Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 102. (Read 288375 times)

I'm not talking about an unequivocal definition, I'm talking about morals. No matter how many research they make on human happiness, spiritual health and the like: I will still want to measure and seek my own happiness myself.
I just don't care what the experts say is good, because I don't believe in good. Talking about experts on happiness and quality of life reminds me the Inquisition and its moral experts.    
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and his mental health was enforced.


The degree of freedom will be decided? That doesn't sound like letting the free market be.
The free market doesn't put any limit of what can be produced/consumed beyond the limits of nature and the imagination of the producers.
In the RBE, some form of government (again, I don't care how efficient and democratic your new system will theoretically be, if is not the private sector the one that feeds the world through trade and charity, then is the public sector, period) will set the limits.
Some expert determined needs will be satisfied at the expense of some individual wants, that is an attack against freedom.


As I said before, programmed obsolescence has the prerequisite of a monopoly/cartel. In a competitive market, if people demand durable products, they're the ones that will be produced.
Also, the short-term thinking that interest imposes us makes people care less about durability.
Without interest and capital yields, maybe the term capitalism is not very accurate.
Ripple and freicoin would disable interest within a free-market.
That's why I think programmed obsolescence is not a problem caused by the free market.


Just a counter-example that proves your point wrong. A man working on sustainability for profit. Just like solar panels producers, permaculture advocates...
Are private profits compatible with an economic and social sustainable development?
For more private initiatives on sustainability, I recommend you the youtube channel "peak moment".


That's your answer? No coercion is needed, is all because of profit?


No, I just watched (in addition to the 3 zeitgeist films) the couple of videos you posted (2 hours) and tried to Peter's answer to an austrian, but I must admit I can't watch the whole video due to its fallacies.
Have you been reading Gesell's book? Anything about austrian economics? Anything about economics at all?


The state does.


It woulnd't be for free. That's impossible. Some resources would be used, even if they're not traded for money.


If it were for free, you'd do it immediately despite the "fucking market".


Sure. In a system of universal access and infinite resources private property would be nonsense.
I just don't believe such a system is possible. If you mean universal access only to food, we still need private property for the rest.
Also the taxes (or expropriations) needed for this universal access to food constitutes a form of coercion.


We can't do anything beyond the carrying capacity of the earth just because it's physically impossible. You mean without reducing the future carrying capacity. You mean thinking in the long term.


Mmmm. I don't think synthesizing enzymes was an available solution back then. Artificial fertilizers, mechanization and chemical plague control was the technical and scientific solution back then.
Science can tell us a lot more about soil destruction today, but that technical attempt to end starvation has only lead us to an increased population size and to soil destruction.    


Profit does not require growth. Not even monetary profit.
You can make profit, for example, by producing the same good in a more efficient way. By downsizing your company.
And the free market doesn't need monetary profit at all. Just needs private property and free trade.


Many people will starve to death during the coming energy crises (unless we make a disruptive discovery or invention, like economic nuclear fusion).
If we don't have a pricing mechanism, many more people will starve.
I can't accept that. Billions of deaths just to prove (again) that central planning doesn't work? Fuck that.


But to replace the exponential monetary system you don't want any monetary system at all.
What qualities should have a monetary system for the transition period?


Can RBE lead us the "good" path? You've already agreed with me that there's no such thing as good.
If you understood well being when I said "good", then free market can lead us to well being.
Better, without the need of a single definition for well being and without the need for coercion.


Many people is doing it. See peak moment.
Most people rely on food that depends on oil just because they don't know "they eat oil".
On the subject of feeding the people of the third world , I would prefer to give them the rod rather than the fish.
Also stop abusing them instead of "trying to help" them.
Africa was pretty well fed before our governments (and then our macro-corporations) went there to coerce its peoples.


"We're in a free market and we have plenty of problems. Therefore, free market causes a lot of problems."

That's not a logical reasoning even if it seems to you.
Furthermore, the premise is false. We're not in a free market, there's more regulations than have ever been.
You've not provided any evidences that prove the free market is incompatible with economic and social sustainability, just examples of non sustainable actions and industries.

In a utopia, yes.

In the real world, you just need to bribe the local politicians.

Again, profit is the problem.


Utopia, utopia, utopia.

RBE deals with the real world, not utopian fantasies.


...and they could provide more services for free, but they don't. Why?

Cause people need to work to sustain this system, it matters not if what they do is useful.

