if we all grew our own food, built our own homes, and manufactured our own machines from metals we extracted and prepared ourselves, why would we need money?
Not one person in the history of mankind has been able to do all these things by him/herself. If we all went back to doing self-sustaining things, the level of technology we would enjoy would be absolutely dismal. I'm gonna fudge some numbers here but its purely for illustrative purposes. The division of labor has basically allowed ten people who specialize their industry to provide for a thousand more. By comparison, in unspecialized economies, if the produce of ten people working separately were added up, it probably wouldn't even be enough to support half of them. Ricardo, Smith, Turgot, the Spanish Scholastics have been dealing with these things for centuries and its basic economic theory.
Money doesntmake sense to me.
Money was a natural out-growth of ever-widening trade. When you trade with people you do not intimately know, there is no way of telling how much of his product you get for his, because neither of you were there to witness each other's contributions to your respective communities. Money serves the purpose (among others) as being a store-house or value.
Honestly, it strikes me as a survival mechanism invented by people who couldn't take care of themselves.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Money was not invented by anyone in particular, and especially not by government decree. In point of fact, considering that all economic transactions are mutually-beneficial, if you were to add up all
voluntary purchases and sales throughout all of history, you would find that everybody was properly remunerated. I exclude "sales" to governments because they are coerced (taxes) but you could readily argue that taxes (even horrible ones) are the fair price for living in a particular society.
Maybe because they were too busy managing the peons...
This sounds like a reference to either bureaucrats or greedy corporate types or both. As far as bureaucrats go, let me assure you, the vast majority of government agents have absolutely no capacity to innovate. They are the epitome of inefficiency and stagnation. Such a useful device as money--which has allowed civilization to flourish to the point it is at--would've never been developed by one of them. And as far as greedy corporate types go, remember they only get to keep their jobs and get rich if they do their job well. That is, if they satisfy consumer demand better than their competitors.
Not to pick on you Python, but many people are under the assumption that doing everything for yourself is "better" than the current system. What they lack is an understanding of comparative advantage and opportunity costs, which sadly, most college professors barely cover. Think of it this way: without money we would probably still be stuck in some crappy neolithic farming village eating nothing but tubers for our entire lives. No sanitation, no internet, no hope, and a guaranteed death at 30 from something silly like arthritis.
