I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
I've heard the nobility of homelessness and joblessness expressed as an ethos countless times by people who wouldn't care for the work of living off-grid. I happen to work in a town with some of the highest taxes in the country that's also one of the most attractive places for indigent campers. The park across from where I live has become a tent city. I get the pleasure of paying for its "upkeep" while also having to step over needles and human waste every day. A natural extension of the philosophy that people who work for a living are amoral slaves, and that only the indigent are noble is, of course, that it's permissible to steal anything any worker drone has. When I got to the part in this article about his glee at erecting tent cities I really became disgusted. What's beautiful about it? It produces nothing of lasting value. It erodes the physical and social landscape. At best as a society itself, it's a drum circle, getting high, talking about the universe without doing anything much, and escaping. What future is there for anyone who wants all the parks filled with tent cities?
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
He also has an unhealthy relationship with money. Withholding money from being spent is immoral because that money is needed to pay debts and saving money causes unemployment. Spending all the money you get is moral. Of course you are allowed to spend your money on stocks and bonds to maintain real savings.
> Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion.
Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?
On the other hand there is such a thing as a statist parasite (think politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, etc.), and hobos with a belief they're superior to others and love to do virtue signaling as making a life decision to live until the end of their lives supported by others, directly or indirectly, is something very, very wise.
It is easy to radically underestimate how much food a human needs every day and how hard it is to acquire, especially when living a non-sedentary life as a hunter/gatherer.
Trying to accumulate 2000+ calories per day growing food requires a rather significant farm and skill (and weather); doing so with meat requires daily hunting, or a permanent storage facility with refrigeration (unless you like salt and pickled meat).
Doing this while trying not to die from exposure or injury is even more challenging.
I don't think that comment is underestimating it, but rather saying that living off the grid would be impressive because it's hard. Living off of charity or the work of others isn't impressive.
It's also a little harder these days with how barren the environment is, comparatively. The oceans and shorelines especially, past generations could walk on down and gather lobsters by hand. Good luck now. Maybe after a few hundred years of human population collapse.
Yes, and in the northern hemisphere at least, you quickly realize that foraging for plants is a waste of time. There just isn’t enough calories.
Re daily hunting, meat actually keeps for quite a while when hung in cooler temps (heat is not your friend when hunting). This is routinely done with eg deer. And it is easy to dry meat of all sorts, or even smoke it as that has the same effect and also makes it even more delicious.
That's far more complicated than you'd suspect, at least in the US. There are a litany of policies that criminalize self-sustainment. Granted I suppose one could consume pests without being harangued for poaching, but that doesn't mitigate property laws, and all property is owned if not privately then publicly and in either case most often requires license to be there, whether explicit or implicit. Certainly doing any reasonable amount of cultivation is seriously complicated by this. So you're legally barred from hunting, barred from cultivation, and you're left with scavenging or gathering and that's highly dependent on a number of factors. Granted the probability of being found out in the depths of the wild are minute, it is nonetheless a serious existential threat. Let's just say we're at the mercy of our captors.
Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.
So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.
>if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Or among the last, being used to it by now. Beggars have existed under all regimes and all kinds of economic collapse. Cushioned middle class people however, didn't do as well under the latter...
Being in Victoria certainly helps with his lifestyle too. It's probably the best city in BC you could hope to be in if you're homeless. It's a nice city, there's lots of green space, lots of facilities around for the homeless, a relatively small actual homeless population then the tourist homeless population of young people camping for fun.
I really doubt he'd be able to maintain that lifestyle anywhere else. Definitely wouldn.t be able to live like that in Vancouver.
Hi, someone from Victoria who hasn't bothered to live there for a long long time.
You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem.
