Step back a second...we're arguing over an 80-year-old economic theory derived from free-market capitalism by positing universal capitalism.

That's kindergarten compared to trying to understand some real aspects of the modern economy. Anything that involves digitization results in cost factors that produce divide-by-zero and infinity errors in the simplistic calculations of Adam Smith's pastoral theory. You can't explain the decade-old concept of open-source software guided by "The Wealth of Nations" alone. Hollywood's epic and futile battle against digitization is another good example. Micro-lending is superficially like traditional banking, but in some ways it's a radical new use of digital technology to create computer-mediated financial marketplaces that circumvent the existing hegemony of large financial institutions working closely with government to maintain the status quo. The central role of banks in aggregating money to create capital can be rendered moot in a microlending marketplace.

And then there's the recent thinking about where it will all lead, and how to exploit the new conditions instead of fighting the change. One example: There are serious proposals for a "reputation marketplace" to replace Smith's scarcity-based market, as one way to deal with infinities and divide-by-zeroes in a digital world. The idea is that one constant amidst all the change is human ingenuity, and that the "stock" of people who reliably come up with good ideas rises, and that the "equity" is convertible to goods and services created by others. Similarly, there are proposals for non-monetary economic systems, based on observing that money is a crutch used to represent value in an era when it was inconvenient to physically barter many commodities, but that nowadays we can have computers perform an infinite number of such conversions, and even take into account realtime fluctuations in the marketplace. Ideas such as accruing and bartering credit in terms of hours of labor rather than dollars that have shown up in science fiction for years are very likely to become reality in the next few years.

The nature of economics is changing naturally as the world changes, and none of it is happening because of some Commie plot. You're going to be completely adrift in the modern world just a few years down the road if you can't get over the religious loyalty to Adam Smith's free-market capitalism. If you think Social Credits of 80 years ago is kinky, you ain't seen nothing yet.