A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

Last week, I heard a message about investment, which said that the 3 ways to store wealth are stocks in companies, bonds in governments, and property (owned by banks or rich people). A few days later, I read about GitLab making it their policy to help people get visas (shouldn't that be a government choice?). Privatisation is also taking over police departments, prisons, bus services, etc. I don't trust that the shareholders' best interests are the same as the needs of the people. War helps private companies, at the expense of governments & property. I'm not hopeful for peace in the next 50 years.

What about investing in people? Not saving wealth, but giving it away!

People will try hard to save their own lives in a war (and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway). It's a personal contact, so I think it's highly resistant to inflation. Building community is, in my opinion, more important than storing up wealth. I guess this view is similar to 關係 guanxi. It's democratic: if I do something silly and lose face, then it has consequences. I don't think it's authoritarian communism, where 單位 dictate who you can marry or what kind of job you can do, but a community-focussed lifestyle where newcomers are welcome, and share freely within the group. I'm still trying to figure this concept out though, so other suggestions of philosophical readings are welcome :)

He talks about living without money, but basically mooches on his parents.

Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.

The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.

There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.

If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.