I'm never going back, it's gotten that bad. I know so many people who have died from overdoses. It would have been a nice place around 12 years ago but after around the Vancouver olympics, the region has turned into some kind of black hole of misery and misambition outside of the wealthy condo social bubble and being on the wrong end of the ensuing wealth disparity. Unchecked money laundering on the housing market was a huge problem leading to this kind of scenario as well. Almost none of my friends who stayed there are the successful and happy ones. Even if you have like two decent blue collar jobs you may still end up living on a friend's couch for long periods of time just for a lack of affordable housing where your neighbors aren't doing shit like moving a stove at 4am because they dropped their flap of fent-adulterated heroin behind it (my own experience in the last apartment I rented before it really went to shit out that way -- that still cost me like 1000/mo)
Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live in the only region where they don't get found frozen to death in bus stops. They do this in the USA, too, quite sadly.
It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabonds as "roving priests" then what they are doing is of the same concept. Although the difference between a local priest and some modern hippie rhetoric is a priest has relationships with his congregants. The idealist vagabond does not. So it's much harder for them to garner any support.
Traveling Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia live solely on donations. They don't necessarily have an individual relationship with "parishioners" any more than this particular hippie does (probably less). Whether it's beneficial for anyone for too much of society's resources to be allocated to the practice is a question. If you view spiritual comfort and the pursuit of karma as a kind of social glue, then some amount of tolerance for it might be positive for society.
Why is it ironic? The system may be bad, or it may not be, but the fact that it is virtually impossible to survive completely outside it is not evidence of it being bad or not.
Maybe one could see it as a form of civil disobedience ... surely it counts that the person lets another person take the job he might have taken and ultimately uses less resources than the average worker (commute, buying power, paper trails etc) ... also one might argue those opting out help push up wages... I personally am in favor of working as little as possible, outlawing"big corporations" encouraging artisans and entrepreneurs and veggie farmers...
I don't know what to say to the poster about the druggies.. except maybe have some compassion and consider maybe society should reach out and help more (maybe he lives in the US where the recent oxycodone epidemic was caused by the permissivness of said society)
Yes, he receives handouts, but you left out his values of simplicity, community, and such.
Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, and many peers also live off taxpayer money and impoverish poor communities by siphoning money from them, plenty of regulatory capture.
We could probably 10x the number of “handouts” as you call them, at least in the US, and nothing would change.
We’ve auditioned it already: $4T in stimulus, the $600/wk employment checks, etc. What negative negative impact really did that have on an average person’s day to day life? “Handouts” made pay rise for the first time in decades.
Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of the rent forbearance and eviction moratorium - and I don’t even agree with those policies.
He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?
Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.
The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.
There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.
If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
But we are special, so naturally it'd be we who get the interesting exciting jobs in the post-money society. It'd be all the non-special people who'd be cleaning shit off the sidewalk, though of course they'd enjoy it since they would no longer be burdened by money.
> I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them.
Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.
> Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them
Is that a bad thing?
One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy investors, having a car is just about mandatory, a century of very materialistic consumer culture, regulatory penalties for being poor, etc. I'm shocked that people don't question more of this stuff.
(Speaking of motivating people, governors of many states recently cut unemployment benefits to get people back to those low status jobs, instead of giving them more money. Funny how many people objected to those handouts but are fine with all the tax breaks that investors get on empty properties.)
Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing evermore!"
Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.
Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.
“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”
> Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
That’s one theory, and it’s not even the one Graeber preferred. According to him (and supporting evidence) money originated as a way to “keep score” of debts.
The question of the origin of money is an interesting one, but that will be probably be unsolvable, since some of the alternative theories (like barter) would leave little to no evidence.
It's been a while since I read that book but I believe the message was also that money allowed groups to grow larger than the Dunbar number. In a small community, you can keep track of the favours with everyone. It's also highly likely that you'll see someone you help out with again so there is a good chance you'll get paid back.
Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.
The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
> Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.
Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job?
Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone?
The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries.
And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
> They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done.
While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.
In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
I'm the last person to be charged with "feminist-speak" and I actually agree that it's usually women who end up in these undesired jobs.
Most communes and cults that give up money end up using some other form of control. NXIVM is a recent example, but most of these fringe movements discover women are more useful and less trouble than men.
