If “value” and the economy are essentially man-made, why can’t the world just sort of… Hit pause to avoid global economic crisis?

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I know there must be reasons and this is a dumb question, but I’m a bit of an abstract thinker and have trouble grasping it from a big picture presepctive. Can someone break this down for me? Can’t we all just kind of agree to just kind of… Reset some numbers or something?
Sincerely,
I’ve never taken an economics class in my life

In: Economics

26 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’re touching on abstract anarchist theories. P.J Prodhun asked the same question and designed the whole philosophy of anarchism around the idea that we don’t really need money.

To answer your question, there’s nothing preventing what you are suggesting. Except doing so would cause a breakdown of all market forces as we know them. Money and the markets are just very complex zero-sum games. But “pausing” that game would mean nothing within the game would function.

It would be like a game of monopoly, where the banker suddenly says that the bank would close down for three spins around the board. There is nothing stopping this scenario, except it violates the nature of the designed system, and therefore the system would collapse . In this case, the monopoly game would be very boring as no one could purchase property or mortgage or do anything but barter with the other players.

That’s basically what would happen in reality as well, but on a much grander scale.

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