So you are still selling goods in your shop but you don’t have many people coming in to buy. How can you increase the number of people who purchase goods from your shop? The answer is advertising. We see advertising everywhere. We even buy clothes that advertise the company that manufactured the clothes.
This is the case in every nation that uses a physical object money (POM). Those who have products to sell want every possible customer to know that these products are available, where, and when. A customer will not come to buy unless he knows there is something to buy. You cannot take your shop to the customer (we will assume this, although some tradesmen in the past did exactly that) so you must somehow get word to the potential customers.
You also have competition from the shop across the street. Both shops sell similar items. So you need to convince the customers that your shop has better products or less expensive products than that other shop. Otherwise customers might buy there instead of at your shop.
You send messages to customers in a variety of ways. The messages provide information but it is a special kind of information. It is information that persuades, whatever else it does. It probably provides information, perhaps a few laughs, perhaps it has something that catches the eye, and it may even set a tone of comfort, style, success, or whatever. This is a special kind of communication. This kind of communication is what we call advertising. It is a product of POM, really.
Now let’s say that you have the same shop but in an economy which has a money which is not a POM. In this hypothetical economy, money simply appears in one’s account when it is earned and ceases to exist when it is used to buy things. So Joe works hard and does good things and $100 appears in Joe’s account. If Joe had done bad things no money would have appeared there. If Joe had worked less hard and produced less net benefit for the people in his community, he would have had less money appear in his account. So you would like to have Joe buy things in your shop. By selling items to Joe you will be doing something good for Joe and for your community because you will be rewarding Joe for the work he did. Therefore, you will have money appear in your account. Joe enters your shop and buys an item. The money Joe spends does not get transferred to you because when Joe or anyone else spends money that particular money merely ceases to exist. The money that appears in your account for selling to Joe is not the money that Joe spent. But what do you or Joe care? You are gaining money and Joe is buying things he wants to have. Joe doesn’t care what happens to the money he spends and you don’t care how money happens to appear in your account so long as you are confident that the money that appears there will be at least a reflection of how much net benefit you have provided others. In other words, if you get paid for the value of your work, you don’t care how it happens.
So to get Joe and others like him to come to your shop you want to advertise. So you go to the newspaper and ask them to put the message you have prepared in their paper. They look at the message and say they will be happy to put in the location and hours of business of your shop. They will be happy to include accurate descriptions of your stock. But they will not be willing to include those very subjective and obviously exaggerated claims about how good your stock is. They also refuse to print the picture of the barely dressed young woman holding an item from your shop. They also refuse to print the part about how much better your shop is than the one across the street. In other words, they are willing to provide accurate information, education, if you will, but they will not print lies or do anything else that they think might mislead a customer.
Why would they refuse? Well, you aren’t paying them. You can pay to have the message placed in their paper. But that money simply ceases to exist when you spend it. They are paid for the good things they do for their readers, for providing information that will help or entertain their readers, not for lying to them. Therefore, you can walk up and down the street saying whatever you wish about your store but no one else will help you lie about it to others because that would cost them money to do so and you can’t give them money.
In this economy that uses a different kind of money which is not a POM, there is no way for you to use money to reward someone for helping you hurt others in some way. You can buy items and offer those items (physical objects or services) for such help but then it would be obvious who hired them and you, also, would lose money for causing that harm. You could not benefit from advertising and no one else would either. Therefore, there would be no advertising if there were no POM. There would be education, making information available to those who need or want it, but there would be no ads.