I’ve never lived in or studied commune living but do you or the GP have nonfiction sources? I’m hesitant to take either of your claims as truth without them given my own lack of knowledge. Thank you!
I know it's anecdata, but from my experience cooking at a local church it was almost always the women who would come and help clean up after service. Not just women, of course, but they were definitely over-represented on that front.
> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
>There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.
Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact?
I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis.
Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpetrators would get away with it Scot free because they were high-status.
"There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach."
This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.
I don't understand why the dishwashers leaving needs to cause societal breakdown, though. After they leave, surely someone thinks "Hm, we have no clean dishes any more and nobody's volunteering, so I guess I'll need to clean some dishes, if only for myself, but then once I'm in dishwashing mode it's efficient to clean more dishes than I personally need, and even better if someone decides to reward me for cleaning their dishes by doing my laundry since they realized someone needs to do that".
I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?
It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
You'd be fine with doing a number of people's dishes every single day, dishes that are never cleaned by their user, for multiple hours with no pay because you're in dishwashing mode?
Is it "usually women" who do the unglamorous jobs that no one else wants to do? This doesn't really seem true, but maybe you have a source that shows it?
> From cooking and cleaning, to fetching water and firewood or taking care of children and the elderly, women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men.
From what I’ve seen, men get stuck with the jobs women don’t want to do. Just look at our current society. Who are the miners, the garbage workers, the delivery people?
You’ll notice there’s a push to get women into comfy office jobs like programmer and not strenuous jobs like oil rig worker.
Someone can reply to me and cherry pick to show counter examples but for the most part it’s men doing these jobs.
Maybe if it was only the people who did the jobs that no one wants to do who get paid then people wouldn’t be trying to get rid of the money system. How many thousands of years would a dishwasher need to work in order to earn what someone does in one year from making 100 million in a year as a corporate fat cat, a sports player, movie star or a business owner
How much money should the modern inventor of the electric dishwasher receive, given the labour saved by the invention?
And as much as I utterly fail to get spectator sports in general, footballers get their money specifically because people pay to watch their teams and the teams are more popular when they win and therefore the teams directly bid against each other for the best players. Similar logic for movies and their stars, and in both cases there are a lot of people at the bottom who do similar things for approximately nothing as it’s fun — but they’re not the best in the world at what they do, and only the best can compete with the best.
The connection in sports and media is a lot more direct than asking if (and how much) a corporation’s overall performance can be attributed to the skills of given fat cat acting as a multiplier on the work done by those under them.
And then you have the last question: what is the stuff which must be done? Most individuals could live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, yet no city (UK definition rather than USA) can survive everyone trying that at the same time, let alone the whole world. Is shipping in the “must have” list? If just shipping stopped, much of the UK would starve even if everyone turned their gardens into personal farms like in WW2. Who makes the ships? Who digs up the raw materials for the ship?
If you can wash dishes for a billion people in the world, freeing everyone from the burden of taking, sorting, drying, washing dishes, putting all dish washers out of work, i guess, you can become pretty rich too. People will have time to do something else.
Societies can work without money, or without using them that often, there used to be many self-sufficient peasant communities (villages and even entire mountain valleys) that used to manage just fine without actually using (much) money. Of course that modernity and the industrial revolution put a stop to that but it can be done.
Yeah. With money, there are lots of problems such as this too. I agree that money is evil. But I think a system with money is slightly less evil than a system with no money.
I do my own dishes now, I'll do my own dishes then.
Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.
Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.
[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery...
[2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.
Devil's advocate here. Failing sufficient encouragement to do tasks (psychological/sociological rewards as got through volunteering), most of those tasks can be automated or replaced by an alternative.
Didn’t groups of people live without money just fine for most of human existence? We worked together. Money only entered the equation when the groups we lived and interacted with started getting too big and impersonal. Generosity is easier when you know the people benefiting from your work. Greed and freeloading are easier when you don’t.
