barter

People with this Idea

	Title	Author	%	Category	Thoughts
	Become well educated in scams.	Agent Pugsly		Belief	Idea Group:  Money Idea Category:  Belief I really want to know more about the scams that are abundant in the world.  I've started reading http://quatloos.com/ which is a scam educational resource page.  It's pretty good!
	Convert USD money into something else.	Agent Pugsly		Belief	Idea Group:  Money Idea Category:  Belief Apparently you can get foreign currency CD's at www.everbank.com .  They also seem to have lots of other services to provide a person who is interested in diversifying their savings out of the US dollar.
	Money	angiewoot		Criticism	Idea Group:  Money Idea Category:  Criticism I prefer the gift economy over money (on a small society level) for a few reasons: -people can still generally get what they need -less greed: the haves aren't lusty over useless products -advancement of goods for people, not for profit -less division of people over economic/social class -more community-building in the sharing of creations/things made -less people exploited in monetary affairs (whether it is the consumer or producer)
	Money	sikander		Belief	Idea Group:  Money Idea Category:  Belief I like money!

Money is a system which represents actual value.  Rather than bartering goods and/or services for other goods and/or services, money may be used as a representation of value (or method for keeping score, to look at it a different way). Kind of a simple concept, I know, but stay with me, here--there are probably some aspects to our monetary system you haven't thought about before.  

Money, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, but unfortunately most current implementations of monetary systems have lost much of their relationship with actual value, and thus have obtained a power all their own, independent of the actual resources involved (i.e. goods and services).  

Money as Debt--Many modern economic systems in current use feature something known as Fractional Reserve Banking.  This means that a creditor (banker, loaner, etc.)  may lend out more money than they actually have, need only to have a fraction of the load held as a reserve in case the borrower fails to pay.  This means that when a bank makes a loan, they really are making the loan, actually creating (most of) the money being lent out, based on the borrower's promise to pay. 

If you think about this for a moment, it sounds almost too ludicrous to even consider, but that is essentially the way our economy functions (and has since long before you were born).  

If you then think about this for a moment, you will also realize that this means our economy is doomed--there will never be enough actual money to pay back the borrowed money, so we'll never get ahead, but instead--thanks to interest--the gap is always going to increase.  This is bad.  

So, like I said--money is not inherently evil, but our methods of going about it sure do seem kind of ass-backward.   

If you haven't done so, I would highly recommend watching the (40 min. or so) documentary animation entitled 'Money as Debt'.  You can find it on the online video sites, no problem.