Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 45. (Read 288375 times)

Hating something means you don't understand it. Many people here clearly don't understand that the state is an extension of the dominant participants of the free market, so they blame evil governments which do exactly what their money interests want them to do. If you want to get rid of the state, get rid of money.

Dress To Kill reference.

I think almost all of us here hate socialism and corporatism, which is what we have now. To say that we have capitalism, anywhere in the world, is complete strawman.

Even pollution is due to corporatism, with the central power of government being taken advantage of by companies in order to grant themselves special privileges and immunities. For environmental issues, look at how companies lobbied the government to destroy the customary-law protections of tort law. So that, for example, you couldn't sue a coal factory upwind of you nearly as easily. Instead we have EPA regulations, even though it's obviously that lawsuits are far more effective. The state is what is destroying the environment, not companies. At least not companies in isolation. Without the state there'd be no way for them to protect themselves to such a degree.

I don't have to convince anyone of anything. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the current methods we use to allocate and utilize resources are destructive to our common interests. If you are truly concerned about the welfare of people, you would investigate how things are done now and how they could be done better. Adhering to the sick mentality that produced our current circumstances is the kind of dangerous and destructive behavior that will harm everyone you say you care about.

He'd better educate himself first, but I'm afraid the level of brainwashing he's received from the ZM does not leave much hope.


which is a VLOG suggesting that "revolt" is the only solution against capitalism or something.  Does not seem very peaceful to me.

Personally I just wish they do revolt and get their ass kicked.


As compared to what?  Communism?  You can't be serious.

All you have to do to refute this is to explain how you plan to convince people to have their resources controlled for them. We had this discussion a year ago, and it never really went past the point at which someone said "won't this system fall apart as soon as a few people decide they want to trade things instead?"

Great points, Rassah.

LightRider is indeed, apparently, only advocating education. It just happens to be misguided. It's not fair to claim LightRider will support the use of force against people.

Your continued assertions that I want to do terrible things to people, while hilarious, are ultimately indicative of an intellectually dishonest personality. If you want to see horrors on such a scale, you need only to look at what capitalism, which you admire so much, has done to the people and environment of the world.

It's not about picking, it's about forecasting and projecting based on current trends. The overall trend has been more individual empowerment through increasingly decentralized technology. I don't think things like file sharing, 3D printing, decentralized law, and decentralized finance can lead to a centralized power.


Radical anarchists may be advocating throwing it out and replacing it, but that's not necessary. It's much easier to simply withdraw, ignore, and change things in small steps by simply making it impossible for the system we have to continue to exist. Whether that means ignoring copyright laws with filesharing, gun control laws with 3D printing, drug laws with Silk Road, and finance and tax laws with bitcoin. Centralized power requires financial and popular support, and decentralization is undermining both the popular, and soon the financial.


Not so much. I understand that ZGM's claims can't work not because I am brainwashed into thinking that capitalism is right and socialism/government is wroong, but because it goes against basic human nature. On the other hand, Eric, and possibly the ZGMs, for some reason still want to give control over themselves to someone else, despite technological and cultural trends (guided by human nature) are taking us in a different direction.
However, if you were to claim that I am brainwashed about ZGM with a mental block of "Humans can't be convinced not to trade and freely give up the products of their labor for no compensation whatsoever" or "Resources are by definition limited, because we only have a limited amount of stuff, energy, and time," then yeah, feel free to say "pot kettle black."

So who's forcing you to pick a story and believe in it before it becomes the established order? You forgot:

5) Don't believe in any of the stories. Just work with what you've got and try to make it better.

That's what I think Eric Li was trying to get across. He seemed to be advocating a kind of "rational conservatism" by implying that it's better to work on improving whatever system you have, rather than throw it out and replace it with somebody else's better sounding story. Revolutions tend to be bloody for some, and profitable for armchair manipulators behind the scenes. And believing in the Anarchist story does not give you a free pass because it's just another story full of plot holes.

Story = synonym for 'ideology'.


Pot kettle black?

There is an interesting trend that I noticed in this video, whic applies to the Resource Based idea, too, and hints at a general "brainwashing" of all the groups mentioned, whereby they can't even consider an alternative due to being raised in a specific mindset (which is somewhat ironic, considering ZGM proponents claim that capitalists are brainwashed for the same reason). The different systems proposed by Eric and ZGM proponents are:

1) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Communism (at least if we consider Soviet style)
2) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Individual Sovereignty > Everyone Votes (Democracy)
3) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Communism > Centrally Planned Merit-based Government
4) Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Centrally Planned Resource Based

Note that every single one of these has one thing in common: Someone, or some entity, is in control deciding things for everyone else.

