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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)
/^t/The problems presented above occur even in the simplest possible model of society, where everyone needs only basic things. This is not the case in real conditions. Some people want larger houses and more clothes than the others. The needs of individuals are not the same and again, one cannot change it in any administrative way. A decree saying that buildings are to be of a given size and not any larger would make many members of society irritated and unhappy. Why should such regulations be imposed on people? Everyone should be free to have as huge a house as they wish. However, then a problem occurs. In any society most people would like to have large and luxurious residences. There would be neither enough people or materials to construct palaces for everyone. A just solution can be found - maybe only individuals who contribute the most to the society should have larger houses. To find the deserving ones, we have to establish whose products are the most valuable. Let us try to compare a mason with a baker. We have to find out how much work a house requires (how many days would a single mason have to work to build one). Then we should establish how much time it takes to bake a loaf of bread. When we divide the time of constructing a house by that of baking a loaf, we will get a factor representing how many times a house is more valuable than a loaf. We should also take into account the fact that baking bread and building require different qualifications and adjust our calculations accordingly. Then we can compare the baker with the mason by allocating them figures expressing the values of their work. Now everybody in our hypothetical society can calculate how much work they do and how large a house they should get for it. The value of each person's labour is expressed by figures and it determines their 'social status'. But here we get to the concept of money. When the production of an individual is worth a certain value, he or she can afford a large house. This is market economy.