Hacker News Reader

Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.

View on HN

Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing."

It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)

The fact that the underlying number of resources changes dynamically is not related to whether money keeps track of those resources. The quantitative easing is akin to when an OS overcommits memory and starts doling out more memory than actually exists in response to malloc() calls.

This works because people (programs) aren't going to start using the money/memory right away, or even necessarily at all. Yet, it prevents the system from locking up (or crashing). The fact that not that much memory exists doesn't mean that your malloc() call doesn't let you keep track of how much memory you are allocated. You can't just start writing to memory that hasn't been allocated to you, in essence. The memory (and money) put a bounds on what kind of behavior you can do, what kind of resources you can use.

Money doesn't keep track of resources. It is a fake system that has no correlation to how many resources are available to each person, and in fact it is ripe with abuse to hoard resources for those that don't actually need them.

Computer systems and databases are what keeps track of resources, as well as communities. This idea that we should focus on money rather than morals or value is absurd and part of the issue that will end up causing the 2nd fall of rome.

But it does track the relative allocation of resources between all parties, which is all you need to grow food, etc. (and yes, that balance can be changed by printing money, but again, it is simply changing the relative allocations). Communities cannot really keep track of how many plots of land that Corporation X has bought, especially if they are a national establishment buying plots all over the country. You would have to have a distributed mechanism for tracking that, which would somehow involve each district protecting its own data sources very carefully. Luckily, people already carefully guard a data source: dollars. So we don't need this.

Of course we should focus on morals and value. But value is something that cannot be measured accurately using any real world metric, so we only have approximations, of which money is one. As for morals, I'm not sure where you got the idea I said we shouldn't focus on them. One moral I have is that keeping people alive is good, and in the industrialized world, money is the only way to do that, whether you earn it or steal it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com