But you can't exchange a complete cow for cigarettes...
Discussion
In a perfectly efficient market, you wouldn't be trying to do an asymmetric trade like that, needing money as a token.
You would be exchanging the cow for what you actually need with a person who needs an actual cow and has something you want that isn't a ton of cigarettes.
This will never happen. It's economic utopia. So, we solved this with money.
I wonder if cigarettes would even exist, in a perfectly efficient market? 🤔 Probably not, right? There are no cigarettes in Utopia. 😅
cannabis cigarettes maybe, they actually do something useful and smell nice
the market can be strongly efficient without having a sub-day delay to respond to changes in supply and demand tho
these kinds of superlatives and absolutes don't line up with the reality of the latency of information in the real world
They aren't meant to. This is meant to clarify that money isn't essential to a capitalistic system. We can completely remove it from a process or interaction without it becoming less-capitalistic and more-communistic.
For instance, if I were a butcher with a steak to sell and you had an equivalent number of apples to trade for the steak, we could just complete the transaction by exchanging goods. Each of use selling the other person the good in exchange for money, would double the number of interactions, without making either of us wealthier. It would simply make the transaction take up more time, involve some third entity (whoever issued the money, even if that is the Bitcoin network), and raise the chances that the state will levy taxes on the exchange. The cost of the exchange rises considerably, as soon as money is involved.
What made the exchange capitalistic in nature, was not the involvement or absence of money, it was that it was _my_ steak and _your_ apples.
yes, money reduces the latency
government increases it and parasites on the profit
what's the saying: "if tax on cigarettes reduces smoking then what does tax on income do?"
also, mises used the word "catallactic" to refer to the basic nature of exchange, only just dawned on me that is a variant of catalysis and the meaning has to do with how both sides gain, like how a catalyst tends to have a low cost but stimulates a greater efficiency than without
Well, someone who isn't an anarchist could argue that some measure of taxation is necessary to have a functioning state, but I bet that argument wouldn't work on you, so I won't bother. 😀
yeah, i just point to the pre 1913 situation and the sub 3% tax rates and say that the whole taxes meme has been concocted to funnel wealth to bankers, and that government has no business doing business outside of setting standards
no army
no welfare
no courts
just an organisation that gathers and publishes the consensus, that's literally all government can do without being harmful, the moment it starts to use that position to do violence against people's rights (and property, which is part of people's rights) you are on a downward spiral to revolution and neighbours killing neighbours