It is probably obvious to most, but I had this thought recently - the primary function of money is limiting access to scarce resources. All resources are scarce by definition, to varying degree, although some are more scarce than others. It's not that it wasn't clear to me before, but the weight and ramifications of this escaped me. When we say "limiting" it's not just like in a fair play thing, like when you have few fish and some bread and you distribute it among people equally - limitation is actually actively trying to make everyone pay the highest affordable price.
Mortgage is operating on this kind of logic, at least where I live. The highest affordable (not to everyone, but to most) price is 30 years of working to pay off your debt - and before it happens it's not even your own house.
And, what's more, this kind of logic is in direct opposition to post-scarcity mindset - it operates on making all resource possibly scarce in order to be able to profit from redistribution. Thanks to free market forces (competition) progres is possible and prices of some resources actually are going down (bandwidth, computing power, etc), but it's side-effect, not the main goal.
Sooo... Access to resources should only have natural limits - Maledives can accommodate only so many people at a time for example - but otherwise it might make more sense to aim directly at expanding our resources base, pro publico bono. Simple as that. Because we can. Because what makes sense for humanity to move forward, to the stars, instead of crawling in the mud looking for a dollar. It's just stupid to waste the only real resource we have - our time.
Everything should be free. Actually that's a revolutionary thought, isn't it. The question is how to provide everything for free and how to make sure, at the same time, that it's not abused - sending e-mail is (virtually) free, and there are spammers abusing that freedom. But it's a technical question, not ethical or philosophical one.
