To Free or not to Free?

Why do people use money, and why is daily life structured around buying and selling? The logic, as far as I can tell, begins with the idea that resources such as food, housing, water, land, and jobs are limited. Since there are not enough of these for everyone to take freely, society needs a way to decide who gets what.

Money steps in to solve the problem. Money functions as the standard measure used to assign an “objective” value to things (reflected in its price) and to control access to them. The idea is that by restricting access to everything, people cannot freely take from the common supply, and thus the common supply is protected from depletion. This money ideology claims that fairness is best achieved when individuals compete to gain money and then use their money to buy goods. In competition, individuals prove their worthiness of receiving money through accumulating merit. To do so, they work their way through institutions that certify merit, such as schools, universities, and workplaces. People earn jobs based on how well they accumulate merit and then market their accumulation of certified merit. Those jobs provide income, which is doled out in proportion to the level of merit the job purports to require.

As the idea goes, we have the freedom to work hard and pursue the accumulation of the forms of merit of our choosing. If we choose to accumulate the merit necessary to secure a job in a high paying industry like investment banking, we may secure that job and be rewarded with its accompanying monetary benefits. With those benefits we can purchase the goods and services of our choosing. Thus, we are free to work where we please and free to own and use the goods and services that please us.

The system is deemed fair because those who accumulate less merit or are less able to market their merit simply deserve less. This model of “earn and succeed” translates into ultimate freedom, allowing those who work hard enough to purchase goods and services of their choosing. And, hey, if you don’t succeed, you have no one to blame but yourself. So, next time, just work harder.

Built into this model is the fact that many are always losing out, since there are far more jobs that require low-to-medium amounts of merit and thus pay low-to-medium incomes than there are high-merit and high paying jobs. Thus, most people cannot afford high quality goods, services, and livelihoods. But again, the whole underlying idea here is that we need this method of resource allocation because those high-quality goods, services, and livelihoods are scarce and the fairest way to allocate them is by determining who deserves them most.

However, this assumption of scarcity is shaky because resources are not scarce.

Although billions of people and countless neighborhoods and villages experience intense, acute scarcity in today’s capitalist world order, our capacity to easily provide for everyone is strikingly apparent.

This is an important distinction I would like to re-emphasize. Scarcity does exist in our world today, and if you go to any city around the world this will be immediately apparent as you will witness multitudes of people experiencing homelessness showing signs of physical debilitation and mental torment as they are reduced to beggars. Scarcity is a lived reality in their everyday lives, and I am not disputing this. It is my contention that this scarcity is not an inevitable feature of a world with eight billion people. It is not as if we can’t end world hunger, house every individual, and meet basic sanitation and hygiene needs. Rather, the scarcity that pervades our globe is an artificial condition that arises from a capitalist social order that deliberately manufactures it to facilitate corporate entities’ maximization of continuous profit growth.

This manufactured scarcity keeps people desperate enough to accept low wages for the monotonous, exhausting work that sustains global supply chains and the endless production of commodities. It also trains them to become obedient consumers who do not question why so much remains restricted even as productive capacity grows with the advancement of technology and the knowledge of efficient production practices. As automation and efficiency expand, capitalism prevents the abundance of basic supplies such as food, clothing, and shelter from reaching people freely by inventing new markets for “unnecessary” goods. Through advertising and media, people are taught to crave products they never knew they wanted until those desires were implanted in them. The system constantly invents new “needs” and markets them through new gadgets, fashions, and experiences. By channeling expanding productive capacity into the creation of artificial demand, capitalism prevents that capacity from being used to meet real human needs, keeping essential goods scarce and profits high.

In this process, capitalism creates both material scarcity and a deep scarcity of self-worth. It conditions people to define their value through what they own, how they look, and what they can afford, rather than through meaningful work or community life. The self becomes a project of consumption, always incomplete, always in need of another purchase to feel adequate. As Guy Debord explained in Society of the Spectacle, modern life revolves around appearances rather than reality. People are taught to see well-being as status and to measure their worth by what they own instead of considering the more nebulous and indeterminate question of who they are. Advertising manufactures the anxious, restless consumer who believes that personal fulfillment can be bought.

