What is a Gift Economy?
The Gift Economy is a unique feature of the Burner community. In the world of the almighty dollar, we trade money for goods or services. In a Gift Economy, we simply give things away with no expectation of reciprocation. It’s a liberating way to live and share. Vending, commercial sponsorships, advertising, flyering, and exchanging things for money are banned from all Midwest Burners events.
A gift economy is where gift exchange rather than money or trade is the basis of the economy. In communism, everything is free. If you give something away, you can still survive. Since those who share the most would have a reputation for sharing, it is in your best interest to share since that encourages others to share with you. In Communism everything is given to you by an organisation under the name of a government according to your needs.
A gift economy is an economic system in which both goods and services are freely given, with no direct expectation of being paid back. A gift economy may make use of external incentives to giving, such as the idea of karmic rewards or an afterlife, or social rewards, such as increased standing in the community through giving. It may also use the idea that a healthier community benefits all members, so that giving to those in need is ultimately self-serving as well as community-serving. The gift economy is really the third major type of economy, along with the market economy and the command economy. In a market economy, things are bought or traded directly, in a quid quo pro fashion, so that very little is ever actually given away. In a command, or planned, economy, a central organization, usually the state, takes control of all goods and services, and distributes them as they wish. In actual practice, very few economies are absolutely any one of these types, and more often merge a few
