Some of the younger people in my family are very into bartering and avoiding $ as much as possible. Any thoughts about that?
Barter is popular with a largely Libertarian group that sees going backward as favorable to confronting and solving issues. It works at a local level as long as it doesn’t have to cross state lines and fall under federal tax laws. Don’t expect much local government support though, as it cuts into tax funding for vital services.
It is a fringe movement that simply doesn’t scale up to the needs of a modern economy and only finds support among those who have a deep mistrust of their own democratically elected federal representation. The irony of politicians applying for a job that instantly makes them suspect with their supporters is lost on this group, which is why they fall prey to opportunistic right-wing rhetoric so easily.
Supporters of barter are also prone to attaching their ideology to parts of the Constitution while ignoring, or misunderstanding, the rest. Article 1: Section 8 clearly gives authority to the federal government to levy taxes, which drives the need for the currency and provides control of extreme wealth. The same section also makes the elected representatives the monopoly patent holders of the currency, providing the people with a method of paying the tax by exchanging resources and labor for the currency demanded by denominating taxation and contracts only in the currency they issue at will.
This patent on the currency is not limited to any finite number or supply of any commodity, but is a no-cost commodity itself that Congress can use to provide for the “common welfare” as it is mandated to do by that same section. The mistake that causes so much error in the functioning of our government is primarily due to the inability of the people to understand the difference between a currency “issuer” (Congress) and a currency “user” (anyone who isn’t Congress) and their attempt to force rules on their government that don’t apply to the monopoly issuer without doing great harm.
This misunderstanding of the roles played by the parties of the economy has enabled the investment class to take extreme advantage of the working class with their full support by simply propagating the lie that the people “fund” their government with their taxes, which is exactly opposite of reality. When people believe their government is spending “their” money they work against their own best interests and jealously guard over any expense paid that they don’t directly benefit from, not realizing that doing so only cuts the available currency available in the larger economy.
This also promotes most of the uglier parts of our economy, such as the extreme of income disparity and the racism that often lies behind the choices of who benefits and who doesn’t when voters demand that government make such choices. We won’t fix these problems with the methodology that causes them, which is the concept of unlimited resources and scarce money. The money supply is infinite and the government “funds” us, not the other way around.
This is only limited by the availability of resources and labor to accomplish goals the money is deployed to accomplish, not some zero-sum accounting number of dollars removed from or left in circulation by taxation, which is what the deficit and debt actually represent. A balanced budget, the holy grail of most politicians, is another way of saying 100% taxation that leaves nothing behind to enable commerce, store value/save, fund economic growth, or retire private debt.
To those who understand federal finance at the macro level, it is not a mystery why we go through periods of boom and bust or why the richest nation on earth can’t supply the basic needs of all of its citizens. Those are entirely political choices which may or may not be made from ignorance. They are, however, completely unnecessary and cruel, and they always give advantage to the ruling class by suppressing the power of the purse meant to be in the hands of the people via their representatives.
