And again, that's due to the banks and insurers pushing for higher prices from colleges / hospitals, so they can get higher loan payments / insurance premiums. If the system wasn't running on credit, prices would be lower because providers wouldn't have an incentive to inflate, and all incentive to keep prices competitive.
Credit is a major aspect of a globally expanding capitalist system, because keeping people and organizations in debt is very profitable for all big companies, not just banks and insurers. In a resource-based economy with no money, on the other hand, there would be no such thing as debt.
It is not, because it is done by the same machines people can have at their house. There was a day when only the uber rich could have afforded to buy complex, expensive and very large machines to produce stuff. That was more than 100 years ago. Today most people can afford to buy relatively simpler, much cheaper and much smaller machines to produce stuff.
But we are still required to purchase these machines from private owners, and these machines allow us to mass produce certain types of items we want, which make the concept of barter entirely obsolete. Also, large factories are still needed to produce the most expensive items on the market, including automobiles, fans, medical equipment, etc. CDs and DVDs are very simple and small items.
The advantage back then was that producing many identical items lowered the average costs of each item. Today the average cost is both very low and doesn't change when producing different but similar items. That might be "mass" in terms of quantity, but not in the way that classic capitalists such as a Rockefeller or a Carnegie worked (and socialists of their time described).
Yet charging people $1.00 for every mp3 downloaded, or a few dollars for every album downloaded to a CD-R, adds up very fast if the person doing so is a collector. Add on the cost of multiple CD-Rs purchased, even in bulk, to that and things add up even faster. This escalates to huge required expenditures for consumers in the long run, and in no way defeats the benefits of a resource-based economy where people would have full access to the social store and everything it provides in direct exchange for performing a modest amount of the useful work per week/year.
It is a strawman because the mega-store advantage is not in being more efficient to mass produce items (although some do it, and more so in some European countries than in America), but in being more efficient to sell very diverse, disparate things, than small stores. This advantage is also blind to property structure. A socially owned mega-store is still more efficient than a socially owned corner store in this sense.
A socially owned distribution center would all carry a diverse array of items that would not require workers to expend any type of personal currency, would not put them in any type of debt, and wouldn't force them to pick and choose between any of these items and anything akin to mortgage or rent payments, utility bills, cable bills, etc., because there would be no such conception as "charging" people for anything. Further, none of the diverse items offered would be of low quality to "save costs" to manufacturers, no useless junk would be mass produced in large wasteful quantities, and no item would be subject to planned obsolescence.
Since I see you're in such a lacy mood,
This is the first time I ever heard the adjective "lacy" used in such a context before. Thank you for the addition to my vocabulary.
I youtube'd it for you.
Okay, thanks. But you seem to forget that Big Bird looks nice in feathers also, and I don't see you mentioning that.