And anyway, in the real world, a huge corporation will come and wipe out the local companies.

Free market = utopian fantasy
RBE = how to deal with real world problems

Actually, the reason for THAT is because a lot of local governments have either unions or contracts with monopolies that prevent those governments from doing business with anyone else. Thanks to that, these companies can do whatever they want, including building crappy infrastructure that costs too much and needs to be replaced often. You're essentially describing an unnatural monopoly that has nothing to do with a "free market," and would likely be a problem in RBS as well. Places without those problems work like the rest of the free market: those trying to sell the cheapest crappiest stuff to make the most profit end up losing out to those who can sell better stuff at the same price. In a free market perfect competition environment, profit is usually close to 0, with the most efficient producer who can make the best product winning the race. So, in places like closed or private communities wo hire their own companies, or toll roads not subject to using government contracted workers (i.e. those working with a free market) usally have much better quality roads ad sidewalks for not much more money.

The reason sidewalks, roads, and transportation in general take such a big part of a state budget is that the companies providing these services need to adhere to the cost-efficiency mechanism, therefore there will be crappy streets that need to be rebuilt every few years. If we were to build in the most efficient and optimised manner, where the criteria were maximum efficiency and strategic allocation of resources, not profit, we could unleash such an incredible abundance that humanity has never seen before, nor can many people even imagine.

Profit makes companies create crappy, shitty products, using highly inefficient and wasteful methods, due to the structure of the market.


I don't need any "faith", I'm looking at the evidence. People are already doing these things for free, in a fucked up system where they have to work a dayjob to survive, and in their limited spare time they still do awesome things.

If they didn't have to work a dayjob, they would have more time to do awesome stuff, stuff that is actually useful to humanity. And I don't need any faith, I personally know hundreds of people like that. I am one of them.

Woah woah woah! This here is a BIG heaping serving of fail. Sidewalks are nowhere NEAR free. Sidewalks, roads, and transportation in general is usually the biggest part of a state budget, is in many states (in mine, too) is most of where your tax dollars go to. If you think automated hydroponics can be supported the same free way that sidewalks are supported, do I have a HUGE tax burden surprise for you...
Which, of course, leads to the question, do you work, pay huge taxes to build and maintain these hydroponics, and help support everyone, or do you not work, relax at home, and have others work and make money to pay taxes to support your food production? Or, I guess since there's no money or profit, do you just have faith that there will actually be people who will be boring enough to be excited by hydroponics and will work to build and maintain those machines and maintain that knowledge for nothing?

I have read it. I believe you claim these things happen because people would do stuff for free, anyway, open-source style. Problem with that idea is that all these things required an enormous amount of money to build and support an infrastructure to make it happen. Where's our free open-source internet, CPUs, or hard drives?

And the RBE can, it's its very basis.

So far, RBE 1, profit-based market 0.


Excellent! Then why don't we do it and let people starve instead?

Fucking profit, that's why.


Oh, really?

Then, against all available evidence that shows exactly what i am saying, tell me how that could be possible.

Please, illuminate me.


http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/AFAICS

None of those things happened thanks to the profit mechanism. They are an inevitable consequence of cultural and technological evolution, both if which are hindered by the profit structure.

I already explained this thoroughly. Please go back and read the thread.

We could debate about that, but it's not the matter of discussion.

Physical and mental well being can be scientifically evaluated.

There is much scientific research on this, the emotional well being (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_well-being), the Human Development Index, the Physical Quality of Life Index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Quality_of_Life_Index), the Happy Planet Index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index), the Gross national happiness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness) and many others. None of them are complete, but you don't just dismiss the whole thing outright because of that.

In the same way, we have no universal unequivocal definition of life, but I guess you don't say "oh, you can't define life, therefore you can never know when something is alive" or any of that nonsense.

So, you can tackle this issue, and evaluate scientifically. The RBE approach gives you a blueprint for that. The free market doesn't care if people are well fed, emotionally and physically well, and that's exactly why there is so much unnecessary suffering on this world.

A support for the profit-based market is a silent acceptance and reinforcement of all this violence and suffering.


It's pretty simple:
- the degree of freedom will be decided by what the planet can provide, or in one word, sustainability
- within that, anything is acceptable, according to the people's values

the big difference from the current system is that we don't put any limit of what can be produced/consumed, which is nonsensical if you realise that the planet from which we depend has a very finite carrying capacity.


Don't be silly.


You mean the MEGA-FUCKING Watts he clearly deserves?  


