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JoshuaZ comments on How should negative externalities be handled? (Warning: politics) - Less Wrong Discussion
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The actual history is a bit more complicated than that. There's what officially happened and then there was what happened with the massive black market. It became even more extreme towards the end of the collapse where many people essentially did almost all transactions on the black market. Real estate was of course harder to put on the black market, but could be sometimes accomplished via extreme bribery. It is noteworthy that the switch to a legitimate, private ownership system of real estate was so extreme culturally that there was a lot of trouble adjusting. See some of the discussion here(pdf).
I think we're more talking about what officially happened.
There was still plenty of stuff they did with money, wasn't there? They didn't just give everyone the same set of goods. They gave them a few basic goods, and money to buy anything beyond that. Right?
There were things to do with money -- but not a whole lot, because there were shortages of just about everything you might want. And of course, if you can't actually buy a washing machine with money (leaving aside the massive black market, of course), there's not much reason to work hard at your job producing washing machines.