[blurbleblurble]

Related:

I've often wondered how much money is spent on the money system itself. There are people whose entire days are spent devoted to the goal of keeping the money system flowing. They could be off somewhere else, tending gardens, nurturing children, cooking, educating, repairing, cleaning, healing from stress and trauma, etc. But no, they are at some office working for the all mighty dollar. Keeping tabs on society at large.

I'm not saying that it is overall evil to count supply and demand of resources. I'm merely wondering if the current state of money systems is really well suited to do this without devastating collateral damage on its host, the "human resources."

[lmm]

The great success of capitalism is to allocate resources efficiently. Fundamentally, someone is paying banks for their services; either the value they're providing is more than they charge for it, or not, but in the latter case people would stop buying their services (conspiracy theories notwithstanding). Then at the individual level, the bank is willing to pay someone x amount for the value they provide the bank, and either that's where they can earn the most (because it's where they can contribute the most) or the person will be paid more elsewhere.

There are of course inefficiencies, but they're self-correcting. A bank that overpays its bankers will be undercut by one that doesn't. A company that overpays its banks will be undercut by one that doesn't. It works better than any alternative that's been tried.

[MarkPNeyer]

Also related:

We don't charge people for the air we breath.

Why not? There's a cost to keeping it clean. There's a finite amount. Some people consume more than others.

Answer: because keeping track of those costs and assigning them to individual persons would be way more expensive than just keeping the air clean and letting people consume as much as they want.

Food should be the same way - now that we produce so much of it, it's kind of insane to expect to keep diligent tabs on how much people are consuming.

This is why i think a basic income makes perfect economic sense. People already have the ability to consume society's resources without paying (medical care or prison care still cost money) - so we might as well just give everyone a small amount 'voice' in the system and then dismantle the barriers to entry that are ostensibly in place to protect poor folks.

[TeMPOraL]

Interesting question. This expense is something I'd classify as upkeep - costs that are necessary waste. Inefficiency. You need to pay them to keep the thing running, but we would do well to minimize them as much as possible.