At least future generations will know that not all of us were self-destructive, shortsighted fools. Knowing folks like this exist gives me hope.
💕
@aral say this were adopted globally and it was only demand ↔ supply (but no prices).
- how can we use scarce goods efficiently without a price mechanism?
- why would people produce goods that aren't fun to make?
- what would stop drug users from consuming but not producing?
If the world relied on purely gifts, with no prices or trade, it’d be almost impossible to organise specialised labour to produce goods.
Gifts are produced through cooperation and a larger process. For a tribe built on love/trust in a tiny area with primitive goods, it’d be doable.
Almost all the charities linked in that directory pay massive amounts in direct salaries.
Look at their reports for direct salary info:
St Jude — $600m/year
Red Cross — $972m/year
RNLI — £83m/year
Heart — $392m/year
For RNLI specifically, 68% of all their costs are salaries.
Almost all the non-charity examples there are for nonscarce items — software, where there's no additional cost for each additional item produced.
Scarcity is the physical barrier.
Charities are not corruption-free — particularly at global scale, where corruption and waste naturally ensues.
Even UNICEF (mentioned in the Trade-Free directory) have a team dedicated to investigating their own corruption, fraud and wrongdoing.
https://www.unicef.org/auditandinvestigation/
This is an issue regardless of trade, markets and prices.