Money in politics
I've mentioned several times that democratic politics has had successes in ensuring that people who cannot work receive necessary resources and filling the gaps in the liberal market economy. However, modern liberal democratic politics exists within the liberal market system, and this means that it needs to concern itself with exchanges and money, and that the motivations of the exchange economy - to accrue exchange capacity - are in tension with one of the roles of democratic politics to ensure the health of society overall and ensure that vulnerable members of society are cared for.
A giftmoot economy removes this tension. Without money and exchanges, government motivations and contexts are different, and the concept of a democratic institution guided by the people to understand and achieve the common good is less hindered by constructed constraints and maladaptive practices of people looking to make personal gains from the system.
Here I give a quick overview of some of the potential changes and benefits.
No monetary lobbying
It is essential for a democracy that people can address the government and advocate for their interests and to have their issues attended to. Without this, a democratic government would have far less tools to be responsive to the people, especially between elections. Moreover, it can be beneficial for people to organise into groups in order to facilitate this type of advocacy - in part to secure more resources and demonstrate the number of people affected, and in part because it allows for members of the group to form a coordinated and coherent message.
But once these types of groups are allowed to lobby the government, wealth inequality has a dramatic impact on how it can occur and which groups will have the most sway, with wealthy groups often able to organise more time and prepare more compelling positions. These groups have the resources to write example legislation, have dedicated full-time staff to have multiple meetings, conduct their own research, and fund flights and lunches and events. They can - depending on jurisdiction and law - also directly offer to pay for politicians to receive benefits.
In a giftmoot economy wealth inequality would be reduced, and because there is no exchange-value and no motivation to accrue exchange capacity the ability to bribe or pay benefits to a politicians is dramatically reduced. Lobbyists would have to provide a politician with something that they could not obtain for themselves that they would also want to own, but there would be several roadblocks. First, there are less things that would fall into this category. Second, the lobbyists would also have to obtain it somehow - if they don't make it themselves, they would need to find someone to provide it to them, which would be easy if the thing were easy to obtain, and raise due consideration if it were not. Politicians couldn't just store abstract value to spend when they retired, which would help with transparency.
No jobs waiting for ex-politicians
One loophole in places where regulation and scrutiny makes bribes difficult is to provide an ex-politician with a high-paying, low-stakes job once they have retired from office, effectively giving them a delayed payment. But because jobs don't have pay and volunteering work is motivated by purpose, these types of jobs would not exist. This takes away another avenue for bribery and influence in political office.
No money in campaigns
In many market economies, political campaigns cost a lot of money. This means that wealthy people can run for office more successfully than poorer people, and it also means that political parties can be influenced by businesses who make large donations to their campaigns.
In a giftmoot economy, campaigns would be run by volunteer effort alone. This evens the ground somewhat, with more popular causes obtaining more volunteer effort than less popular causes. There is still the issue of political alignment by industry type having an impact (such as media bias), but taking money out of campaigns would have an enormous impact by reducing the influence of corporations and wealthy individuals.
No taxes
In a non-monetary economy where non-reciprocal gifting is the only type of transfer, there would also be no taxes. The purpose of taxes varies from person to person, with many economists proposing that they pay for government spending, others suggesting that they reduce money supply during periods of inflation, and others proposing their utility is in redistributing money so that wealth inequality is tempered.
Taxes are a common talking point among voters. There are a variety of extreme positions, such as "tax is theft" or "the wealthy should fund healthcare", and various positions in between that taxes should be higher (and the government provide greater benefits to citizens), or lower (and people will have more disposable income), or that the wealthier need to be taxed more (because they don't pay their fair share) or less (because their spending and investment creates jobs). Taxes are often seen as a person's money being taken away, though in other cases money is seen as a social good and taxes correct some level of misallocation.
There are an enormous number of different taxes and tax regulations. Taxes can incentivise certain types of behaviours and discincentivise others. Tax regulation can attempt to make taxes fairer, with deductions for things that are, say, necessary for workers to work. There are tax thresholds so that poorer people are not taxed too punitively. But exactly what regulations should exist and where these thresholds should be is contested. It is politically difficult to raise taxes, but often economically concerning to lower them. Should labour be taxed more than investment? What about land?
The point is, I guess, that taxes are complicated and controversial. They exist as a by-product of both history and the requirements of the system of exchange. Getting the tax laws right is frustratingly difficult, but they exist to solve a problem that the exchange creates in the first place: trying to temper the motivation to accrue exchange capacity and the outcomes of this motivation, trying to get resources away from those who can over-allocate to themselves and toward those people who have been under-allocated, and trying to keep the economy in a stable condition to prevent things from going wrong.
But without money and without exchanges, taxes are unnecessary. Their corrective measures and stabilisation pressures aren't needed when the economy doesn't have an inherent movement toward inequality or when there is no exchange-value that is constantly fluctuating. Taxes are, by and large, currently an inefficiency of a market system, rather than some necessary component of justice or fairness.