Then please explain.

Any proft-based system is fundamentally corrupt because:
- it doesn't care about being sustainable
- it has to adhere to the price-efficiency mechanism, which makes you create crappy, useless and obscolecent products

regardless of whether you call it socialism, capitalism, or free market. it's still the same shit.


Very circumstantial example, 95% of production and pollution is made by 100 megacorporations seeking profits. They are the ones who will make the planet inhabitable, so yes, I'm fucking demonising profit, it's effectively destroying the only planet I have to live in.


Play it as you like, it's because of profit that all this happens. Try to take you hands off your keyboard, stop thinking, close your eyes, pause, then think again.

You might get it.


You haven't been reading the material.

Who owns the sidewalk on the street?

We get free sidewalks, why can't we have automated hydroponics facilities to produce food and distribute it for free? It's technically possible, and quite simple, too.

It's because it would destroy the fucking market, that's why. People won't have to enslave themselves, and will have time to read some books, think for themselves and realise that this system is fucked up.

That's why.


Good! That's what we are doing


Alright! You are halfway there, just a little further and you'll see that the need for private property in a system of universal access is greatly reduced.

Maybe not eliminated, I don't really care, to be honest. But reduced for sure.


And you don't have to.

Look, I'm not against free trade. You wanna do it? Fine, nobody's gonna stop you.

As I said, the limit is the carrying capacity of the Earth. Within that, do whatever you like the most.


+1. Making progress


Errrr, politics oriented. If it was up to science, we would have made aquaponics, hydroponics, aeroponics, or even synthesised directly the enzymes needed for the production of food, without destroying any field, and without the need of any pesticide.


How will that be? o_O

Profit requires growth, otherwise you'll go steady state, which is good for us, but bad for profit.


Ahhh, and so will people, who will starve to death, readjusting the prices, right?

I can't accept that. Billions of deaths just to preserve the profit-religion? Fuck that.



No, that's the projection I make, based on the available evidence.

But again, I don't care.

If we manage to make our living here sustainable without killing billions of people, I'll be happy.

Do you use Google search, maps, or Gmail? They exist because Google wanted a profit. Huge recession almost as bad as the Great Depression, yet no people starving on the street or waiting in soup lines because you can buy mass-produced food cheaper? Thanks to profit. Posting things on the internet and being able to spread ideas ad videos about TZM? Thanks to internet companies seeking profit. Totalitarian regimes falling around Africa and Middle East due to organized mass protests? Thanks to Twitter and Facebook wanting a profit. Things like gay marriage, women's rights, and minority group's rights being legalized despite the general population being against it? Thanks to companies not wanting to be forced to discriminate, accept money from everyone, and seeking profit. Also thanks to organizations fighting this injustice seeking personal profit.
Plenty of examples. Ones you are using to post about all this are blatantly obvious ones.

What I mean is that free market cannot give us anything different that what we want. There's no mechanism in the free market that takes us to the "good" path.

People don't need to work to survive, just food. Build your automated hydroponic farm, plug it to some solar panels and you're done.
People work because they want things that other people produce.

But, wait. I was blaming capitalism for unemployment. Are you blaming technology?


You believe that sustainability and social justice cannot be achieved within a free market. But that's not a scientific fact.

What's the meaning of "AFAICS"?

Exactly.


Physical health is relatively easy to define. Defining mental health is more dangerous. Defining objectively happiness and prosperity is impossible.
You can't optimize happiness because is relative.  


Ok. I like beer but I don't need it to survive. The RBE won't give me beer because it's not necessary for my health (although it is for my happiness) so I will get it in the free market.
Is my education/culture inferior because I like beer? Who say so?
Also what about arts?
If a reincarnation of Jim Morrison appears, will he gets the Watts he deserve?
Should we just want what we need?


That's what I deny, that capitalism and free market go hand in hand.


Corporations may seek just monetary profits, but our society is not just for monetary profit. When a self-sufficient permaculture farmer grows his own food, he makes it in a sustainable way and for his own profit, but not for monetary profit.
You seem to demonize profit.


States are coerced by corporations and then states coerce any other corporation/individual that tries to compete. What I claim is that private property and free market is not enough for monopolies to appear. Coercion is needed.


Well, Hawking is a scientific authority, don't know how you're so sure how I think about authorities.
Anyway, now that we have clear that I see producers just as individual like you and me, I state this again:

Unless the producer of the good/service you need/want wants to give it to you as charity, you either have to coerce him or give him something he wants/needs in exchange.
Money's just a proxy.


