>     >
>     >     Options are contracts. You can trade contracts without money. We do it all the time with, say, "quit claim" deeds. While the overwhelming majority of these trades use money, my claim is that money isn't *necessary*. Of course, it may be effective and efficient.
>     >
>     >     This conversation is about the accumulation of capital and UBI as a band-aid to help maintain a society under the tendency to accumulate capital. In that larger conversation, reduction to a singular, grand unified measure like a single money, like USD, washes away the variation in ways to store value. Storing value in Yuan, as opposed to Euros, actually means something (at least Putin thinks so). Similarly, storing value in a .25 acre plot of land with a fairly maintained building on it is different from storing value in gold. Although they can all be *thought of* as money, only a capitalist does so. The rest of us think, say, our espresso machine, is different fundamentally from our pickup truck.
>     >
>     >     On 5/10/21 8:22 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>     >     > As you say, your alternatives are "money writ large." So how does that eliminate money? It just changes its form. 
>     >     >
>     >     > I don't understand how options further your position. How do you trade them without something like money?
> 
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