[RD] What is the Point of a Minimum Wage?

[Synobun]

You certainly won't get any argument from me that a basic income guaranteed to all would be better. I also view that as an essential development in the coming century. Still, until exploitation is completely plucked out of the equation, there being a reasonable minimum seems important. Defining a truly survivable minimum wage as a "significant deadweight loss" feels a little bougie.

 

[metalhead]

The minimum wage ought to provide sufficient incentive to work, but should not be considered a means to provide economic security in its own right. Economic security should be what people receive in return for being consumers.

Labor and consumption are what people have that is of value to society. Consumption for security should be the mandatory deal; labor ought to remain available to trade for added comfort.

 

[Estebonrober]

It seems to me that there are few lines of thinking here that are disconnected from political reality of the moment, at least US political reality. First UBI is not seriously being considered in any nation state, so for the time being (next 4-12 years) its a non-starter. Secondly the idea is subsidizing the poor is being argued in almost antithetical terms in the US. The "why are we paying people to work less, those bums need to get a real job" is largely what we here from the right and the "center". So in this light the minimum wage is not only unavoidable its an imperative part of the economic reality, the real question becomes what is the floor at this moment. I believe that 15$/hr is fair by the time it actually passes it will be low (not badly) in some areas. It would also be good if we could get it adjusted for inflation every other year or so.
Adjusted for inflation the minimum wage should at least be 12$

I've said it elsewhere but it always bears repeating since its so popular on the interwebs, libertarian takes on market economies are always so disjointed from physical and social realities as to be completely useless. In this sense it is very similar to the anarcho-communist nonsense we also hear a lot in the more fun places of the internet. They are both interesting in small scale localities and mainly agrarian places, but become completely useless in a post fossil-capitalism world.

I support the jobs guarantee we have along way to go until he have people making dust bunny piles for a job. We need to bring to market more environmental stewardship jobs and there is a potential for a huge market there imo. We do have to convince the more established among us to pay for those jobs though.

Great thread!

 

[El_Machinae]

The same argument applies to minimum wage as well. If someone picks 9 apples, but needs 10 apples to live, the net productivity is negative, no matter what the minimum wage is. If we allow someone to pay 5 apples, society somehow has to pay the missing 5 apples and the employer gets 4 apples as profit. If the government would employ this person to pick 9 apples and pay 10, the net cost to society is only one apple. So without a living minimum wage, people get rewarded for creating employment situations that are a drain on society. Forbidding such situations will at least stop this profit and may free up labor to perform more profitable tasks (maybe the person could pick 15 oranges instead). A minimum wage is a blunt tool, but it is much better than having no tool at all.

You've got to be careful with the idea of 'freeing up labour'. This assumes that another ten+ per day opportunity exists already (the units are apples, you're either picking more apples or fewer apples. They get picked or they rot.), but that the field owner is going to tax all-but-ten. There's no guarantee. But there will always be lower-value jobs. The lower you go, the more they are. A MW destroys 100% of them. Two kids ask to shovel my walk. If they insist on $15 per hour each, because that's the law, then they don't get hired. Reductio ad absurdum, sure, but it shows the point. The labour and the opportunity are both there. If it gets priced out of the market, the job doesn't get done. Heck, I cannot even go work my 'living wage job' in order to pay for the shovelling. Because I'm better at shovelling than they are, there's no comparative advantage trade. I go to a church, and the usher offers to show me the seats. I find out he's a volunteer, so I leave. They're not paying a minimum wage, even though he's providing a service. The teenager next door offers to walk my dog while I am at work, I say 'no' because it's zero-sum. I have to work an extra hour to pay for the one hour of walking.

In all of these examples, society is better if the service happens rather than not. In fact, in all cases a mutually beneficial arrangement is possible, but forbidden. If my time had been worth more, the trades could have happened. So, the damage is being done regressively.

I made a quick mistake in my analogy, with my government example I was suggesting that it's very easy for the government to create a 'job' that involves picking one apple (but paying ten), and thus crowding out the opportunity that allows picking two. The two never get picked because someone is wasting their time picking one. Keep in mind, I'm comparing it to a UBI. In a UBI, you get ten (or nine, or one, whatever. It needs to be phased in). Then, if you see an opportunity to pick one, it gets picked. You might not pick the one. But you might pick the seven or nine. You might pick 100. But the two can get picked, because it's not priced out by the one. In the real economy, people who have 'a living wage' might still have side-hustle. People with a living-wage will still work on for a charity or community organization. So, we know that a portion of people will seek out opportunities to harvest those apples. The UBI frees up more time.

