What if I want to get rid of my truck, and need toothpicks,
an iron, an old copy of Dos 3.0 and a credit to do something
later with (actually, I need to pay my debts and buy groceries).
The owner of Dos wants flowers; the owner of iron wants
a movie ticket, toothpicks are not there, my lender wants
cash, and my grocer is offline.
It may be quite complicated in many cases.
Matching is harder too than just exchange for cash.
But barter definitely has some benefits.
There are people who don't like money, and people who don't
like IRS, and just curious people...
What if you include currency as one of the goods, so that
the service could have all kinds of transactions, some of
them taxable, some not? Then you don't have a barter-vs-cash
dilemma, you have a service that does everything that others
do, plus barter...
There are also alternate currencies that do not have to be
exchanged for $. That's also hard to tax.
They can have external backing. Like, in rights to stay
at one's home as a guest or in personal sexual favors.
Let the govt tax those :-)
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Sasha Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:40 MDT