I would argue that we are living in a all time high of human generosity, on a scale previously unimaginable. It just isn't carried out on a personal and emotional level.
I feel you are presenting a false dichotomy. If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? It seems that capitalist money is just hidden punishment: do something you don't want to do for a pittance, because you have no leverage. In a family, in a community there are also ways to incentivise prosocial behaviour just by culture, which is why e.g. most of German emergency operations are volunteer based. And in most associations, people are if not happy then perfectly willing to do the boring job if that's the way they become a part of the association. Social norms and customs and their establishment are a whole lot more complicated than "punishment from leaders"
> If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best?
Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.
Because most boring jobs require skills that everyone has. Specialization makes the other jobs have higher salaries, not because they are less boring, but because they can only be done by a smaller amount of people.
I agree that in small situations you can bring social pressure to solve this problem. Sometimes. Some families break up over issues like this.
As you scale up, it gets harder and harder. You get a few people who are intentional free riders. The hard workers see the free riders sitting right next to them stop. Then more and more hard workers defect.
That system of emergency operations is a great counter example. You correctly point out that it's good to have a system with more than just monetary incentives. You have to have a mix of monetary incentives, punishments and other incentives such as just the feeling that you're helping out, or perhaps prestige.
I'm not arguing to get rid of all incentives except money. Those other levers are vital. I'm arguing against a system with no money.
The Victoria man is a radical, he's there to start an interesting conversation, he's succeeding.
> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.
Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.
It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
I hate arguments like this. People who want clean dishes will do dishes. And no there's no free-rider problem because they don't have to do dishes for anyone else.
And people who want to eat will farm their own food? And people who want medicine will craft their own medications?
Self-sufficiency and moneyless societies are pure fantasy, unless they include giving up all modern amenities. I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading.
It’s an extreme amount of work to be self-sufficient.
I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral. If everyone did this we'd all live in a far worse world.
This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive. I relate to him in that I value money very little as a medium to facilitate my own happiness, but I still want to make a lot of it so I can give more.
He seems sweet though. I think I would get on with him were we to ever meet.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a leech on society. He has two children he could not support (and has no contact with), he's constantly mooching off others for his basic needs, and there's not a word in the article about him ever doing a single thing productive for society. And unlike many other homeless people who legitimately are unable to contribute productively, this is all his choice.
He's lucky he's in modern society where we at least take some care of people like him. Go back further in time and he'd have been ostracized from his hunter-gatherer community for not contributing, and would've lived a short life as a hermit.
Really? Why do you assume any society is free of leeches? Heck, even Torrent has them. I think he probably would be a shaman or something like that and he would still live a similar life.
Funny, he'd fit more in a hunter-gatherer society because guess what they also don't have... (to spell it out: money).
I mostly agree with what you write, but "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type.
I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange for some "gifted" groceries and a room. Obviously the city doesn't want to enter into customized barters with all its employees.
I agree. His heart is in the right place. And he's fighting the good fight. There is something wrong with a system which won't allow a spot somewhere in the city to put up tents. He's right about that.
But I don't think everyone has to go as far as you, and give more than they take. I think we can find win-win situations where we both benefit. I cut your your hair and you paint me a picture. We both win. But it's hard to find good one to one barter like this. Money is the way to find more win-win situations. In a system with no money, you're back to only one to one, so there are less win-win exchanges, and everyone is poorer.
> I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral.
Taking? It seemed pretty clear that he doesn't ask anyone for anything. People give him things of their own free will.
> This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive.
Give more money than you receive? There are other things that can be given, like time, companionship, love, etc.
The guy from the article is striving to make the world better for those who can't afford a home in Canada (Vancouver being ridiculously expensive, a separate conversation), and prompting an interesting conversation about how focused we are on money. I think those are valuable contributions to society.
Or should society force everyone onto the same page, and moralize against those who can't or don't want to keep up?
(These are questions that I think of, just throwing them out there...)