But don't only think of jobs paying less than a living wage as being a 'drain on society'. The job already exists. And if it's not taken advantage of, the opportunity is lost. Now, obviously, if that job isn't sufficiently productive the worker needs subsidy. But with a MW only the employer is allowed to pay the subsidy. Teen living with his parents? No one can take advantage of that subsidy. His wage is zero when it could be nine-per-day. The retiree on a pension? They can't leverage their subsidized life, even if nine-per-day opportunities exist. Their cost is still ten. They're already fully subsidized.

Part of an economy is just simply lost opportunity. Part of an economy is the acquisition of goods and services that make a long-term shift in future costs. For an example of the first, an economy where people can afford to go out for dinner tomorrow is literally 'better' than one where people cannot afford to go out until three days from now. The ability to dine tomorrow is an apple that can be picked. Even if people can only dine out once a week, being able to do it sooner than later is 'better'.

I'm a worried a too-expansive job guarantee is a bit like the welfare trap, even. In our current welfare trap system, you get a welfare check that then gets clawed back (potentially at over 100%) if you go find any work. We've known about this problem for decades but are terrible at fixing it. You get welfare of $14k if you cannot work. But, get a part-time job, and your welfare either ends or you lose a portion of the welfare cheque in proportion to what you independently earn. Thank God people work under the table, they are not the villains in this story.

If the government were hiring people to produce nine or eleven apples, that's great. And government spending is VERY capable of hiring people to pick wayyyyyy more than ten. It's certainly possible. But there are mechanisms in place where people assign a limited budget and try to create value from that budget. With a jobs guarantee, I worry that you've unhinged the budgetary mechanism a little too much.

I'll show a quick example where a job guarantee ruins people's ability to seek more productive opportunities.

This article actually covers it really well
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/military-retirement-too-sweet-a-deal/

Twenty-year retirement, in conjunction with present personnel management policies, is an inefficient means of attracting new members, causes the services to retain more members than are needed up to the 20-year point, provides too strong an incentive for experienced personnel to leave after serving 20 years, and makes it impossible for the vast majority of members to serve full careers.

If you look at people's retiring patterns, you'll see that people drop off after they've done their four. And then they flee once they've done their 20. The entire article is great. Instead of people leaving as they perceive opportunities, once they've done their ten they end up doing their 20. From 5 to ten, they leave if they see a better opportunity. Now, it's a wage guarantee, not a job guarantee that they're sticking around for, but it's the same idea reframed. The high wage (but low productivity) priced out higher productivity opportunities. You know it's true, because people flee after they get their 20 to get better jobs.

Keep in mind, I'm arguing against a minimum wage because I am insisting that a UBI is better. The MW destroys opportunities. Output and creation is less than what it could be. The field owner who's able to get 20 picked per day but can pay one is taxed on the nineteen in a UBI. And the workers get eleven (10+1). As soon as they see an opportunity to earn 2, they will take it. Anywhere. With a MW, there's a field owner with nine apples per day. If he pays 8, there's still a profit. If the MW is ten, they rot. With a UBI, he pays two. But Mr.20 is able to then up his bid for the labour. Mr.9 cannot compete with Mr.20 on wage if there's a MW.

You think it's great because all workers are getting paid at least ten. Except that the person who only needed 8 and will only pick 8 is getting zero. From both fields, that person is still getting zero. Heck, the person who only needed 2 and can pick 3 is still getting zero. From both fields. There's more room at the bottom. Always. But the MW is insisting that people's minimum wage is zero if it's not ten. The person who can pick only nine is a drain of ten instead of one. The MW is insisting that there are more fields are available where people can pick 11+, if this is true, it's just as discoverable with a UBI as with a MW.

A society has to be lucky for the MW increase to lead to an aggregate improvement. You're hoping that the local multiplier effect (which comes at a zero-sum cost with the customer or people further away) outpaces the opportunities that are regressively forced out of the market.

 

[Hrothbern]

How is currently the health care situation for people earning a minimum wage ?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

If you look at people's retiring patterns, you'll see that people drop off after they've done their four. And then they flee once they've done their 20. The entire article is great. Instead of people leaving as they perceive opportunities, once they've done their ten they end up doing their 20. From 5 to ten, they leave if they see a better opportunity. Now, it's a wage guarantee, not a job guarantee that they're sticking around for, but it's the same idea reframed. The high wage (but low productivity) priced out higher productivity opportunities. You know it's true, because people flee after they get their 20 to get better jobs.

