There is no intrinsic reason that everything in the economy has to be quantified in money.  Like so many other things, money may be a lesson we must unlearn. It has certain disadvantages.  In microeconomic terms, the individual actors are supposed to avoid costs, but money exchanges are subject to taxes, fees, and percentages of all kinds. You might say, money is illiquid.   The use of money as a storage of value causes deep and pervasive rent collecting, which boils down to the entrapment of each younger generation by the older. 

What is still lacking as far as I can see, are effective non-monetary alternatives, such as software algorithms for multi-party barter. For example, imagine a website called "BarterMatch.com" 

1. Users submit precise specifications for what they need ( at first, simple goods and services, simple transportation, and intellectual property such as software and entertainment.  Later, housing, utilities, food, entertainment etc. etc.) 

2. Users submit precise specifications and descriptions of their capabilities, locations, available hours to schedule, etc.

BarterMatch would read your capabilities and performance history from the database, and the capabilities of others, and compose multiparty offers or collaboration contracts. The contract would be boiled down to lists and instructions of places to go, and tasks for each party to do.

BarterMatch would figure out what is possible, what the schedule is, how far away you're located, and calculate scenarios and proposals to members, to organize the labor. 

There is nothing but labor in the universe. Adam Smith was wrong: there is no capital, no entrepreneur. Those are useful concepts but fundamentally, there are only individual humans in the economy.  Investing, or entrepreneurship, are not esentially any different from any other role.  Why should we worship these roles?  There are no natural resources or land or minerals. We have never paid money to a field, or a forest, or an oil deposit  --we have paid it to certain people.  These are materials that originate outside BarterMatch but he regards them the same as barter inputs-- they are just another "resource", to be included in scenarios. REA accounting and the ebXML core components and BPSS are applicable technologies for this. 

Some parties will reject some offers, which will feel like too much work for not enough of what they said they want. BarterMatch will relentlessly compute new offers, sometimes as simply as finding another similar worker to fill in for your rejection. You could always scratch some stuff off your wish-list, and BarterMatch will start pitching offers to you, having shorter tasks lists.

If you don't do your task, some other member will be mad when they don't get their stuff, and you will be busted and you won't get any stuff either. BarterMatch would figure out you owe the tribe some tasks, and would get on your case. 

Groups of people would form collective resource offerings, and other tribes would form collectives on the demand side, to simplify collaboration generation. Maybe there would be multidimensional tribes, cross-market tribes. 

This will happen any day now. This year maybe. bwaha ha! That's why we should all work hard to keep our income below $20,000 per year. It will be terrific evidence of our fair market value in the economy.  We should collect documentation such as DWI convictions, letters of reprimand, bankruptcies and defaults.  Nobody should be allowed to join BarterMatch.com if their income in any of the past 3 years was above the poverty level, because they would be driving up everybody's taxes.

Governments will say "You valued your groceries income for 2002 at $3,000 but we know that groceries in the supermarket cost $52,000 for a family of 4." Members will argue "Look, here's a list of every hour of every bum who worked on those damned groceries. And look what a bunch of bums, their labor is only worth $6/hour. Some of them didn't even show up. Besides, I never received all these groceries." Economists will argue, "Those supermarket groceries cost $52,000 because they came from a completely different system of production that's less efficient" And they would be right.

You think I'm kidding, don't you?  The banks and credit card companies could begin reverse engineering the entire world economy today, and begin composing nonquantified multiparty barter offers.  They have the data. 

* Todd F. Boyle CPA http://www.GLDialtone.com/
* tboyle@rosehill.net Kirkland WA (425) 827-3107
* XML accounting, web ledgers, BSPs, ASPs, whatever it takes