In a mass-production economy, advertising functions to create demand for goods people would not otherwise seek. Capitalism needs constant consumption to keep profits growing, so it must turn workers into eager buyers. Advertising trains people to see buying as a normal and necessary part of life, even when the things being sold serve little real purpose. Commercials, billboards, and online promotions associate products with belonging, confidence, and success, teaching people to look for satisfaction through purchase. This keeps workers spending the wages they earn, feeding money back into the same system that underpays them. Companies design products with short lifespans or built-in obsolescence, ensuring they break down or lose compatibility within a few years. At the same time, advertising makes people crave newer versions by attaching status and excitement to the look of novelty. The appearance of progress becomes more valuable than the product’s actual function. This constant push for replacement keeps spending high and production endless, turning waste and dissatisfaction into the engines of profit. The cycle maintains high consumption levels and keeps profits rising, while real needs like housing, food, and healthcare remain unmet. The result is an overworked, spiritually impoverished, and morally numb population kept in line by dependency on the very system that denies them lasting security or dignity.

Machines, appliances, cars, entertainment, and medicine have brought undeniable gains in comfort, speed, and convenience; yet it is precisely because these gains are tangible and often astonishing that people grow accustomed to ignoring the destruction that makes them possible. These modern comforts are sustained by a rapacious industrial system that consumes vast resources, fills cities with waste, and poisons or strips entire regions to keep production running. In the process, millions are left without food, medical care, or protection from extreme heat and cold. Yet the visible rewards make this violence appear acceptable. Over time, people come to believe that a system capable of delivering such benefits must be rational and necessary, even as its progress depends on widespread suffering and ecological ruin.

The irrationality of the system becomes obvious when we take a closer look.

Across the country, enormous productive resources and technological capabilities remain idle or misused. Advanced machinery, fabrication equipment, and digital infrastructure capable of coordinating production at every scale already exist. Industrial parks and storage facilities contain millions of machines, vehicles, and tools that could be reactivated or repurposed. Millions of homes, offices, and factories stand empty or partially used, containing recoverable steel, copper, glass, wood, and electronic components. In addition to the goods, tools, and machinery already in use, landfills and salvage yards hold mountains of usable appliances, furniture, building supplies, plastics, and metals that could be remanufactured rather than discarded. Vast tracts of farmland grow feed and fuel instead of food, while cities and suburbs hold thousands of acres of reclaimable land suitable for cultivation or small-scale production. The skills, land, raw materials, and technology needed to rebuild a self-sufficient society are already present within national borders, but they remain locked behind property claims and fragmented supply systems that prevent their collective use.

Even in this capitalist world that doesn’t produce to meet needs, we produce 1.5 times the amount of food needed to feed every person on the planet. According to the British Fashion Council, we have enough clothes to clothe the next six generations, and according to Greenpeace, the fashion industry is expected to produce 200 billion garments per year by 2030. In 2023, it was estimated that there are 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S. In Detroit there are 116 empty homes per unhoused person. While some of these structures are damaged or abandoned, many are not far from repair. Studies show that most vacant houses are empty because of speculation, foreclosure, or delayed renovation rather than structural collapse. Further, as we are all aware, humanity has long possessed the knowledge and tools to restore shelter, so such conditions cannot reasonably be treated as an unbridgeable barrier.

In fact, we have long possessed the knowledge and machinery necessary to eliminate scarcity virtually everywhere it appears. Scarcity exists not because resources are lacking, but because capitalism uses efficient methods to serve a harmful goal. Production is organized around profit instead of human need, so goods are withheld, destroyed, or misused to keep prices high and wealth concentrated. If we redirected our labor and technological capacity means towards a rational end, that is, if we reoriented production towards meeting needs, we could easily provide for everyone.

The myth of scarcity was exposed in 1970 by Murray Bookchin, who wrote in his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism that “roughly seventy percent of the American labor force does absolutely no productive work that could be translated into terms of real output or the maintenance of a rational system of distribution.” Instead, he said, most workers are “limited to servicing the commodity economy—filing, billing, bookkeeping for a profit and loss statement, sales promotion, advertising, retailing, finance, the stock market, government work, military work, police work, etc., ad nauseam.” He added that “roughly the same percentage of the goods produced is such pure garbage that people would voluntarily stop consuming it in a rational society” and that “working hours could be reduced enormously without losing high productive output,” since “the quality of the productive output… could be so improved that its durability and usefulness would more than cancel out any reduction in productive capacity.”  

In 2025, these statements ring even truer because automation, digital coordination, and global logistics have multiplied productive efficiency far beyond what Bookchin could have imagined. A small fraction of the workforce now generates the entire material foundation of society, while most employment remains tied to administrative, financial, and marketing functions that sustain consumption rather than need. Manufacturing technology, renewable energy systems, and supply-chain automation have advanced to the point where essential goods can be produced with minimal labor input. The productive power to provide durable, high-quality goods for everyone already exists; what persists is the economic structure that compels waste, overwork, and planned obsolescence instead of universal sufficiency.

