[quote name='epobirs']Repealing idiotic laws that compel banks to make loans to people who shouldn't qualify would fix everything in short order. This is the one action the folks currently in charge won't even discuss because, well, that made it that way in the first place, including a certain Chicago attorney hired to litigate by ACORN in the 90s.[/quote]
This.
[quote name='Grico']Bartering hurts our current monetary based economy as it leads to less actual consumer economy. I guess theoretically it could represent a new economic model but I don't see how barter could sustain a global economy of any sort.[/quote]
Quite the opposite really. The barter economy is as old as symbiotic creatures have been around. But no, imo i don't think the barter system can sustain a modern global economy of any sort.
The first reason is that the barter system doesn't represent exact quantifiable value of some things'/actions' worth. Is fixing your plumbing quantifiably equal to a ps3 console? or three ps3's? Without using an independent measurement system, it would be difficult to find a thing's 'worth'. Using currency or some other measurement system allows one to assign a fixed value at a certain time. This allows for more accurate accounting of some thing's value as well as breed competition between vendors to manage an accurate price when met at equilibrium. Some would make the argument that you could measure using the barter system. In my example, they would say that the plumbing might be valued at 2 ps3 consoles. But what if it was determined that the plumbing job is worth 1 and 1/2 ps3 consoles or 2 and 1/3 ps3 consoles? Unless you've got some engineering magic to make one-third of a ps3 work by itself, the barter would be inherently unfair to the plumber receiving fractional portions of a game system. So bartering would only work on a basic, rudimentary level.
The second reason bartering wouldn't help the global economy is, due to it basic mechanics, it can't scale proportionally. What if somebody wanted to build a hydroelectric dam? Again, if you tried to pay in ps3 consoles, do you think it would be practical? A person would not want several million ps3's (unless he need multi-core applications like Folding@home and even then it would be more of an isolated case) because it exceeds his needs (one ps3). It's far easier to accept currency which represents the dam's value than tangibly receiving something else that would be a logistics nightmare to move/transfer/store (such as several million ps3 consoles).
Thirdly, because it can't scale, bartering would be difficult to motivate huge groups of people to do a certain job since people all want different things. Going back to the dam example, say you were trying to get people (engineers, architects, electricians, construction, etc.) to build that dam, not all of them would be motivated to get ps3 consoles as payment. Some might want 2 consoles while others might want a/several xbox 360(s) or a Wii. With currency, you have a definitive (and more accurate) unit of value measurement that can be applied across the board and generally accepted as a form of trade towards products/services that people might want. Looking back in history, most of the great technological feats happened after the barter economy was slowly being fazed out for currency. Granted, non-monetary innovations such as assembly lines also contributed to these feats but then, how would you motivate a bunch of people to work on that assembly line?
