The End of Cash

I wonder if there is ever going to be a time when people stop using money. I don't mean that they would stop using paper money, or change from the dollar to some other means of exchange, I mean a future with no money whatsoever.

I was listening to a story about hydrogen fuel cells. These take hydrogen, and make water and electricity. They are currently made with platinum alloys, which are rare and make hydrogen fuel cells expensive. They talked about bringing the cost down by using something other than platinum, a cheaper and more abundant metal that might serve as well. It got me to thinking about how something has a value to it which is somewhat arbitrary, but usually based on scarcity.

What if money was scarce and we somehow evolved past it? This is a theme brought out in Star Trek, where there are a couple of scenes where a character expounds about how money is no longer used. This is supposed to be about 250 years in the future, in a time when energy is cheap and abundant and any food or material goods can be manufactured just by requesting it out of a replicator. Very few medical problems cannot be whisked away by waving some glowing or humming box over the effected area. So you wonder why you would even need money when all of your needs are met effortlessly.

Yet the Enterprise keeps running into races that still use money, such as the Ferengi and their obsession for Gold-Press-Latinum, whatever the hell that is.

I was wondering how this works in practice. How do they pay for their precious dilithium crystals? How does trade in general work, as there are mining colonies, and some are shown in relative poverty, others in wealth. You can't just fly in and take what you want, there would have to be some kind of exchange. It doesn't seem realistic that the miners would toil and stockpile minerals and then someone would just come and take them without given the miners anything at all.

I've always wondered why they still gamble. You see scenes where they are sitting around playing poker, yet there is no money, so they are not really gambling with anything. They are simply pushing chips around. If a player runs out of chips, can't he just get more since they don't cost anything? Maybe the chips are just for keeping score. Hell, that's the way some people today look at money.

If there was no money, how would you account for rarity? I've always thought that the Soviet model of Communist could never work, but why not. Of course people would not be motivated to produce an excess of anything if their hard work would just be given to those around them. Some people's efforts in life are simply valued more than others. It's hard to imagine a time when this would not be so. It's hard to imagine a time when the lowest producing segment of the society was doing virtually nothing and expecting others to provide for them. Imagine a world where everyone was working hard, striving to their limits. It just doesn't seem realistic. You will always have those that are content to sit back and do very little. Without money to provide a way of sorting the achievers from the lazy, what is the point of killing yourself working hard?

Of course, you can turn it around and see all the people that have lots of money that did very little mental or physically challenging work to attain their riches. And you also see those with lots of money and power not content unless they have an ever increasing larger amount of wealth. When this comes at the expense of others, or when the wealth of a few is paid for by the destruction of the environment that has to be shared by all, it is not hard to see why some dream of a day without money.

It's just not a very realistic dream.