Awesome post. Okay, a lot to think about there. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions? They will read like jew tricks because I am going to try and expose what I think is a flaw in that thinking, but I mean this honestly and accept that I could be wrong. So lets go back 100 000 years to europe where our ancestors lived in small tribes, usually along rivers and grazing pastures because only meat exist year round and veg/fruit only during the summer. Some of us will live in small 1-3 person tribes because of bad luck others will live in 60 person tribes and dominate an area. The economics for everyone looks something like this: 1) SUBSISTENCE - Some tribes, especially the small ones, will be living hand to mouth. They only have enough labour to hunt enough food for a few days to a week ahead of time before they have to hunt again. Because they have so few people in the tribe they can never overcome the core poverty level because any savings in food that they accumulate gets eaten up either by due course of illness or another tribe killing a person or a valuable member of the tribe tripping, breaking their foot and now not only NOT able to provide but actually consuming valuable food saved up. 2) STORED WEALTH - Larger tribes usually become larger through the luck of bounty of their area + not enough desease and death eating into their resources. If their numbers are large enough, they will have automatically learned the benefits of the network effects of a large tribe of related individuals dividing up responsibility through specialization. The smartest and most competent tribes will have learned high levels of specialization through discipline which will allow them to hunt more food than they need and create techniques for smoking and storing up large amounts of food for a long time so they have to work less and enjoy life more. If they happen to have a VERY large store of food (value) and they happen to live next to other larger or small tribes, they can start to TRADE those stores of food (value) for labour and other goods and services that other tribes provide. Perhaps the find out in one small tribe there is an exceptional builder of a kind of flint axe that they don't know how to make, they can trade him some of their stored food for a new set of tools which they now take and hunt even more efficiently and store up even more food. The small tribe got a very large influx of new preserved food that will last a long time for a few tools they are really great at making. The large tribe looses a bit of their stored food but now has a tool they can get more food and store more food efficiently. Everyone wins. This is basic economics. Everyone SIMULTANEOUSLY is working for money (goods for exchange) and IS NOT working for goods of exchange because economics is merely the consequence of barter in the struggle to survive. AT THE MOST ABSTRACT LEVEL, economics is just one monkey finding a delicious fruit that doesn't exist anywhere else trading another monkey for a shiny rock. Economics is merely the coincidental result of network effects of two monkeys being able to hold a thing and exchange it for another thing they can hold. What you are proposing is that NO ONE SHOULD TRADE EVER IN ANY FORM FOR ANYTHING AT ALL EVER. According to your world view, each person can only act as an indvidual on their own selfish behalf and should be hunting, foraging and growing their own food, sewing their own clothes, making their own shoes and building their own airplanes to fly around the world. You are proposing that I am following shiny trinkets. I am proposing that you don't fully appreciate economics terms such as 'store of value' and 'coincidence of wants' as it relates to survival. Economics is as natural a part of the universe as gravity. It is the conseuquence of network effects of individual entities EXCHANGING things and building systems to store and maximize value. There is ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBILITY of a human ever evolving into a mammal that can self organize into large groups without the benefits of producing surpluses, storing the surpluses and maximizing surplus value without fully exploiting the network effects of transactions between individuals. Did I get that right? How do you propose that a single person access food, clothing, shoes, shelter, computers, games, flights the internet, and on and on WITHOUT trade?