The Sun provides the Earth with enormous amounts of syntropy (this is the inverse of entropy), and we can capture this through productive labor before it inevitably dissipates off into space.
As a toy example, it is certainly mathematically possible for everyone to grow more calories than they consume. We wouldn't want this, for the obvious reason that we don't need more calories than we consume, and this would be labor-intensive enough to leave many useful tasks unfilled.
But it proves you wrong: there's nothing preventing "give more than you receive" from being a categorical imperative. Certainly nothing "mathematical".
>This is mathematically impossible to apply universally. Can it be a moral code if it can't be universal?
It's obviously impossible but it is better than the inverse which is also impossible. The difference is that if you are below the potential that is actually possible you will approach the maximum potential of your society. You're failing, but you are failing upwards.
"taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral." is effectively trying to approach the minimum potential of your society i.e. zero.
> I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral. If everyone did this we'd all live in a far worse world.
We have a large upper class that does exactly this and not only do many people seem not to mind, they find membership of this class aspirational. It’s how capital income works and what capitalism is built on.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
Uh, I'm not sure that's what I would have taken away from this.
Alternative title: a bum glamorizes his parasitic lifestyle.
Money is one of many solutions designed to allocate resources on a large scale. Of course, there are others, but he doesn't propose any alternative system. He's just a parasite. A pre-industrial society most likely wouldn't be able to support his existence so easily and he would either starve to death or start working.
He's less of a parasite than many rich people! I'm thinking of those who are nothing better than rentiers and/or running cartels, commandeering common resources for their own profits, accumulating money for themselves at the expense of society, who glamorize materialism and moralize hard work because that's what keeps the money rolling in from the plebes, and having the support of the government to keep them on top.
They seem to be have done, and are doing, way more harm to our society than this guy.
Money is only one kind of power as I learned from going from working stiff to millionaire (thanks software biz!) to homeless broke person (cursed alcohol.) There is the shamanic-like power of a deeply spiritual person. There is the leadership power of a good manufacturing supervisor or ship captain. There is the moral power of Martin Luther King or Solzhenitsyn. I've come to the conclusion that accumulating money is how people who otherwise wouldn't have any power to purchase it. There's a easy test I do in this industry when a rich person publishes a thought piece that doesn't move me: Would this person have any power if they weren't rich? A lot of times the answer is no.
This Victoria man has another kind of power: The power that gets other people to take care of his needs for him without objecting or rejecting him.
> Would this person have any power if they weren't rich? A lot of times the answer is no.
In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.
Junior gets to fail again and again until they succeed, and then the return on capital further institutionalizes their family's power.
I feel a bit sorry for them, because with money you can build yourself a really nice gilded cage (or be born in one), which is extremely difficult to escape from because it would take giving up the money. This makes it hard to develop the other kinds of powers I mentioned. I believe these thoughts are not my own, but are the basis of ideas like "The love of money is the root of all evil" and "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (I am not a Christian but I am familiar with it - I'm sure I could find similar thoughts in other religions)
>In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.
Well, this may be bad but what is the alternative? It's not like the life of an average citizen is any different other than in degree. They also use money to go to a good school and good college to get good jobs at good companies. I don't see the injustice here as substantial. I see bigger flaws in the money system than our society maintaining itself.
Usually those "rich people's" thoughts are interesting not because they're worth millions or billions, but because they've built something impressive over their lifetime and probably have gained valuable insight as a result.
Most people wouldn't be very interested in an interview with a Walton heir for instance, but Sam Walton himself would have no problem drawing an audience.
He cultivated those other powers before he became rich, or he most likely wouldn't have been able to build what he did. I think a good example is Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs went to India, practiced Zen and experimented with psychedelics before he built Apple. He found his power and used it. Bill Gates was born rich and is having a tough time inspiring people at the moment.
Exactly. If you want to live without money, that should be doable, but this isn't it. You can live on a homestead in the middle of nowhere, grow your own crops, raise your own cattle, barter with neighbours and be completely self-sufficient without money. This guy just lets other spend money for him.
