Excellent essay by John Michael Greer this week. My favorite passage: https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/11/dark-age-america-hoard-of-nibelungs.html
yes, i'd agree with that last bit especially. i much prefer a barter system, but with the problem of the extended trust network being too difficult to manage for a single person to interact on a larger scale, there seems to be needed some mechanism for saying "this person's X is trustworthy" at a distance, and as you can see that even money has it's own problems in that regards (counterfeiting). money provides a very flexible mechanism for that sort of thing and it doesn't need a trust certificate to go along with it (as long as it is not too widely counterfeited). so the quandary is in any system of transactions always involves basic measures of trust in one form or another, i think the arguments both pro and con are that money removes the person from the transaction in some manner. the pro is that it makes it quick and efficient to not have to run a background scan on every transaction, the con is that sometimes you really should know the full details of the transaction...
Barter doesn't fix the problem of externalization. How do you account for pollution, for example? Thank You Kindly, Topher
