The interesting thing is that for people who are wealthy, it is already almost possible to be released from a life in which thoughts about money play a significant part. Of course, the rich actually think constantly about money. But it’s not because they have to. You can pay people to think about your money and just go and enjoy your life. They “never have to worry about money again.”

Let me describe to you an imagined place where money has virtually disappeared from people’s lives:

Pleasant Acres is one of those awful Florida retirement villages full of Trump supporters where everyone plays pickleball and does salsa dancing. We are not here interested in the cultural vibrancy of Pleasant Acres or the politics of its residents. Instead, we are concerned with the internal economy. Residents pay $100,000 per year to live in Pleasant Acres. That price secures them access to […]

I am sure you see already where I am going with this. It is possible to live in Pleasant Acres, have your $100,000 deducted annually from your bank account, and go through your day to day life without thinking about money at all. I do not mean “not thinking about money because you have so much that the cost of each transaction doesn’t matter to you.” I mean that there are no internal transactions taking place between the residents and the management.

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But the fact that “free at point of use” makes people use more of something is not actually a bad thing. I talked about how if fire departments charged people, homeowners would be disincentivized from calling the fire department, which would actually be very bad. In healthcare, it’s bad that people are discouraged from calling ambulances. If the public library charged to check out books, fewer people would read and learn. And in Pleasant Acres, the whole point is that seniors are liberated from the bother of having to think about transactions and get to simply enjoy things.

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This is a silly story, with many implausible aspects, and I am not asking you to believe that rich old Trump voters are going to become syndicalists and make a little socialist utopia. Instead, I am only trying to show that eliminating markets, money, and exchange within certain spheres is quite readily conceivable. […]