>He claims he hasn’t spent any money since. It’s true, his friends have told me. No money at all.
This quote was kinda funny to me, because the online text doesn't convey any sarcasm or tone.
But considering he's actually just a mooch I sort of implied the tone of that comment to be quite snarky. "Yeah, no money at all, he won't spend a dime" - this guy's poor friend.
He's not just living off trash. People give him food too, his friend has spent money on him for things like printing his book. He's indirectly using cash.
Readit News
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
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People have different values. Long ago we forgot that if it's not shown on mtv as something to aspire towards it's not the best pursuit of our time.
All the best chasing that lambo you'll never afford whilst looking over your shoulder at others smart enough not to get into that game.
In my home country we actually still have people living off their land and animals, off hand dug wells and cut down trees, using no money.
That's rather extreme, though, most villages have electricity at least.
Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion.
Some good things come out of having them that do not come out of having another corporate drone.
Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?
On the other hand there is such a thing as a statist parasite (think politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, etc.), and hobos with a belief they're superior to others and love to do virtue signaling as making a life decision to live until the end of their lives supported by others, directly or indirectly, is something very, very wise.
False dichotomy much?
Name one odd philosopher poet that has brought anything to the table
It is easy to radically underestimate how much food a human needs every day and how hard it is to acquire, especially when living a non-sedentary life as a hunter/gatherer.
Trying to accumulate 2000+ calories per day growing food requires a rather significant farm and skill (and weather); doing so with meat requires daily hunting, or a permanent storage facility with refrigeration (unless you like salt and pickled meat).
Doing this while trying not to die from exposure or injury is even more challenging.
It is amazingly nontrivial.
Re daily hunting, meat actually keeps for quite a while when hung in cooler temps (heat is not your friend when hunting). This is routinely done with eg deer. And it is easy to dry meat of all sorts, or even smoke it as that has the same effect and also makes it even more delicious.
This is what I thought the article would be about. Instead it’s glorifying living on handouts and other people’s largesse.
Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.
So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.
Or among the last, being used to it by now. Beggars have existed under all regimes and all kinds of economic collapse. Cushioned middle class people however, didn't do as well under the latter...
I really doubt he'd be able to maintain that lifestyle anywhere else. Definitely wouldn.t be able to live like that in Vancouver.
You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem.
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/victoria-posts-warning-si...
I'm never going back, it's gotten that bad. I know so many people who have died from overdoses. It would have been a nice place around 12 years ago but after around the Vancouver olympics, the region has turned into some kind of black hole of misery and misambition outside of the wealthy condo social bubble and being on the wrong end of the ensuing wealth disparity. Unchecked money laundering on the housing market was a huge problem leading to this kind of scenario as well. Almost none of my friends who stayed there are the successful and happy ones. Even if you have like two decent blue collar jobs you may still end up living on a friend's couch for long periods of time just for a lack of affordable housing where your neighbors aren't doing shit like moving a stove at 4am because they dropped their flap of fent-adulterated heroin behind it (my own experience in the last apartment I rented before it really went to shit out that way -- that still cost me like 1000/mo)
Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live in the only region where they don't get found frozen to death in bus stops. They do this in the USA, too, quite sadly.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...
Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, and many peers also live off taxpayer money and impoverish poor communities by siphoning money from them, plenty of regulatory capture.
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Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of the rent forbearance and eviction moratorium - and I don’t even agree with those policies.
Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.
The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.
There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.
If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
You’ve hit the crux of the issue. Most people who push for these types of social changes have rarely been involved in the hard work.
They’re the “ideas” person. Same people who wanna give you 5% of their amazing idea so you can implement it.
I don’t really know anyone who hates their line of work or lacks interest in their field (plenty in their job, but not their field).
That’s probably because I only know salaried professionals/soon to be professionals (interns).I suspect many others are in the same boat.
Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.
Is that a bad thing?
