Where does currency come from? Ultimately it comes from the need to exchange items indirectly. Why indirectly? Because direct exchange is barter and has limitations which create (or are) resistance. Money comes from the needs created by the weaknesses of direct barter. Barter in turn comes from the mammalian strategy of communication and socialization. Organization itself is a step towards diversity because that’s where advantage is found.
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood
Organizational life implies interaction. Interaction is always an exchange. Even a hug or a hand shake has a cost. There will always be supply and demand, since not all demands are material there will always be diversity of supply which means a basis for trade, the long term intolerable weaknesses of barter can only be overcome by currency of some sort or by stasis/homogeneity.
Any optimal society has money/currency. A way to render an abstraction as tangible. A way to externalize commitment and desire. A contract for example is a form of barter. Sure you could try to tolerate the weaknesses of barter but you’re only setting yourself up for either universal stagnation (as a result of trying to prevent…) or re-capture by covert capitalists. (What do you think the mafia/yakuza/triads are? They are competing governments.)
Economy is just an abstracted way of saying movement. Typically expressed physically as matter or energy traveling from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration along the path of least resistance.
Creating these paths in advance and waiting for reality to take them according to an imagined superior state, leading to an objective, leading to a plan for accomplishing that objective, is how one controls and shapes reality. Each of these steps can be debated forever. That’s why we have to actually try stuff.
Societies without money have been tried. They were first after all. It only works in conditions of extreme homogeneity, because only at the simplest levels can barter suffice because of a lack of diversity among goods/services/demand. Simple of course need not mean small, or boring. You can have simple and entertaining huge things. There have been massive barter economies. But they were intrinsically disadvantaged and quickly trumped by the greater diversity tolerance/exploitation of competing systems. Systems which developed from within the older systems. Even the church was forced to adapt or die.
History can be seen as a constant war and progression. A war between social inertia and innovation created diversity. A progression of capabilities growing out of growing tolerance for diversity. Progressiveness vs conservatism. Diversity will always win over the long term because it produces new opportunity/ability or exploits previously unexploitable opportunity.
http://swankivy.com/shenanigans/labels/evolve.jpg
But of course one can reject the earth as it is or ever has been as an argument. One can have faith in imagined superior alternatives because being an imaginative construct it is flawless and infinitely malleable.
So instead of going up in scale, let’s go down. To start with, life is activity. And activity is movement. Like movement explained above. A rock is lifeless because no part of it changes or moves “on its own” (whatever that ultimately means philosophically.) I can’t sit on a rock and get it to hatch, I can’t plant a rock and get a tree. If I could, then it wasn’t a rock, it was an egg or a seed.
The moment it sprouted roots or started to hatch it, by definition had to have an economy.
But let’s go a little lower. If it moved/reacted at all it still had an economy, even if it wasn’t alive. Like if it was made of dry ice and I dropped it in water. Now you have a temperature exchange and phase/material/chemical economy. Go lower and everything has an economy, because it’s all moving.
The lack of economy is a perceptual limitation or an illusion. Like when a tree appears to not be growing because it’s not happening fast enough for you to register. Or when pitch appears to be a solid because of its rate of flow.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/18/pitch_drop_experiment_video_science_world_aflutter_after_experiment_pays.html
or lower…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
It can be argued that existence itself is movement, or vibration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory
Are you hearing me yet? If you eliminate movement at any point you merely create an insulator around which movement must occur. This is the base reason why external discipline is always doomed to fail and why prohibition creates black markets and why it takes more voltage to get around, or through resistance, etc etc etc, including why you can never dispense with economy/movement/money without hideous cost. (Like saying becoming an inert chunk of rock.)
http://www.lifegem.com/ Ironic really, the only way to mostly escape the economy is to become something often used as a form of currency. XD
Even the body has an oxygen economy. How that oxygen is distributed changes based on the needs of the market/organism as a whole.
Sure, you could make an organism that doesn’t need oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria for example, which in turn just have a simpler and far less capable/diverse economy.
The planet’s surface has a water economy, upon which I modeled my economic solution (ubt/cap) because it’s a proven system. It also has a magnetic economy powered by fission, which is great for us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Importance
All of it is running out. This movement appears to be unidirectional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
The entirety of observable reality is the progression or movement from one state to another. The only point at which we can be free of this is the last point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death