People are going to end up being haves and have nots without money anyway. How do you think money was invented? It's human nature to work for reward. The no money system will never work, same reason why communism never worked. Without money, how do you organize the concept of Trade? If Trade doesn't exist, what's left is Take Or Be Taken From. People will destroy one another over survival without the organization of a monetary system.
There shouldn't be haves and have-nots under the structure they designed. They got their jobs by random selection. Any service they provided or products they produced were for the benefit of the entire city. Do you think that Clary got to decide what happened with the food just because she was lucky enough the get drawn to run the greenhouse? If that was true, she would easily be the wealthiest citizen of Ember. They had a Store Room and Store Room Clerks for a reason. Every item produced was to be given to the Store Room and then rationed out. When the guards knocked over all those vegetable plants, Clary doesn't say "that's my food!" She says something like, "that's our food, all of our food!"
It was a very small population. Almost like a family unit. When the builders sent the first people down into Ember, they couldn't have anticipated that the population would ever grow much beyond 200 people. They worked because that's what they knew they were supposed to do. Their reward was knowing that their work was important to the survival of their "family". I don't think Native Americans traded amongst their own tribes. They traded with other tribes and European settlers but they took care of their own just because they were supposed to.
The only realistic reason for the Builders to install a monetary system would be because it might give the Emberites a head-start on setting up a new society when they left Ember. However, if I were a builder, I would have let things take their own course.
My rhymes are so potent that in this small segment I made all of the ladies on IMDb pregnant.
reply
share