One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy investors, having a car is just about mandatory, a century of very materialistic consumer culture, regulatory penalties for being poor, etc. I'm shocked that people don't question more of this stuff.
(Speaking of motivating people, governors of many states recently cut unemployment benefits to get people back to those low status jobs, instead of giving them more money. Funny how many people objected to those handouts but are fine with all the tax breaks that investors get on empty properties.)
Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.
Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
That’s one theory, and it’s not even the one Graeber preferred. According to him (and supporting evidence) money originated as a way to “keep score” of debts.
The question of the origin of money is an interesting one, but that will be probably be unsolvable, since some of the alternative theories (like barter) would leave little to no evidence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job?
Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone?
The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries.
And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.
In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
Most communes and cults that give up money end up using some other form of control. NXIVM is a recent example, but most of these fringe movements discover women are more useful and less trouble than men.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact?
I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis.
Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpetrators would get away with it Scot free because they were high-status.
This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.
It's easy to imagine paradise in cultures we don't understand but reality is rarely that pretty.
I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?
It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-...
You’ll notice there’s a push to get women into comfy office jobs like programmer and not strenuous jobs like oil rig worker.
Someone can reply to me and cherry pick to show counter examples but for the most part it’s men doing these jobs.
And as much as I utterly fail to get spectator sports in general, footballers get their money specifically because people pay to watch their teams and the teams are more popular when they win and therefore the teams directly bid against each other for the best players. Similar logic for movies and their stars, and in both cases there are a lot of people at the bottom who do similar things for approximately nothing as it’s fun — but they’re not the best in the world at what they do, and only the best can compete with the best.
The connection in sports and media is a lot more direct than asking if (and how much) a corporation’s overall performance can be attributed to the skills of given fat cat acting as a multiplier on the work done by those under them.
And then you have the last question: what is the stuff which must be done? Most individuals could live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, yet no city (UK definition rather than USA) can survive everyone trying that at the same time, let alone the whole world. Is shipping in the “must have” list? If just shipping stopped, much of the UK would starve even if everyone turned their gardens into personal farms like in WW2. Who makes the ships? Who digs up the raw materials for the ship?
That sounds like modern retail workers who have spouses to supplement earnings to house & feed themselves.
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Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.
Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.
[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery... [2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.
Who's going to pay to automate it?
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Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.
Because most boring jobs require skills that everyone has. Specialization makes the other jobs have higher salaries, not because they are less boring, but because they can only be done by a smaller amount of people.
As you scale up, it gets harder and harder. You get a few people who are intentional free riders. The hard workers see the free riders sitting right next to them stop. Then more and more hard workers defect.
That system of emergency operations is a great counter example. You correctly point out that it's good to have a system with more than just monetary incentives. You have to have a mix of monetary incentives, punishments and other incentives such as just the feeling that you're helping out, or perhaps prestige.
I'm not arguing to get rid of all incentives except money. Those other levers are vital. I'm arguing against a system with no money.
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> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.
Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.
It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
Presumably the person who dirtied them. So they can use clean dishes and not get sick from mold growing from the old food?
Science has given us plenty of evidence to do as we do in a number of contexts.
Deferring to the politically empowered is an unscientific basis for economic activity.
We need not rely on the superstitions of dead men who were less educated than us.
And people who want to eat will farm their own food? And people who want medicine will craft their own medications?
Self-sufficiency and moneyless societies are pure fantasy, unless they include giving up all modern amenities. I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading.
It’s an extreme amount of work to be self-sufficient.
This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive. I relate to him in that I value money very little as a medium to facilitate my own happiness, but I still want to make a lot of it so I can give more.
He seems sweet though. I think I would get on with him were we to ever meet.
He's lucky he's in modern society where we at least take some care of people like him. Go back further in time and he'd have been ostracized from his hunter-gatherer community for not contributing, and would've lived a short life as a hermit.
I mostly agree with what you write, but "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type.
