Yarddog
Diamond Member
- Jun 13, 2014
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First of all...this barter system you are talking about is not a free market and not a single person on Earth aside from a few delusional pseudo-libertarians would want a barter system....so that's a fail...the first time two humans traded for goods there were no such thing as governments,,,Please tell me a time where a free market existed without government...free markets have been around longer than any government,,,Free markets don't exist without government....and never has existed without government.....Absolutely right. When the government doesn't allow the free market to be the free market, don't go blaming failure on the free market.Another free market fail as Britain nationalises the railways…
Not a free market fail.
A British fail.
How did this free market enforce contracts? How did this free market establish property rights??
I'll wait
and back then a handshake was enough,,,
And even this barter economy is itself mostly fantasy...
"various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”
The Myth of the Barter Economy
Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right.www.theatlantic.com
So we should do away with patents, copyrights, etc -- and just rely on a handshake?
Africans across the continent had a free market system between tribes and they had no common government to rule them. Fact.
They had their own currency in brass, copper, shells, beads. it was used as money. They did just fine.