What Would You Do If Everything Was Free?
A Little Thought Experiment
Before you disavow me as a crazy, communist, socialist lunatic for even suggesting such a thing, just entertain this thought exercise with me for a few minutes. I recently wrote an article about my issue with the increasing monetization of every little damn thing. I live in a world with money, fine. I’ll work with that, if I have to, I suppose.
When I say “free”, I don’t mean provided by the State, I don’t mean stolen goods and services, I just mean free.
“Well, where would the goods and services come from if there were no financial incentive to provide them?”
A fair question, for the unimaginative, I suppose.
But let’s back up a moment, back to mine first: what would YOU do?
If, instead of having to go to work to make money to buy the things you need and want, they were just available to you… would you collect and hoard everything that you could? How many clothes, vehicles, and gadgets do you need?
Would you stop doing the dishes, making your bed, and resort to scrolling on your phone, play video games, and watch TV all day?
Would you stop caring about learning things you were interested in, just because there was no financial incentive to be gained from doing so?
Or would you travel, invest time in creative pursuits, cherish time with your family, and go meet new people?
Would you start injecting heroin or smoking crack just because you didn’t have the responsibility of needing to pay bills? There are plenty of people doing those drugs now, with or without those responsibilities.
Would you just go out and start raping and pillaging like a mad Viking if not for a need for a compulsory need for financial stability? Yikes. As if a society of empowered individuals would allow such heinous things.
Now, let’s address some of the more logistical problems:
Travel
“But, but, but Alex!” the capitalists cry, “How would we fuel our vehicles? Who would fly our planes, drive our buses… if those that do now weren’t being financially coerced into doing so?”
Well, we’ve already seen cars that don’t need gas to run, and technology for self-driving vehicles can be designed. This is hardly as fantastical as it may have once sounded.
Also, energy could be provided wirelessly and without cost. Nikola Tesla had designs on this as early as the 1930’s, yet died nearly penniless because his ideas were focused on innovation and the collective advancement of humanity instead of patenting and profiteering.
“Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.” — Nikola Tesla
Food
This one is a little trickier, I’ll grant you, but since so much of our “food” nowadays really isn’t, it could be simplified.
Bread can be made from 3–5 ingredients. Brisket should be simply beef. I realize the resolution on that image isn’t phenomenal, but I think you can get my point; most of that ingredients list is not just seasonings.
It’s not particularly my cup of tea, so to speak, but to my understanding, there are those out there who enjoy killing animals for the sport of it. I will admit, I do enjoy a tasty steak or a nice seafood boil, so I’m hardly in a position to condemn them for that.
While I would like to learn, and haven’t really had much the time or opportunity in the current paradigm, growing fruits and vegetables is also something that some just enjoy doing for it’s own sake.
Yes, farming can be hard work, but so can be writing, designing technology, performance art, etc. Things that are not easy would not simply stop happening, sure. That’s hardly what I’m suggesting.
However, if profit-motive were removed from the equation, there would be significantly less reason to commit atrocity against the animals providing us with the resources like eggs, milk, and meat.
Crime
As I touched on earlier in the introduction, much of what we criminalize is a byproduct of scarcity and the limitations imposed by poverty. What we legalize is what makes money for those already in positions of power.
What would be the point in trying to rob or defraud someone if money were no object for anyone?
I mentioned in one of my more recent pieces one of my favorite Bible verses:
“Listen to this, you who rob the poor and trample down the needy! You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be over and the religious festivals to end so you can get back to cheating the helpless. You measure out grain with dishonest measures and cheat the buyer with dishonest scales. And you mix the grain you sell with chaff swept from the floor. Then you enslave poor people for one piece of silver or a pair of sandals.” — Amos 8:4–6
Horrific actions like murder and rape would not just be excused in a world devoid of money, neither would they be more difficult to prevent or punish. Why, in a world in which you don’t need money to acquire anything you need or want, would someone produce meth?
If you need a paycheck in order to punch someone you catch touching a child inappropriately, I’m almost as skeptical of your integrity as theirs.
Healthcare
The idea of having to pay for treatment and medicine when you’re sick is an American one if ever there was one.
While many of our bodies would simply be healthier in the first place if they weren’t ingesting profitable poisons so routinely, this ties back in with the question of passion I posed at the beginning: would you want to help heal people, even if you weren’t going to be made rich by doing so?
Some certainly would, and personally, I would rather be treated by someone motivated by healing for healing’s sake than someone who’s been incentivized towards giving me some addictive opioid for pain management, or ignoring the potential harms and risks of the treatment they prescribe just because they’ve got medical school debt to pay.
The income disparity between doctors, nurses, and let’s say, gee, I don’t know, skilled phlebotomists, points to an inherent flaw in the way the system is constructed and functions.
Death
This one is actually the trickiest one for me, personally, since I certainly would not want to work in a morgue or be around dead bodies for it’s own sake, but I’m also fairly sure there are those that would.
We’ve all got our weird interests.
That said, the industries of funeral services, caskets, crematories, and burial plots is one of the biggest rip-offs and emotional manipulations that doesn’t get nearly enough flak.
“Here, put your dead relative in a $2000 velvet-lined box to go in the ground and decompose. Oh, and it’s going to be another few thousand for the plot of land in which to bury them. You wouldn’t want them to feel like you didn’t care, would you? Gotta make sure their corpse is comfy!”
Get bent, you absolute shyster.
As long as everything unfortunately isn’t free…any help supporting my dream of quitting my day job and writing and creating full-time is greatly appreciated!