I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange for some "gifted" groceries and a room. Obviously the city doesn't want to enter into customized barters with all its employees.
But I don't think everyone has to go as far as you, and give more than they take. I think we can find win-win situations where we both benefit. I cut your your hair and you paint me a picture. We both win. But it's hard to find good one to one barter like this. Money is the way to find more win-win situations. In a system with no money, you're back to only one to one, so there are less win-win exchanges, and everyone is poorer.
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It's a great community where I think you'd fit in: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
Taking? It seemed pretty clear that he doesn't ask anyone for anything. People give him things of their own free will.
> This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive.
Give more money than you receive? There are other things that can be given, like time, companionship, love, etc.
The guy from the article is striving to make the world better for those who can't afford a home in Canada (Vancouver being ridiculously expensive, a separate conversation), and prompting an interesting conversation about how focused we are on money. I think those are valuable contributions to society.
Or should society force everyone onto the same page, and moralize against those who can't or don't want to keep up?
(These are questions that I think of, just throwing them out there...)
Noo! You can't do this. If everyone did this everyone would be better off!
This is mathematically impossible to apply universally. Can it be a moral code if it can't be universal?
Although this might be applicable if you live in a wealthy circle and there are poor circles.
The Sun provides the Earth with enormous amounts of syntropy (this is the inverse of entropy), and we can capture this through productive labor before it inevitably dissipates off into space.
As a toy example, it is certainly mathematically possible for everyone to grow more calories than they consume. We wouldn't want this, for the obvious reason that we don't need more calories than we consume, and this would be labor-intensive enough to leave many useful tasks unfilled.
But it proves you wrong: there's nothing preventing "give more than you receive" from being a categorical imperative. Certainly nothing "mathematical".
It's obviously impossible but it is better than the inverse which is also impossible. The difference is that if you are below the potential that is actually possible you will approach the maximum potential of your society. You're failing, but you are failing upwards.
"taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral." is effectively trying to approach the minimum potential of your society i.e. zero.
We have a large upper class that does exactly this and not only do many people seem not to mind, they find membership of this class aspirational. It’s how capital income works and what capitalism is built on.
Uh, I'm not sure that's what I would have taken away from this.
Money is one of many solutions designed to allocate resources on a large scale. Of course, there are others, but he doesn't propose any alternative system. He's just a parasite. A pre-industrial society most likely wouldn't be able to support his existence so easily and he would either starve to death or start working.
He's less of a parasite than many rich people! I'm thinking of those who are nothing better than rentiers and/or running cartels, commandeering common resources for their own profits, accumulating money for themselves at the expense of society, who glamorize materialism and moralize hard work because that's what keeps the money rolling in from the plebes, and having the support of the government to keep them on top.
They seem to be have done, and are doing, way more harm to our society than this guy.
This Victoria man has another kind of power: The power that gets other people to take care of his needs for him without objecting or rejecting him.
In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.
Junior gets to fail again and again until they succeed, and then the return on capital further institutionalizes their family's power.
It's just aristocracy, but with more steps.
Well, this may be bad but what is the alternative? It's not like the life of an average citizen is any different other than in degree. They also use money to go to a good school and good college to get good jobs at good companies. I don't see the injustice here as substantial. I see bigger flaws in the money system than our society maintaining itself.
Most people wouldn't be very interested in an interview with a Walton heir for instance, but Sam Walton himself would have no problem drawing an audience.
"Johnston’s feelings about money are inextricably bound up in his certainty that refusing to spend it is the only moral way to live."
It's ok for others to spend on his behalf, though. It sounds like he is applying an effective story to a nicely vulnerable population of marks.
While his philosophy is BS, I cynically admire his hustle.
This quote was kinda funny to me, because the online text doesn't convey any sarcasm or tone.
But considering he's actually just a mooch I sort of implied the tone of that comment to be quite snarky. "Yeah, no money at all, he won't spend a dime" - this guy's poor friend.
And that is only if you consider throwing food in the trash charity.