This is not a full picture of what happens. The military places a lot of emphasize on career advancement and if you aren't promoted within a certain window, they push you out. The higher you go (i.e. the longer you serve), the less opportunities there are for you to continue advancing - and they won't let you stay at your current rank indefinitely. You can be a perfectly good soldier but get shown the door after missing two promotions - and at a certain level there won't necessarily be job openings for you to be promoted into even if you qualified.

https://taskandpurpose.com/military-needs-abandon-promotion-boards

Some claim that welfare benefits to the working poor are subsides to exploitative employers, but that is wrong. Making poor workers less dependent on their paychecks empowers them to be picker about their jobs and demand even higher incomes when it comes to negotiating wages.

A specific problem is that in the US the benefits are not strong enough to accomplish this. People are still tied to the extremely low-paying, exploitative jobs because they lose most benefits if they don't work and the benefits they do get are not enough to achieve independence in any meaning of the word.

Because we've pushed all welfare down to the states to distribute, it's enabled a race to the bottom when it comes to benefits as some states wrongheadedly believe less welfare = more jobs. I get pretty mad whenever someone says people in Mississippi don't deserve a living wage because businesses there can't afford it. If that's really true then we should be distributing some of the excess wealth from places like the Bay Area to provide welfare to raise the standard of living in Biloxi.

I don't believe that higher minimums would destroy all jobs in a place like Mississippi either and there are measured approaches to increasing minimum wages per locality.

 

[El_Machinae]

The military graph is more about the wage guarantee. Once people have the pension, they suddenly figure out that there's something better to do

 

[Berzerker]

Taxing improvements like apartment buildings discourages investments that produce more affordable housing (and all other sorts of goods), but taxing land up to 100% of its unimproved value actually stimulates the economy and encourages more efficient use of natural resources.

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

That might put WWF out of business, I think their strategy is to buy up lands for habitat preservation

 

[astrallite]

You've got to be careful with the idea of 'freeing up labour'. This assumes that another ten+ per day opportunity exists already (the units are apples, you're either picking more apples or fewer apples. They get picked or they rot.), but that the field owner is going to tax all-but-ten. There's no guarantee. But there will always be lower-value jobs. The lower you go, the more they are. A MW destroys 100% of them. Two kids ask to shovel my walk. If they insist on $15 per hour each, because that's the law, then they don't get hired. Reductio ad absurdum, sure, but it shows the point. The labour and the opportunity are both there. If it gets priced out of the market, the job doesn't get done. Heck, I cannot even go work my 'living wage job' in order to pay for the shovelling. Because I'm better at shovelling than they are, there's no comparative advantage trade. I go to a church, and the usher offers to show me the seats. I find out he's a volunteer, so I leave. They're not paying a minimum wage, even though he's providing a service. The teenager next door offers to walk my dog while I am at work, I say 'no' because it's zero-sum. I have to work an extra hour to pay for the one hour of walking.

In all of these examples, society is better if the service happens rather than not. In fact, in all cases a mutually beneficial arrangement is possible, but forbidden. If my time had been worth more, the trades could have happened. So, the damage is being done regressively.

I made a quick mistake in my analogy, with my government example I was suggesting that it's very easy for the government to create a 'job' that involves picking one apple (but paying ten), and thus crowding out the opportunity that allows picking two. The two never get picked because someone is wasting their time picking one. Keep in mind, I'm comparing it to a UBI. In a UBI, you get ten (or nine, or one, whatever. It needs to be phased in). Then, if you see an opportunity to pick one, it gets picked. You might not pick the one. But you might pick the seven or nine. You might pick 100. But the two can get picked, because it's not priced out by the one. In the real economy, people who have 'a living wage' might still have side-hustle. People with a living-wage will still work on for a charity or community organization. So, we know that a portion of people will seek out opportunities to harvest those apples. The UBI frees up more time.

But don't only think of jobs paying less than a living wage as being a 'drain on society'. The job already exists. And if it's not taken advantage of, the opportunity is lost. Now, obviously, if that job isn't sufficiently productive the worker needs subsidy. But with a MW only the employer is allowed to pay the subsidy. Teen living with his parents? No one can take advantage of that subsidy. His wage is zero when it could be nine-per-day. The retiree on a pension? They can't leverage their subsidized life, even if nine-per-day opportunities exist. Their cost is still ten. They're already fully subsidized.