What struck me about Eric Li's speech was that he listed the stages off one by one, got to the bolded part with "individual sovereignty," and then suddenly took a sharp turn and veered off a cliff in the red part with "everyone voting in a democracy." The two are not the same thing, since the latter is essentially giving up your sovereignty, and decising whom you want to subjugate yourself to. I realized that Eric, and the Resource Based proponents here, all have the same mental block: they can't imagine anything beyond the idea that people will need to be controlled by someone, as if people always subjugating themselves to someone or something is the only way things can be, and thus they don't even think of or consider alternatives.
Eric should have said:

Primitive > Slave > Feudalism > Capitalism > Individual Sovereignty

and stopped right there, since that is where we are headed. As we are able to provide our own communications (post office replaced by e-mail), security (guns, home security systems, private security/investigators), travel (cheaper flight replacing highways, telepresence replacing need for travel), manufacturing (3d printing), law (arbitration and digital contracts), and now finance (bitcoin), the role of the single all-ruling body that is the government is slowly diminishing. We are literally approaching the state of Individual Sovereignty, where each individual is capable of weilding the powers of control and production for themselves that used to be reserved for entire countries. While at the same time, we still have people fighting over who should have control over whom, and in what configuration.
In the list of systems above, 1 through 3 all have individual sovereignty, brought on with the help of technology, as the final outcome. Though I think #4 may be impossible to achieve in the first place, the only outcome I can think of for 4 is war between humans trying to achieve individual sovereignty, and the machine that is programmed to think that it MUST continue to subjugate and control all people at any cost, in order to "save" them.

Question:

How is everyone here defining the word "scarce"?

Especially LightRider.

What you call a "free market" I call corporatism. This is absolutely not what most people here arguing against you mean by the free market or capitalism. The US is an extremely hampered market, stricken with reams and reams of regulations. Look at 1800s US and maybe we can talk.

Yep, and it still does:

SEOUL – North Korea publicly executed around 80 people earlier this month, many for watching smuggled South Korean TV shows

Indeed.

The question is what to do about it.  There are two main approaches.

One approach is for government to enslave everybody to prevent them from being enslaved by the evil corporations.  This is your approach, and since it has already killed hundreds of millions of people across the globe over the last century or so, it is not something that will ever gain much traction here.

The other approach is to shrink government until it no longer has the power to cause much harm.  The US was actually born from this method, and God willing, it will be reborn in this way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb4w6cKja4c

Depends on what you mean by life. Did you mean capable of reproducing? Shouldn't be too hard. Or did you mean capable of cognition and simulating the brain? The link points to our progress with that.

Well, some demographs have made comprehensive studies about that, studying the trend on the fertility rates in developing countries, and they made a different conclusion from yours.   They tend to observe that the reproductive behavior of developped countries is being followed by developping countries.

I rred this here few years ago.



You can have an opinion by saying 'Globally, I think it averages out", but I'd rather believe those guys who have academic formation and made a several years study about the subject.


Well, there are countries already where the rate of natural increase is negative, the most famous one being Japan, but also Germany and Russia, IIRC.

The truth is that nobody knows what happens exactly after a demographic transition.   You seem to think that the population stabilizes, but it can also crash, if women chose not to have more than two children, as it seems to happen currently in Japan.   There are very serious demographs who even fear a global demographic crash sometimes called the demographic winter.   Anyway, it really seems to depend much more on our reproductive behavior than on our ability to extract resources.

Of course, contraception and women's rights are very important factors... But again, they only exist in rich countries. These countries would never have contraception and women's rights without economically relying on countries with larger populations that have much higher growth rates. Globally, I think it averages out.


By the way, looking at the links you have presented just strengthens my opinion on demographic projections. These models are based only on extrapolation of past growth rates. Economics never enter into it.
Of course if you look at declining growth rates and extrapolate forward, eventually you will reach negative growth rates... Heck, if you keep extrapolating you'd eventually reach negative population size
From the point of view of economics and ecology, there is a very good reason to assume a declining growth rate, but absolutely no reason to assume population shrinkage once the maximum supportable population size is reached. As we've known since the time of Malthus, the best fit for population size is still the logistic function, and I have yet to see any conclusive evidence to dispute this.

Well, I disagree.  I think the main reasons are modern contraception and women rights.   Those things did not exist at Malthus time, so no wonder he could not include them in his population model which basically postulated that we reproduce like rabbits.

I'm not an expert on current demographics, but I know that population growth rates have indeed been declining for some years and projections have them going down further. Of course the projections are totally speculative but let's not even get into that. The point is, why is this happening? I think it's quite clear this decline stems from the fact that technology is no longer capable of extending available resources indefinitely. There's just so many calories you can grow on an acre of agricultural land, and while this number has been increasing for thousands of years and is still increasing today, it's increasing at a lower rate. Eventually, the world simply won't be able to support a bigger population.

All of this is perfectly Malthusian.

Will the population really start to decline when we reach the maximum? I doubt it.