Love the Drake

Pointless

ePrairie.com's Adam Fendelman writes a new series of opinion articles called My Turn/Your Turn that encourages users to reply with there own opinions on the weekly column. His first article titled "A Brave New Moneyless World" suggests getting rid of money and replacing it with Points for those who do good acts. Read the responses from readers here. I guess you are printed only if you agree with the article.Here's my response, posted to the discussion board:

Mr. Fendelman:The idea of getting rewarded for doing good and reprimanded for doing bad is a naive solution to eliminating evil. People are inherently flawed; we make mistakes and do bad things. The problem with your system is that it does not cure evil, it just praises “good acts” which some would selfishly perform because of the reward involved. I would call these selfish acts evil.Many people perform acts of kindness, do good things, etc. because it makes them a better person and they get some personal satisfaction from it. Some of these people do good things knowing no one else knows, and they don’t want to flaunt these good acts for anyone, including your “Pointpeople”.Your article seems to promote smart-card systems (no physical money) more than it does to promote the idea of Points as ideological replacement to money. Smart-cards and the like will eventually be more popular than physical dollar bills and coins, we can probably agree on that point. There is no need to physically imbed chips into people just because you can.The ideas you bring forward in your article have little to do with technology. It appears you have a solution desperately looking for a problem.Your comparison of this idea taking off with the boom of the Internet is absurd. How can you compare this article’s content with any great idea within the last twenty years?-Don Drake

Don,You make a good point about *some* people doing good things just for themselves, but I think the truth of the majority of humanity is that people like immediate gratification. So what if we have to get something to do good? Doing good is still doing good, regardless of why it was done.This isn't intended to be a solution that fixes all our flaws; rather, an idea that helps us be less flawed. I don't think we can rely on people to do good without giving an incentive. It's like throwing a product up on a Web site and trusting that people will buy it. Reaction takes action.