Part of an economy is just simply lost opportunity. Part of an economy is the acquisition of goods and services that make a long-term shift in future costs. For an example of the first, an economy where people can afford to go out for dinner tomorrow is literally 'better' than one where people cannot afford to go out until three days from now. The ability to dine tomorrow is an apple that can be picked. Even if people can only dine out once a week, being able to do it sooner than later is 'better'.

I'm a worried a too-expansive job guarantee is a bit like the welfare trap, even. In our current welfare trap system, you get a welfare check that then gets clawed back (potentially at over 100%) if you go find any work. We've known about this problem for decades but are terrible at fixing it. You get welfare of $14k if you cannot work. But, get a part-time job, and your welfare either ends or you lose a portion of the welfare cheque in proportion to what you independently earn. Thank God people work under the table, they are not the villains in this story.

If the government were hiring people to produce nine or eleven apples, that's great. And government spending is VERY capable of hiring people to pick wayyyyyy more than ten. It's certainly possible. But there are mechanisms in place where people assign a limited budget and try to create value from that budget. With a jobs guarantee, I worry that you've unhinged the budgetary mechanism a little too much.

I'll show a quick example where a job guarantee ruins people's ability to seek more productive opportunities.

This article actually covers it really well
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/military-retirement-too-sweet-a-deal/

If you look at people's retiring patterns, you'll see that people drop off after they've done their four. And then they flee once they've done their 20. The entire article is great. Instead of people leaving as they perceive opportunities, once they've done their ten they end up doing their 20. From 5 to ten, they leave if they see a better opportunity. Now, it's a wage guarantee, not a job guarantee that they're sticking around for, but it's the same idea reframed. The high wage (but low productivity) priced out higher productivity opportunities. You know it's true, because people flee after they get their 20 to get better jobs.

Keep in mind, I'm arguing against a minimum wage because I am insisting that a UBI is better. The MW destroys opportunities. Output and creation is less than what it could be. The field owner who's able to get 20 picked per day but can pay one is taxed on the nineteen in a UBI. And the workers get eleven (10+1). As soon as they see an opportunity to earn 2, they will take it. Anywhere. With a MW, there's a field owner with nine apples per day. If he pays 8, there's still a profit. If the MW is ten, they rot. With a UBI, he pays two. But Mr.20 is able to then up his bid for the labour. Mr.9 cannot compete with Mr.20 on wage if there's a MW.

You think it's great because all workers are getting paid at least ten. Except that the person who only needed 8 and will only pick 8 is getting zero. From both fields, that person is still getting zero. Heck, the person who only needed 2 and can pick 3 is still getting zero. From both fields. There's more room at the bottom. Always. But the MW is insisting that people's minimum wage is zero if it's not ten. The person who can pick only nine is a drain of ten instead of one. The MW is insisting that there are more fields are available where people can pick 11+, if this is true, it's just as discoverable with a UBI as with a MW.

A society has to be lucky for the MW increase to lead to an aggregate improvement. You're hoping that the local multiplier effect (which comes at a zero-sum cost with the customer or people further away) outpaces the opportunities that are regressively forced out of the market.

In the 1960s we had 2 million (non-military) government employees. We still have about 2 million government employees, almost 6 decades later despite an almost doubling of the population. Our infrastructure, education, and technological investment from a government perspective today is way behind where we were in the 1960s. I feel like this is a nice theoretical argument if we were already living in an utopian society. Instead we are making this argument from a point of significant national deterioration from a place more than half a century ago. There's no need for the government to be involved in projects like hiring one person to dig a hole and another person to fill it up because that's mostly a theoretical exercise at this point and would only happen if some corporate interest wanted to legislate that, not because we have nothing better to do. There's literally endless amounts of high ROI infrastructure or technology projects that America hasn't kept up investment in.

