The fuck-you money ideal: for and against
The origins of the phrase "fuck-you money" are obscure but the meaning is simple enough. It's an amount of money great enough that if you had it you wouldn't have to put up with any bullshit from anyone and you could tell them to fuck off instead -- bosses, family, colleagues, neighbors, whatever. Fuck-you money might mean, enough money to live comfortably on for the rest of your life. Depends on your tastes and needs and so on (as well as on the continued health and survival of some kind of credit environment, we'll come back to this). From Cryptonomicon:
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck-you money" at a glance.
In a wider sense, though, all money is fuck-you money. Consider this famous passage of Adam Smith:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
In the cash economy imagined by Smith, we get what we need from others not because they care about us, but because we give them something they want (i.e. money). The beggar lacks dignity because he has to care whether other people care about him. Nobody, Smith implies, would live like this unless they had no other choice.
In Debt, Graeber argues that Smith is self-consciously imagining a money utopia -- one of cash instead of credit money. In a credit economy, our daily transaction with the butcher depends, if not on their benevolence exactly, at least on their assessment of the continuing relationship between us: have I paid up in the past, am I trustworthy, did I just get fired, could extending me more credit make me more able to pay off my existing debts or would it be good money after bad. The transaction is not purely arms-length. It's not even purely self-interested, in a sense: the merchant takes into account matters of my interest. He has reason to care and I want him to care about me. We are both depending on our relationship. The ideal of Smith, in contrast, is one in which we each secure the means of our subsistence without depending on enduring relationships.
This is a very seductive ideal. If you have money, you can leave anywhere and go anywhere else. You don't have to care if people gossip about you. For you, social death cannot mean actual death; words can never hurt you. Money is more powerful than prejudices; everybody's money spends the same. At least, we can imagine things thus, and it seems attractive. There is a real freedom being hoped for here. Independence from others' opinions is a genuine good, I think.
On the other hand, being bound to other people is a per se good by itself. We can have and perhaps do have too much freedom from that. The money system is of course also grotesquely unfair, and remedying that unfairness seems to require a reassertion of democracy. But democracy is perhaps rule by gossip.
Maybe the strongest kind of argument to make here is to undermine the reality of the fuck-you money ideal. Money only obscures our general dependence on each other, rather than eliminating it. It liberates some by means of dominating others. If this is right, then actually-existing liberalism can't be defended on the grounds that it fulfills this ideal of freedom. But this line of argument seems to leave open a question of principle: is the ideal one to be left behind and superceded, or one to be finally realized under conditions of justice and liberation?