Although coercion sometimes leads to profits, profit is not coercion.


I plan to do it myself and educate those around me.
So called intellectual property is not private property. I'm against intellectual property.
We need private property to manage scarce resources, but information can be replicated at no cost.


Sacrificing free trade is sacrificing freedom.


Sure. It's one of the many aspects of the unsustainability of the current economic model.

Have you heard of the loss of biodiversity, rampant desertification, overfishing, soil erosion, ecosystems destruction... ?

Peak oil is just of of the many symptoms that there is something fundamentally wrong with this system.
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Exponential growth in oil (and other resources) production has made us think that our exponential monetary system is sustainable, which is false.
The green revolution (science powered, with the noble aim of feeding the world) has destroyed our soils, but oil derived fertilizers keep us in the illusion that our land is fertile.
All these illusions are coming to an end. There will be free market after the oil era, but without an exponential monetary system.
The demand for energy will decline with its supply. Energy won't be a non scarce resource in the near future, neither food.


And that's your belief.

RBE is a joke.  And a bad one.  I've heard all the documentation/movies and read similar-minded books on the topic.  The system they propose doesn't actually exist, it's a cloud kingdom that is a bunch of euphonic slogans and fluff.  It isn't a system, just a bunch of ideals incomplete in their overall construction and relation to one another, like an animal with no vital organs.  But the goals of said system are laudable and the frustrating part is that they are largely achievable but it requires massive political action and an understanding of the economic groundwork that could be laid to achieve it.  BTW, the mythological "Free Market" you people are fond of believing in around here won't give you these goals; only an educated, organized, fighting class of people that take the reigns of the Political Economy into their own hands can do this.  But you need an actual program that can be implemented.  Do you have such a program?  If not then quit wasting your time with fantasies such as this.

First you propose a completely free market, then you say that it should be the State through legislation that prevents corporations from polluting.

You see the logical fallacy right there?

The free market doesn't ensure in any way the well being of people.


We did have clean water in past, the process of capillarity through the soil cleans the water perfectly and brings it up to the mountains. Today the soil and the water are polluted to the point that you need to filter the water to make it potable.

The profit-based market created this problem.


No, they won't, if you change the incentives and if being corrupt is not "profitable" by design. I explained this before, and I'll explain it again in the video I'm preparing.

So, again, the free market doesn't solve this.

So far nobody has provided a decent explanation on how to free market is supposed to provide the basic needs for human well being to everybody and to ensure the survival of the species.

Face it, the profit-based market has failed and it's flawed at its very core.


I can't believe how misinformed this sentence shows. Have you been reading ONE page of the TZM proposals?

As for inventions, watch this:
http://vimeo.com/21516444


It's not about what i think, it's about what is it, and what can be showed.

I showed how the profit motive creates wars, unnecessary suffering, differential advantage, inefficiencies, pollution, inequality.

Do you have any proof to support your claim, beside philosophically wishes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtd9LUSbBFY

This is the final edit of the recent LA Zeitgeist Movement townhall meeting. The first section gives an excellent overview in broad terms about the movement's goals and premises.

Problem with China has more to do with corporations polluting other people's property (air space), and the legal system not being willing to defend them. As for the water example, nobody used to pay for clean water, because until about 100 to 200 years ago we did't have clean water. As for not paying for water at all, we've been paying for water since the dawn of civilization. It was a scarce and expensive thing in the Biblical middle east and other ancient desert cultures.



I don't really know how to fix it, other than vote the politicians out, boycott the corporations (like people are doing with BP), and bring mass class-action lawsuits against corporations. But this is actually a problem that's even bigger for TZM: The biggest problem will be that people will always seek profit, and thus, even in a TZM syste, someone will find a way to corrupt politicians to make sure they can have more "needs" than others.



How can you believe that, when profit and making money has been behind things like cars, planes, phones, computers, automated robotic machines, drugs and medical treatments, and a whole slew of other things that have taken us out of the dark ages? Are you proposing that the only good "well being" way to live is to work on a farm with 0 technology?


I think as long as you guys don't realize that seeking profit IS attempting to maximize the well being on oneself and one's stakeholders, you'll just keep wishing for a utopia based on essentially communist ideas, not even understanding what it is you are attacking, or the pitfalls of what you are proposing. After all, corporate profit means that many people/customers who needed things (food, medicine, technology) had their needs fulfilled, that lenders, employees, and all taxes that support the government and social programs are paid, and that there is still enough left (the profit part) to make sure that many people who invested in the company are better off and are able to pay for their needs too.

