I noted this in the NZ Herald.
Amanda Chapman’s tiny home has taken her on a journey through Auckland’s sharing economy.
The 28-year-old has been building the house over the past two years using all borrowed or hired tools thanks to the community phenomenon many believe is key to the future of New Zealand.
The experience is defined as “a peer-to-peer-based activity of acquiring, providing or sharing access to goods and services that are facilitated by a community-based online platform”.
A Newspaper
That’s the whole idea behind a market economy. People use their skills and resources to do things for other people who have different skills and resources. People used to do this all the time. Because it is very hard to find someone who has something you want and who also wants something you have (a barter economy), sharing economies work by people getting some sort of ‘credit’ for what they contribute.
Before the internet, people gave each other tokens that could then be given to someone else in return for them providing a service or resource. It worked very well and there are examples of it in almost all cultures using various tokens (pigs, shells, gold, etc). But then governments decided to get into the act. Not only did they demand that a third of the tokens changing hands in any transaction be given to them, but they also tried to regulate these transactions. They decided that it should no longer be up to individuals how many tokens should be given; they insisted on a rate of 15 tokens per hour (with up to 5 going to the government).
This made it impossible for some of the lesser skilled people to take part. The government used a lot of the tokens they collected to give to people who didn’t have any tokens because no one else wanted to give them 15 tokens per hour. As a result, a lot of people stopped contributing to the shared economy and instead just lobbied the government to give them more tokens.
Once enough people were reliant on the government for tokens rather than by working, national elections became competitions about which government would give out the most tokens. People stopped working and the new prime minister then declared that the sharing economy had failed.
Notwithstanding the above, which is only slightly tongue in cheek, what they are in effect running is a tax avoidance scheme. If a tradesperson does work for free but accepts some other form of reward, she is cheating the tax system. It could well be the way New Zealand goes in the future if the government continues to make legitimate work less and less attractive.