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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)
/^t/This short history of currency is to show that people have always needed some means of paying for goods and services. Why pay for them at all? Cannot everything be free? - someone might ask. The answer is quite simple. Every member of society needs certain goods like food, clothes and a shelter to survive. A single person can hardly be expected to be so versatile as to provide for herself or himself all these. So people have specialized - some produce food, some manufacture clothes and some build houses. This leads to the need for social interaction. If everyone is to have all the necessary products, the commodities must be exchanged within the society. In a group of ideally cooperative people this problem would be easily resolved. Everyone would produce as much as possible and everyone could take as much as he would need from the others. People, however, vary. Some are more productive and cooperative, some less. In a typical society the solution presented above would most probably lead to a situation when some of the people would work hard but there would also be individuals who would do nothing and profit from the labour of others. If one can have everything without any effort, why work? Some administrative solution can be proposed, for example making everyone work, but this has at least two major disadvantages. The first one is that the liberty of the people would be seriously infringed. People should be able to do what they wish (if their activities do not harm the others, of course). The second disadvantage of making work compulsory is that it would be simply ineffective. It could be feasible to establish if the person is doing nothing at all but determining if they are doing their best is impossible. People could largely simulate working and still draw profits from the society. So this model is not practicable - the system where goods are free for everyone quickly degenerates into one where the more diligent people work for the less industrious ones.