You Can't Eat Money: A Thought Experiment

Let’s do a thought experiment:

Imagine that you are hungry. You walk into a grocery store and see a wide array of foods available. You pick up a few items to satiate your hunger, and then you proceed to the checkout line. The clerk scans your items, then asks for your payment. 

At this point, you realize that you don’t have any money. He says that you’ll have to leave the items there and exit the store. But you’re really hungry, so you pick up the food and walk toward the door. 

The clerk yells after you, then alerts the manager. The manager runs up and reminds you that you can’t take the food if you didn’t pay for it. She offers to take it back inside for you. But you ignore her and keep walking. 

The manager yells to a police officer, who is stationed just outside the door. The police officer physically blocks you from leaving the stores, and takes the food away from you. He then puts you in handcuffs and takes you away to jail.

In this scenario, what is it that prevents you from getting the food that you need? Most people would say that it was your lack of money. But looked at from a different point of view, it was actually the decisions by three people - the clerk, the manager, and the police officer - that denied you what you needed.

Or to put it more positively, what could have allowed you to get the meal you needed? Any of those three people could have let you take the food if they had so chosen. Or, another party could have intervened, such as the next customer in the checkout line offering to put the food on their bill.

The point of this thought experiment is to get us thinking about what money really is, and why it is one of the main chains that limits our human freedom. Obviously, money is a means to an end. We all know that we can't eat money. Its only a form of exchange that allows us to get what we need. 

Nonetheless, it seems we tend to think about money as an absolute entity, even though it isn't. The notion that one must have certain pieces of paper, or certain little discs of metal, or a certain plastic card, or a certain number - it's not a notion based on the natural order of the world. 

Money is not a reality of creation, like the weather or the law of gravity, that we must contend with whether we want to or not. We created this system of money that governs and oppresses so many, and we are the ones who everyday make the decisions that sustain this system - decisions like the clerk and the manager demanding payment, and the police officer physically imprisoning someone who violates the rules of the system. 

That being said, I’m not recommending that we all go in to a grocery store today and try to walk out without paying for our food. And I’m not recommending that clerks, managers, and police officers stop doing their jobs and risk getting fired. This is the system that we have, and as flawed as it may be, our well-being still depends on it.

What I do hope is that we can see how money is a chain that we impose on ourselves, and how a large part of our movement toward freedom requires us to grapple with this chain. Perhaps we will never have a society where we are free from the idea of money, but we can reshape our attitudes and habits toward it to allow for greater and more comprehensive human flourishing. 

Some questions to help us think about money in larger ways than this grocery store scenario:  

1) How do we decide what to do with our lives, where to spend our time and our passions? How predominant is making money in these decisions?

2) How does our concern over affording cars and houses, paying for children’s education, and saving for retirement affect these life decisions? How is our human freedom and potential limited by this chain of financial need?

3) What does the illustration of the grocery store and the customer with no money show us about how there might be a better way to think about and structure our economy? If it’s not money, what is it that really prevents human beings from a more just and free way of providing each other what we need to live and to flourish?