Environment greatly shapes behaviour, so it does matter, a lot.


Technological unemployment makes it physically impossible.

The reason we have so many people in the service sector doing useless stuff if because the mechanism of society requires people to work to survive, but it goes against the very nature of the advancement of society.


Maybe I'm mis-reading, but I don't see how that addresses the issue.

AFAICS, both issues are not designed to be solved in a profit-based system.

Since they are the fundamental principles for survival, I'd say it's about one of the biggest failures you can have as a societal system.

On the contrary, it's exactly how the market works.

I'll take an extreme example, and you'll see how that turns out.
Take water, or air. Nobody used to pay for clean water, now we do. Nobody pays for air now, but if the profit-based economy keeps polluting to the point air becomes unbreathable, like some part in China, it would be a huge boost for the economy, because people would have to buy oxygens bottles, gas masks and respirators to survive.

The more scarse a resource is, the more profitable it is, the better for the economy, the worse for us.


This is circumstantial example, and that's not the reason they subsidise corn.


And how would you change the legal system, if the politicians are paid and corrupted by corporations, whose interest is not to be sustainable, but to be profitable?

To say that this is a problem with the legal system completely ignores that it's the profit based system that drives politics, not the other way round.

The problem is that the interest of those who produce, the corporation in this case, should not be to make a profit, but to maximise the well being of people.

We have become so brainwashed to think that our activities have money has goal, while in fact it should be to maximise the well being. Profit is often an obstacle to that.


Africa is the perfect example of how the free market in reality creates corruption, war, unnecessary violence and suffering. The reason greedy gun-toting people exist is because all they want is to make a profit, by using socially darwinistic mechanisms, allowed by the fact that we are "free trading" with those countries, allowing those who have power to gain even more at the expenses of the population, because it's profitable for us.

As long as your bottom line is profit and not maximising well being, you'll never solve these two problems.

1) Tree Metaphor

Imagine you plant a tree. In ten years, that tree can give you $100 in lamber and in 100 years, $ 1000.
Now from the financial perspective.

With a currency that yields 5% interest, $100 in ten years are equivalent to $ 61.39 today. And $1000 in 100 years are equivalent to $ 7.60 today.

If the currency has 5% demurrage, $100 in ten years are equivalent to $ 167.02 today. And $1000 in 100 years are equivalent to $ 168,903.82 today.

With interest, the same stuff in the future is valued less than today. With demurrage, the same stuff in the future is valued more than today.

This proves that the structure of money has an impact in our way to value things over time.

2) Isn't demurrage equivalent to inflation?

No. Their impact on the gross interest is the opposite. Demurrage removes the privilege that lenders have over borrowers and the demurrage is substracted from the basic interest.
With inflation, the money holder could just buy things and sell them later at a higher price. That has to be taken into account when negotiating the interest.
This is added to the gross interest in the form of inflation premium (Hausse-premium in the text).
The reason why we have low interest with inflation today is the way the inflation is created.
Central banks monetize debt by buying bonds and giving cheap loans to banks. This way, when the real savers (not the central bank) go to the financial market they find that some borrowers (the banks and the governments) have already obtained its funds with cheap loans and they have to lower their prices (their interest) to meet the demand that the central bank has decreased.
Real savings have to be balanced with investments and that's in my opinion the most important lesson from the austrian school. But that's not incompatible with demurrage.
They found out that increasing the money supply doesn't solve the problems of deflation, just postpone and aggravate them.
But with demurrage you incentive money circulation without increasing the money supply.
 
3) Money is just another commodity.

It shouldn't be. Money is a symbol of value. If the demand for sugar is increased, producers will increase the supply until the price gets just a little above production cost again.
If the demand for sugar decreases, the supply will be reduced until the production costs are are below the selling price again.
But if the demand for money increases, should we increase the supply? If it the demand decreases, who's money are we going to destroy?
Also, who are the money producers? Must the production costs of money be related to its value in the market?

If you want to read the book, you can skip the first two parts. They're about another concept, free-land, but I'm not sure removing the property of land is a good idea.
I'm happy to answer your questions, but I'm sure you will understand the concept of free-money better if you read the book.  
Also, we should probably discuss this in the freicoin thread.