Moneyless Economy: Who Gets the Lobster? Who Collects the Garbage?

The Lobsters?

Marx:“to each according to his needs”  (“jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen”). See also similar formulations in August Becker, Louis Blanc, the Plantation Covenant of Guilford Connecticut, and the Jerusalem community described in Acts 4:32–35. In some of these cases what seems to have been intended is a money-less or mostly money-less society.

So, imagine a community in which the supermarket has neither cashiers nor digital checkout stations. Shoppers put what they want into their carts and unload the carts into their cars. Some shelves, bins, or counters might go empty at some point in the day, the lobster tank being a likely example. Who is going to get to take home lobsters? This has been posed, in various versions, as if it were a killer objection to a moneyless society theory. Is it?

The easiest lobster distribution scheme would be first come first served. If you happen to be at the market when the lobsters come in or shortly thereafter, you get your pick. The problem with this is that it tends to favor those who hang out around the store a lot or, worse, those with friends at the store or whoever delivers lobsters.

Then there is old fashioned rationing. Recall the alternate day gas station system of 1973-74, based on last digt of your license plate, and the heavier handed coupon system of WW II. You might be eligible for lobster purchase only your birthday. A problem with this is that there might be either too few or two many lobsters available on a given day, and your birthday might or might not be a day you were in a lobster mood.

A lottery system would be better. As it would be an opt-in system, only the lobster lovers would be involved. Details would need to be worked out in practice, e.g. whether winners would have some choice, perhaps first come first served, for the delivery date, whether winners would be precluded for some period from reentry, and the like. 

It won’t just be lobsters, of course. There will be caviar, and the better sort of wine, and probably even local asparagus that would run off the shelves. We will need lotteries for all of these. Wines will require special attention. There are just too many labels to have a separate lottery for each. There would need to be some grouping: Class A, Class B, . . . This classing would be determined not by a panel of wine judges, but simply by supply and demand. The labels hardest to keep stock would be in a group with fewer lottery winners, all this to be adjusted as experience dictates. Publicizing what lotteries there are, running them, and notifying winners is made easy enough by cloud computing and universal connection.

The Garbage?

A test of a good job is that most days one wakes up looking forward to going to work. When I taught college or law school, almost all my days were like that, practicing law they were somewhat fewer, but still well represented across the calendar. I’m afraid, however, that I was lucky, and that most jobs, by this measure, are not so good.

There are trends in the right direction, however. As technology improves, the less appealing job descriptions tend to get automated out of existence. It is regretable that there is no discernable trend towards greater expressions of appreciation from the community for those who perform necessary but unappealing labor. Were they more apprecated a greater number of working hours would move into the plus column.

Still, few hours of collecting garbage are going to be looked forward to in any easily foreseeable future, and garbage is not the only such vocation. So how would the garbage get collected or the restrooms get cleaned in a moneyless society? (Yes, robots and the like will help, but there will still need to be on site quality control and supervision. The human worker will have broader and more technical, and less routine responsibilities, but that means yet more toilets and garbage.)

Some solutions are in the literature. One is that everyone does a stint at such jobs as garbage collecting before moving on to more appealing jobs. Versions of this model are in use in the real world today in some corporate cultures. Another possibility, again for a limited duration assignment, is a lottery. Then there is also a market-based solution. Assume that everyone who can is expected to work. The least attractive jobs have the shortest hours, hours short enough to fill the needed positions.

Investment

Lobsters and garbage are not the only problems facing a moneyless economy. There are the resource allocation decisions at the infrastructure and producer goods level, for example. Build more lobstering boats? Rest room robots? Colleges? Roller coasters? I have an easy response. There should be some combination of democratic decision making and market-like mechanisms. The forms levels and constituencies of the democracies, the particulars of the market-like mechanisms, and the mix of the two I leave for those more committed than I am to the idea of a money-less society.  

But, can we, at least, stop worrying the advocates of a money-less egalitarianism about lobsters and garbage?