Money is meaningless.

Currency first came about as a means of establishing set values for economic transactions. The oldest currencies were "precious commodities;" silver, gold, and gems. In the distant past, these were all sought after, even if they had no real value other than physical beauty. Today we use gold to prevent corrosion, silver in medicine, and gemstones in industrial and scientific endeavors. But when they were first used as currency, none of these applied. The currency was, in effect, "created from whole cloth."

Today's money is literally made from cloth, and is completely disassociated from the commodities which originally spawned it, adding one more layer of completely arbitrary distance between us and the origin of economics--and an economic viewpoint and method that is obsolete.

Day by day, the labor of maintaining our civilization is less than the benchmark set for full employment of our people. This is because today's technology is breaking yesterday's economics. Capitalism has allowed our civilization a structure to grow upon, and make itself powerful. But increasingly, what was once our cradle is now our prison cell. We have become concerned with cost, rather than capability.

While the day has not yet arrived that economics as they have been traditionally defined will become entirely obsolete, it is approaching more rapidly with every passing hour. Machines can now make what once required human hands. Ten engineers can replace a hundred laborers. Fifty sharecroppers are supplanted by a handful of tractor drivers, and who may in turn soon be displaced by machines trained to tend crops by themselves, informed and guided by computers and the sleepless sentinels of the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System.

What we're talking about here is the looming possibility of what is called a post-scarcity society. A place in which we produce enough commodities, if that word can be applied, to fully meet the desires of our people, without restriction or the need to ration them out at a cost. When the drudge work of society has been taken by machines to so great an extent that human intervention is restricted to designing and tending them, if that.

We're not there yet. And in fact, it's probably going to be decades before we are there. But this is no longer something that's on the distant, unthinkable horizon of the future. Like Arthur C. Clarke's exposition of space travel 17 years before the lunar landings, what was once absurd science fiction is now knocking on our door and asking to come in for a cup of coffee and a bagel.

 In that context, we need to start contemplating right now some fundamental questions and truths about the world as it's traditionally been seen. We need to ask ourselves whether we want to continue defining our social contract as requiring someone to hold a 40-hour job in order to share in the benefits created by a modern world. And we need to realize that this truth applies not just to us in this country, but across the world.