A weapon is just a tool that can be applied to give a person negative consequences by the wielder.
Most people experience money being used as a weapon, on a regular basis.
Sure, people can be histrionic and hyperbolic.
Other people refusing to give you money isn't "weaponizing money". It's called "sane boundaries".
>Most people experience money being used as a weapon, on a regular basis.
Few people in western nations ever experience that in their entire lives. You couldn't even come up with an anecdote that would pass the smell test.
The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging, I have great colleagues, furiously creative and smart, who also love what they do, but how much of our work is only accounting for overhead? At which point keeping track of all money flowing through the economy becomes the objective of the economy?
Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it, but we also need to be careful not to invest too much in fraud detection that we spend more on it than we would covering for fraud. Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Most people wouldn't. People prefer leisure. While I like programming, most of the work I do is tedious. I would rather spend my time riding my mountain bike, working on my Land Rover, or programming a video game.
> Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
No. The vast majority of people don't just want the bare basics in life. Thinking otherwise is simply naive.
It's a dumb question. Would I want to continue to eat, to be warm in the winter, and have the basic tools needed to live? Your question sounds like juvenile fantasy.
>I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging,
My work is a paycheck. I don't have to love it. I don't need it as a lifestyle, or a hobby, or a religion. It's mildly lucrative, long-term, and they seem to get something out of the deal too. If I wanted a family, I've got one at home and those are the people I love.
>Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it,
Half the people in this thread don't even know what money is. It's been abstracted away beyond their monkey brained ability to understand it's nature. They think billionaires have billions.
>Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Never ceases to amaze me that those who grew up comfortably in middle class homes are in such a hurry to go on welfare. "Please, give me the Medicare for everyone". No, I have no great desire to ever be on welfare, and I say in all seriousness that I would prefer to starve to death, slowly and in great pain.
I don't need money for its own sake, but being fungible, it is virtually everything I do need. It is food, it is clothing, it is heat, fuel, tools, household furnishings, shelter, insurance against disaster, security, etc. To hear people talk about "money they don't need" sounds like mental illness. I suspect it actually is.
That's a very serious oversimplification of the reality, in my opinion. Money, in our society, is much more than a means for survival.
> This seems doubtful.
I'm not sure how that seems doubtful. All you have to do is pay attention to the news, or (even though this is hardly a modern phenomenon) pay attention to what today's ultrawealthy are saying and doing to see the truth of it.
You don't even have to look at the ultrawealthy. For a more common, low-level, example, look at the spying that marketers engage in. They use money to engage in those attacks, and they do it in order to get more money.
> You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors.
Absolutely true, but irrelevant to my point.
> Even poor people are fat.
Not because of abundance, but because eating well is too expensive.
No it isn't. Eating poorly is often (much) more expensive that eating properly. Non-processed food is actually reasonably priced for the most part. Fruit and Veg is reasonably cheap. Premium cuts of meat can be expensive.
Just looking at my recent trip to the supermarket:
* A 6 pack bag of apples (Pink Ladies) was less than £1.50
* A bag of easy peeler oranges was less than £1.50
* A bag of new potatoes £2
* Large Bunch of Bananas are about ~£2
* 12 Pack of Large Eggs - ~£2.50
* 12 Rashers of Bacon - ~£2.50-4
* 1kg packet of Chicken Thighs (Raw) are ~£3.50 (2 chicken thighs a day).
* Broccoli ~£1
* Spouts ~£1
* Beans ~£1
* Berry flavoured Tea Bags ~£2
* Bag of Italian Ground Coffee ~£3-4
* 240 Pack of Yorkshire Tea Bags (will last me a month or two) ~£6
* Store brand Olive oil based Margarine ~£2
* Premium Wholemeal Loaf of Bread ~£2-3
* 4 pints of Semi Skimmed Milk £2.50
* Various table Sauces ~£1-2
That is less than £50 and I don't need to buy some of those weekly. Each day I am eating about 1800-2000 calories (I've put myself on a calorie controlled diet to lose weight) and this will last me most of the week if not the entire week.
If I buy ready meals they are £3-6 each. Premade Pizza is £4-6. So much more expensive and objectively worse for your health than cooking yourself.
One takeaway meal from the local Chinese will cost me £22 (a main and a side), Noodles will cost £7-11 depending on the dish. A pizza from the local pizza shop is £8-10. This excludes delivery. The local deli will charge me £4-5 for a meal deal (Chicken Wrap, Snack and Drink).
McDonalds is about £7 for a Big Mac Meal. KFC is similar for one of their Box Meals.
* Bananas, a fine inexpensive convenient snack.
* Buy bread and sandwich fillers, add sliced tomato, not awful for you and not time consuming.
* Tea is cheap, I like tea.
* Cereal can be good if you can find one that hits the sweet spot between a bowl of chocolate and a bowl of chaff. Some sort of granola maybe.
Most kitchen equipment except for the white goods is dirt cheap and even the really cheap stuff can last for years. Most meals take me 30-40 minutes to cook maximum.
In any-event. It is objectively more expensive to buy junk food, that includes the cheaper junk. Once I cut out the trips to the takeaway and the deli, I was surprised at how much more money I had per month.
The fact is that people tend to want to eat junk.
Eating well and making someone else do the work is expensive. For the lazy, this means eating well really is expensive.
This does not appear to be making people any happier than they ever have been. Rather, the isolation implicit in an increasingly transactional society is creating a lot of loneliness, which generally has a greater impact on life satisfaction than material comfort.
Your life would be better if you devoted so much time to food, clothing, and shelter? That's what money is. If you dislike money, a mere change in attitude such that you believe you're pursuing the essentials should suffice.
>I hate that its used as a weapon by those
This seems doubtful. Those in warzones have my sympathy, but I think that it's pretty likely that you live in a place where it's not used as a weapon at all. Your family remains unstarved, no one's burning your crops or confiscating famine relief off the UN trucks.
>But I yearn for a better way.
You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors. Even poor people are fat. Clothing is so cheap we throw it away if it gets a cheeseburger stain... your grandma didn't slave away for years to gift you that roughspun, sackcloth shirt. Etc etc.