A lot of times I find myself thinking the phrase, "I hate money". I always stop myself and think of how odd that sounds, coming from a person who goes to college partly in hopes of getting a well-paying job, who currently works at a job so he can have money, and is sometimes reluctant to spend his money on certain things. So how can I hate money, but also spend huge chunk of energy and time pursuing it? Well, maybe I don't hate money itself, but what it does to people.
Why I'm Not a Fan
Too many times we see and hear about people that put their pocketbooks before actual human livelihood. This happens to people that have all amounts of money. Hell, it happens to me sometimes. How many opportunities have I had to give money to homeless people who need the money a lot more than I do? I could argue because he might be using the money I gave him to buy drugs or alcohol, but in my heart of hearts, I think this is a cop-out answer that a lot of use all too often (that is not to say it doesn't happen, though). Why does money have such a caustic effect on our character? We hear about all these stories of big companies using borderline slave labor to help increase profits. How do these execs sleep at night, knowing that their giving people a nickle a day for hours of intense labor. How do we consumers know that this is going on, but still find a reason to buy their product? Don't get me wrong, I don't have that much of a problem with the concept of a free market, I just have a problem with how we implemented it. I think it's funny how everyone knows that communism looks good on paper but is terrible in its implementation, but people haven't realized yet that its kind of the same thing for capitalism.We just don't see it as well because the people suffering from its effects are oceans away.
In my opinion, money gets in the way of progress and hinders humanity's ascent into greater things. Think about it: can you think of anything monumental that happened that didn't involve the greasing of some people's palms? Now think about all of the monumental things we could accomplish if we didn't have to worry about money. Just because you can't make a profit off something doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't invest time researching the subject and learning more about it. There are certain things that just have intrinsic value in their discovery. Think about when we finally discovered the Higgs particle at CERN's large hadron collider. If I'm not mistaken it has been about a year since the discovery and I haven't really heard of any practical applications or ways of monetizing this discovery. Does this mean we should stop funding these projects? Hell no! These discoveries are unlocking some of the greatest secrets of our physical universe, just because we can't make money off of it, doesn't mean its not important or worth spending time and resources looking into.
Transcending Money
When hearing this concept of a society without money, a lot of people think "well, what would you have us do then, go back to the barter system?" Well, not really. We've already transcended the barter system, and I think in the future we will transcend our current system to something totally new. What new system will be put in place? How will it work? I have no freaking idea. But I do know that as the capabilities of technology rapidly increase in an exponential trend (see anything written by Ray Kurzweil), It will become much cheaper to live longer and more luxurious lives. Sure, the rich will still have better versions of those things other people have, but what about when/if humanity's progress finally peaks? There will no longer be faster versions of things, because we've already made them as fast as they can go. The only thing that makes sense to me after that is that we're just going to have a lot of the best things we can make in enormous supplies. When the supply gets high enough, anyone will be able to afford all of the best technology. At this point (maybe even before), I believe money will have outlived its usefulness. I'm pretty sure there are other (more elegant) arguments that lead to a system that must transcend money, but if all else fails, this is kind of like the "brute force" way of getting there. I said that I have no idea what kind of system we would put in place, but I'm hoping for a system where people work and make things because it's what drives them, because they're passionate about it. Even if I wasn't getting paid for it, I would still program and create software, because it's something I love to do, and it's something I'm passionate about. Who really needs more of a reward than giving something to help humanity. I know this sounds kind of Utopian, everybody working their jobs because they like working them, but I really believe that something like this is a possibility of the future.
Alright, That's the end of my rant. Once again, Thank you all for reading.
-Carlos
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