Balancing the budget
Governments allocate a lot of resources. They provide welfare, give grants, fund infrastructure projects, subsidise services and provide access to things like healthcare and education. The spending of the government is closely watched and debated, especially in conjunction with taxes and other sources of revenue, and the policies that compose this relation are called "the Budget". There are a few different theories about the relationship between government spending and revenue, and this can lead to hotly contested policies between political parties and economists. I'll have a quick look at three.
The first is the "monetarist" view, which largely proposes that the government should try to stay as neutral as possible in the economy, and leave any economic maintenance (such as responses to inflation) up to other institutions like the central bank. To stay neutral, the government should balance its spending and its revenue. This is called "balancing the Budget". A bit of an appeal is made that governments should be like households or businesses, who (the logic goes) shouldn't spend more than they have. If the government does spend more than it has, then it needs to get the extra money from somewhere, and it does this by selling bonds. The government gets money from the sale, but the bond will eventually "mature" and the government will need to give the money back (it was really a loan, not a sale). To incentivise people to buy bonds, they come with a "coupon", a certain amount of interest paid to the holder. These bonds constitute the debt, and too much debt is a bad thing.
The second is the "Keynesian" view, which largely proposes that the government has a responsibility to carry out economic maintenance through its spending and revenue-raising. The monetarist view tacitly proposes that when the economy is booming and the government is getting a lot of revenue from taxes, it has a lot of money to spend, and when the economy is having a tough time and the government is getting little revenue, it should spend less. The Keynesian proposal is the reverse. When the economy is having a tough time, people have less money to spend and so economic activity slows, threatening to put the economy into an even tougher place. This is when the government should reach into its store of money and spend, to increase the amount of economic activity and get things back on track. Conversely, when the economy is booming, this is the right time to put money away or pay down the debt.
The third is the "modern monetary theory" view, which largely proposes that governments who have complete control over the production of money can carry out economic maintenance and, in fact, may be the best placed or only ones able to do so. The basic logic is roughly the same as the Keynesian logic - to spend when the economy is struggling and to raise revenue when it is booming. However, the underlying thinking is a little different. There is no fixed amount of money that the government has to deal with - it makes the money. When it spends, it actually makes all new money, and when it taxes, this is functionally the same as deleting money. That is, spending adds money to the economy and taxing it removes it from the economy. This means that the government has the levers it needs to pull in order to maintain a healthy economy. What's a bit different about this view is that the budget doesn't need balancing at all, because governments have no need to "owe" money to anyone in order to spend. Debt is an entirely optional and entirely separate thing to government spending and taxing. The limits on government spending aren't how much money the government has (because it makes it up) or how much debt it will incur (because debt is optional and separate), but what positive or negative impacts the spending will have on the economy (and the answer is, usually, not as much as people worry about).
These different ways of thinking about the Budget mean that different people will come to different conclusions about when to spend and when to save, when to raise taxes and when to lower them. This makes the entire Budget debate politically fraught. An enduring consequence is the idea that the government is constrained in how much it can spend because it could potentially run out of money, rack up too much debt, or drive up inflation. The government then has to pick and choose between different projects. Surprisingly, it has to choose between these different projects, even if there are enough real resources to complete all of them. If there is enough labour and resources to provide high-quality healthcare and high-quality education, a government still might not decide to implement both because of some budgetary cost.
As Keynes is reported to have said in a radio interview:
Let me begin by telling you how I tried to answer an eminent architect who pushed on one side all the grandiose plans to rebuild London with the phrase: “Where’s the money to come from?” “The money?” I said. “But surely, Sir John, you don’t build houses with money? Do you mean that there won’t be enough bricks and mortar and steel and cement?”
“Oh no”, he replied, “of course there will be plenty of all that”.
“Do you mean”, I went on, “that there won’t be enough labour? For what will the builders be doing if they are not building houses?”
“Oh no, that’s all right”, he agreed.
“Then there is only one conclusion. You must be meaning, Sir John, that there won’t be enough architects”. But there I was trespassing on the boundaries of politeness. So I hurried to add: “Well, if there are bricks and mortar and steel and concrete and labour and architects, why not assemble all this good material into houses?”
But he was, I fear, quite unconvinced. “What I want to know”, he repeated, “is where the money is coming from”.
In a giftmoot economy, we would likely find that we don't have to decide between different types of projects if there are enough resources to service them all, but, even if there were not, the decision would be about the impact and practicality of the project and not the cost. Sometimes very transformative projects are sidelined because the number of dollars is bigger, even though the resources are there.
Smaller government
But, in a giftmoot economy, we might also find that we ask the government to do less. At the moment we ask the government to pay for education and healthcare and unemployment because there is often no other good way to get those services to people, but that is a circumstance created by the market economy that we choose to inhabit. In a giftmoot economy, we might just try to provide those things directly, without the government having to step in because the economic system has failed to find a way to provide them. There are a lot of people who worry about the size of government and think that the private sector can do things better. I am, obviously, sceptical that this can occur in an exchange economy because any good intentions exist in tension with the desire for profit. But in a giftmoot economy that tension doesn't exist, and the desire of people to do socially beneficial things would be relatively unhindered, leaving less reason for the government to intervene.