So, if scarcity can be surmounted, why isn’t everything we produce high quality and available for free, and why don’t we all enjoy a high quality of living? How do capitalist apologists defend the continuation of scarcity, which lends itself to the restrictive lifestyles most of us find ourselves living?

Although defenders of capitalism offer many reasons for maintaining scarcity despite our capacity to abolish it, the most common one I encounter is the appeal to “human nature.” I’d like to examine this human nature argument more closely.

The human nature rationale professed by capitalism’s ardent defenders rests on the notion that humans are inherently selfish.

Therefore, if everything was free, humans would scrap and claw to hoard as much as possible in an “everyman-for-themselves” style competition. The theory supposes that in a world without money, where everything is freely accessible, each person would be motivated to take or use as much as possible from the shared supply for their own benefit, and, driven by self-interest, they would do so whenever given the chance.

Ominously, this theory warns that while each individual motivated by selfishness to take more than their fair share could personally benefit in the short run, since everyone is selfish and will do the same, the freely accessible stock of essential goods, resources, and spaces would inevitably collapse, leaving virtually everyone with nothing at all. Then, being desperate, we will be defenseless and find ourselves at the mercy of the strongest few who capture and violently defend their right to exclude others from the use of the little that remains. Tempting as the allure of complete freedom may be, they claim that we would be deluded if we were to set out to make everything free, for we would be trekking down the road to our own serfdom.

Does this story feel familiar?

The reality is that in using money and markets to organize life, capitalism has enacted the very tragedy we were just now being warned of. We heard that a self-serving drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulating would undermine us, but this drive to endless accumulation is the logic of the capitalist system built on money and markets. And that is what we already have today! We are being warned of our present condition.

Driven by the pursuit of profit, corporations have ravaged the earth’s natural resources and polluted its water and air, effectively ushering in an era of ecological collapse and mass extinction. Just a few corporations have captured and restricted access to everything from food, clothing, water, and shelter to entertainment, nature, education, and decision making. In hoarding the food, an elite few has left billions of humans starving. In a desperate attempt to maximize profit, elites support the incarceration, enslavement, and torture of millions who they force to toil and produce goods for little to no compensation. Exploiting our desires, fears, and unconscious habits for profit, social media corporations have built their platforms on the same behavioral principles that keep people gambling in casinos, luring us into addiction to endless scrolling. Advertising agencies reinforce this cycle by targeting ads that heighten insecurity and persuade us to buy our sense of self-worth. As a result, billions are now hooked to their screens, spending countless hours each week lost in mindless content, while the number of people who reach for a book continues to fall. The pursuit of profit has led to the mass production of goods that are cheaply made, environmentally harmful, illness inducing, and planned for obsolescence. Further, in producing these goods, the pursuit of profit has motivated corporations to exploit workers for as much of their labor power for as little compensation as possible. As a result, most people are left with barely enough money to afford even the basics, let alone the goods and services that make for a healthy, fulfilling life. Predictably, they turn to the cheapest options available. They eat ultra-processed food and consume addictive media and disposable products. These consume their time, damage their bodies, destabilize their hormones, and dull their emotional balance, steadily eroding the quality of their lived experience. All the while, profits surge, feeding the insatiable demand for even greater returns each quarter. This relentless hunger for profit forces corporations to exploit workers more intensely, strip the earth increasingly bare, accelerate the corrosion human dignity, and it hurtles them towards the incessant perfection of systems engineered to addict, manipulate, and drain life of meaning itself. The race to the bottom accelerates.

Throughout history, capitalism’s drive to accumulate for its own sake has unfolded as a self-perpetuating and devouring process. Its avalanching compulsion to pursue infinite profit growth has restricted the stock of freely accessible goods, resources, and spaces, collapsing the commons and propelling us in direction where ultimately almost nothing will remain accessible for anyone at all.

Reduced to a desperate mass of destitute people, we might now find ourselves looking in the mirror. In the reflection, we see a defenseless collective left at the mercy of a powerful few. Restricting access, not liberating it, has set us down the path towards serfdom.

So, we see that while capitalism presents itself as the barrier preventing collapse, the very collapse it claims to guard against arises from the same impulse that drives capitalism.

Capitalist reasoning is circular.

It claims that money and markets are necessary to prevent disorder and scarcity, yet those very systems generate the disorder and scarcity they claim to avert. In warning of chaos without money and markets, they justify the chaos caused by money and markets.

We would be wise to heed the words of Emma Goldman who wrote the following regarding those who profess the natural selfishness of humans:

“Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless." Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?”

Is it unrestrained human nature we should be afraid of or the incentive structure of capitalism? Could it be that the root of catastrophe lies not in making everything free, but rather in making everything for sale?