It is not artifact of any financial system, this would happen even if we had full communism, just illegally and with barter/favor payments. It is artifact of human nature.
With a different kind of accounting, people behaviors may change. The wealthy art consumers want status, prestige, and acceptance as one of the ‘cool’ crowd. Or when buying for investment, they expect some will buy from them for those effects.
If we make it much more prestigious and ‘cool’ for people to show off their equivalent donations to starving children, fewer will bid for the drawings and more will donate.
As someone who makes most of his money from non-profit organizations, I can say that "competitive donating" is a sport which many of the older rich people will play. The ones who play hardest are typically near the end of their rope and worried that they won't be remembered fondly or won't get into heaven (see: the catholic church).
Definitely, but that has nothing to do with the financial system. Actually the current financial system is the only known system able to create fortunes big enough that someone is able to donate anything; and the system enables it, contrary to others that are designed only with citizens in mind. Another problem is that other systems are designed, the one we have now is more or less natural - people will always trade unless they can get everything for free, which is not possible at the moment and probably won't be for the next 50 years at least. A lot of value would be lost if people didn't use money; this value might seem low per transaction, but it's a lot on a country/global scale.
>the current financial system is the only known system able to create fortunes big enough that someone is able to donate anything
You mean the current financial system where concentrated wealth yields concentrated power to effect change?
And almost everyone is born into a situation where their wealth & power is insignificant compared to the rare individual who has been the beneficiary of the feature where rapidly or not there is a net flow concentrating resources disproportionately toward those already wealthy & powerful?
Nominally, the traditional result is that the few having most concentrated wealth are the ones capable of effecting the changes they desire, with most everyone else serving these masters in one way or another. With the servant class being highly restricted in their ability to develop personal wealth of their own, much less direct major resources toward independently progressive positive objectives.
I must assume that the current financial system is the same one as that of Genghis Khan.
So naturally there is a long precedent.
Anyway, back on topic not every single artist or engineer serves this type of master, just most of them.
Some create value or enhance wealth, some devalue or destroy, what else is new?
>We could invest in lofty ideas to alleviate starving...
This wise investment was fortunately made starting at just the most opportune time in human history, and has compounded itself remarkably in only a few generations. Many approaches are now well known, only requiring a properly-scalable "seed" committment for their relative degrees of success to be proven on the larger scale.
I guess we need to invest in lofty equitable distribution of resources, especially essential survival commodities.
Creating or spreading surplus value can require a lot of work, but those at the top of the food chain don't really have to do it if they don't feel like it since wealth is flowing their way already.
Plus there is just so much wealth & plenty already which is not having a fraction of the positive effect it could be making.
Sorry but right now I don't have time for full reply. Consider that many problems you listed are caused by regulation (that supports corporations and their interests), not the financial system itself. The same system is used elsewhere with better results.
Two thoughts:
I don't see a viable way to change what society views as prestigious and 'cool'.
I can see the argument that the amounts spent on works of art are excessive, but it seems like we should at least keep in mind that this does benefit society by supporting the creation of great art.
you're actually not making any sense. you're saying that no matter what financial system we have, nothing would change, so there's no point in changing it, and there's no point in not changing it. and if courts and police exist in the way that they exist in our society, then that wouldn't be a stateless society by definition.
I'm saying that changing the financial system will change nothing and there is no point in changing it, yes. Part of the world tried other systems and failed miserably, thus we should focus on education and other social factors instead of trying to fix something that isn't broken (what is broken is the current regulation, not the system itself).
Ad communism: That's not true. Have you read anything from the communist theory? Marx, at least? I mean, more than a part of one book?
Communism is a change in ownership and control, but that doesn't mean that a police-like body wouldn't exist (it might not, though). They just call it "people's militia". The court system would be different, but a court nonetheless. A corporation can have police and courts and it's still a corporation. Military, the same. Even today these are deliberately kept as separate as possible from the governing body (what we usually mean with "state").
Thus I think you have mixed up the definition of "state" in "stateless".
have you read marx? he didn't have any actual conception of a communist society. and anyway, that's a bit like trying to understand capitalism by only reading adam smith, which would be incoherent.
and it sounds like you're really describing the 20th century model of essentially replacing boards of directors with government officials and calling that communism. and that's the most basic and universal criticism of 20th century communism that marxists have today, which is that that model preserved the internal logic of capitalism by preserving the structures which concentrated (capital) power within a handful of people in the same way that capitalism does, or something like that. and if you're being faithful to marx, none of those are communist societies, it's more like stage zero socialism.
i'm not trying to start a flame war, i was just confused about what you were saying, but i think i understand now.
> he didn't have any actual conception of a communist society
This is my point, actually. There is no one who would forbid a group of people to appoint a few members of their community to be "police"; there is no one who would forbid a group of people to create a court. And there is nothing saying that would make it a state. Communism is about self-governed societies, not anarchy in the destructive "I can do whatever because there is no police" sense.
Even actual anarchy wouldn't be like that because if you hurt enough people, they will hurt you, and that's why you don't even do it. Later in development, they'd pay someone in advance to hurt you if you hurt them. The same thing would happen in communism, just there wouldn't be money changing hands and the organizational specifics would be different.
Saying that any form of leadership would make a stateless society not stateless is nonsense. My family is not a state and yet we have a leader. My apartment building is not a state and yet we have a leader. Etc. There will always be a leader (or a group of leaders), the difference lies in who owns what and how are the leaders appointed (e.g. on basis of what) and what rights they have. Without any leaders, the society would collapse.
A "stateless" society does not exist, as long as people live together they need tp assign certain roles, and that is a "state", however rudimentary. And if roles are not assigned by agreement, someone will create them by force.
i think what communists usually mean by a stateless society is that there's no formal document or structure that authorizes a concentration or monopoly of power within any institution.