People like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk literally would not be doing what they were doing in technology and space if the government was actually doing it's job and wasn't fully captured by incumbent corporate interests insistent on holding back technological progress in order to maintain the status quo.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm a big believer that a government can value add to the economy, don't worry

The Google algorithm was invented by a National Science Foundation scientist group. Bing was created by the free market

 

[Hrothbern]

In the 1960s we had 2 million (non-military) government employees. We still have about 2 million government employees, almost 6 decades later despite an almost doubling of the population. Our infrastructure, education, and technological investment from a government perspective today is way behind where we were in the 1960s. I feel like this is a nice theoretical argument if we were already living in an utopian society. Instead we are making this argument from a point of significant national deterioration from a place more than half a century ago. There's no need for the government to be involved in projects like hiring one person to dig a hole and another person to fill it up because that's mostly a theoretical exercise at this point and would only happen if some corporate interest wanted to legislate that, not because we have nothing better to do. There's literally endless amounts of high ROI infrastructure or technology projects that America hasn't kept up investment in.

People like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk literally would not be doing what they were doing in technology and space if the government was actually doing it's job and wasn't fully captured by incumbent corporate interests insistent on holding back technological progress in order to maintain the status quo.

Government is bad, private companies are good.... rinse and repeat.... and you end up with a diminished public power.... and also imo not to the benefit of the public and the progress as a whole.

On that 2 million employees then in 1960 and now. Do mind that at an annual labor productivity rate of 1.0%, the labour productivity has increased with 178%, almost the same as the population increase.
But how the government otganices public tasks and benefits to the public has changed enormously over the last decades.

Here below a nice article comparing differing EU countries on effective number of government employees. Too bad the US was not in as reference, but in absolute numbers (60 per 1,000) it would be in the lowest 25%.
Take note that the last graph in the article is the processed and fair benchmark.

Public employees: Comparisons between European countries are deceptive
“Hypertrophic”, “poorly run”, “bloated”, “too costly”... in all countries, cliches concerning the public service are legion. New indicators allow us to see how the reality is more nuanced.

Too many public employees! The refrain is heard on the political stage with almost the same frequency as the arrival of spring. On March 22nd, for example, French public employees took to the streets to protest the government’s planned reform of the public sector. Elsewhere in Europe, liberals are always complaining that there are too many employees in the public sector. So, from country to country, what is the scale of public employment in Europe?
“Comparisons between developed countries relating to the public sector employment are tricky”, reads an illuminating paper recently published by France Stratégie.
https://www.europeandatajournalism....sons-between-European-countries-are-deceptive

On what you say on public investments... I fully agree... it is just terrible how passive governments are... at the expense of jobs that add genuinely value and enable good living standards.

The hype "government is bad" because "reasons" has changed a lot.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

That might put WWF out of business, I think their strategy is to buy up lands for habitat preservation

Generally an LVT would be good for wildlife preservation because it encourages cities to be developed more densely and strongly discourages the sort of speculation that leads to urban sprawl. It also causes a decrease in the selling price of land, making it cheaper for environmental foundations to purchase land to turn into preserves even if it may make it more expensive to hold those lands in the long run if they are places where the demand for land grows. Generally the assessed value would take into account zoning restrictions which a foundation could request to have placed on their preserves to prevent development there, which would then make it cheaper for them to pay the LVT than it would be for a developer or more traditional real estate speculator. Environmental land trusts would need to maintain financial support for their cause over the long term rather than making one huge investment, but it is probably a good thing to make sure they keep the public informed as to current concerns anyway. Within cities, parks are among the sort of infrastructure that can increase adjacent land values more than enough to justify then receiving some LVT funded subsidies.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The reality is the "free market" is basically an Orwellian term. Humans became agrarian well before the creation of nation-states. Humans went from hunter-gatherer tribes related to blood to agrarian villages of people related by blood, who lived basically in the equivalent of a modern commune. People bartered and lent each other things and extended credit to each other.

It's not until nation states were created (i.e. some of these agrarian societies becoming really successful and expanding into the territories of other agrarian societies) through violence does money and markets come into the picture, money is created by nation states so soldiers have some way to trade for goods and services in places they pass (or occupy), and money can be taxed which creates a system where commerce can be controlled by the government, and market places are created in the courtyards of fortified centers of government. So the libertarian fantasy worldview is basically historically illiterate, because money and markets don't exist without external state violence.

The concept of money appears to have utility beyond violent situations. Therefore it is odd to assert they would not exist absent violence even if it were the inspiration.

 

[Lexicus]

Hmmmn, it's just the nature of work that the minimum wage is zero.

No, it's the nature of any system where unemployment is tolerated. The wage of unemployment is zero.

I'm really wobbling on the guaranteed job program, if only because it is very easy for a government to pay people to perform a net-loss task.

