No Money

While walking home with my children today, one of them asked me what if there was no money. As we walked, his idea turned into a very interesting model of why we have money and how it would be if we didn't have it all.

This must come directly from this child's obsession with cops and robbers. He asked why thieves stole. I told him that maybe they don't want to work hard to earn it or they have no way to earn it, or they never learned how. I am guessing that after we had talked he figured that eliminating the money would do away with bad guys.

Here's the plan. "If we didn't have money then people would just make things, we would grow our own food and put it somewhere." "What if I needed something that I couldn't make?" I asked him. "Well, you could just ask someone to make it for you." Profound. "That would take a lot of getting along for everyone," I tell him. "Yeah." Great ideas, based mostly on what we are trying to teach them.