Ah yes, I suppose next we'll be hearing about the mythical "market discipline" that will prevent private companies from hiring people to perform net-loss tasks. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea that there isn't enough for the unemployed to do is just straight-up ridiculous. There is too much to do.

What's the balancing metric of the guaranteed employment? What's the indicator that you use to determine if there's net sustainability? How do you determine the net loss or net benefit of the program, to determine if the wage is too high or too low?

I don't know what you mean by "balancing metric." I would imagine you would need more than one indicator to tell whether there was "net sustainability." You could do a crude measurement of the net benefit of the program by looking at how many people it saved from involuntary unemployment.

The problem with most of your objections is that involuntary unemployment is so wasteful that it is very difficult to design a job guarantee program that would be even more wasteful.

I will add Keynes' view of the matter here:
“The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is “rash” to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable – the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years…"

The "nonsense" here is of course (neo)classical economics. I've told you before you're better off forgetting all that crap if you want to understand the actually-existing economy. Even where classical micro is useful applying it to macro is inevitably counterproductive.

The concept of money appears to have utility beyond violent situations. Therefore it is odd to assert they would not exist absent violence even if it were the inspiration.

Money as we know it cannot exist without a state institution which is sufficiently powerful and legitimate to successfully enforce tax payments. In the absence of such institutions "money" can exist but in forms sufficiently different from our everyday experience with what we call "money" that using the same word makes little sense.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Money as we know it cannot exist without a state institution which is sufficiently powerful and legitimate to successfully enforce tax payments. In the absence of such institutions "money" can exist but in forms sufficiently different from our everyday experience with what we call "money" that using the same word makes little sense.

State institutions are not inherently violent (unless we're asserting that humans are inherently violent, though doing so makes the distinction pointless), but yes money separated from the government would look different. I don't see how it "doesn't make sense", you'd just conceptualize different kinds of money. $1000 in an electronic banking account and a gold coin are already pretty different in terms of everyday experience for example.

 

[Lexicus]

State institutions are not inherently violent (unless we're asserting that humans are inherently violent, though doing so makes the distinction pointless)

The state is, by definition, that entity in society with a monopoly on legitimate violence. The claim that state institutions aren't inherently violent is silly.

yes money separated from the government would look different. I don't see how it "doesn't make sense", you'd just conceptualize different kinds of money. $1000 in an electronic banking account and a gold coin are already pretty different in terms of everyday experience for example.

Not like the difference between electronic ledgers and gold coins, more like the difference between purple and Wednesday.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The state is, by definition, that entity in society with a monopoly on legitimate violence. The claim that state institutions aren't inherently violent is silly.

Violence does not have to happen, and for most states is not lawful absent violation of law. It's also not a true monopoly: self-defense is typically allowed.

Not like the difference between electronic ledgers and gold coins, more like the difference between purple and Wednesday.

Hyperbole. You'd still have people giving money as a substitute for direct goods exchange. This already puts it into a sub-category in more coherent fashion than color vs day.

 

[Lexicus]

Violence does not have to happen, and for most states is not lawful absent violation of law. It's also not a true monopoly: self-defense is typically allowed.

According to the World Health Organization and other authorities, the threat of violence is violence.

Hyperbole. You'd still have people giving money as a substitute for direct goods exchange.

Except, no, you don't. Which is why I hesitate to even use the word "money" to describe what is going on.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

According to the World Health Organization and other authorities, the threat of violence is violence.

By that logic living in any lawful society is necessarily violence. Any potential enforcement of law would imply at least some kind of violent component if the punished resist. I don't like non-functional definitions where were conclude "everything is an exploit' or "everything is violence". These stop being meaningful terms and it's back to square 1 in defining things actually approved vs disapproved.

Except, no, you don't. Which is why I hesitate to even use the word "money" to describe what is going on.

Do you have an example of what you're describing?

 

[Lexicus]

By that logic living in any lawful society is necessarily violence. Any potential enforcement of law would imply at least some kind of violent component if the punished resist. I don't like non-functional definitions where were conclude "everything is an exploit' or "everything is violence". These stop being meaningful terms and it's back to square 1 in defining things actually approved vs disapproved.

The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

Do you have an example of what you're describing?

Tiered exchange systems where one type of commodity money is used for certain kinds of payments, another is used for other kinds, and so on. Ritual money where payments cannot be made without performance of the proper magic. Personalized money where the value of money in a given transaction is dependent on the status of the person offering it. Those are just three examples of major differences.