Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 49. (Read 288348 times)

Hi LightRider,

I would also love a Resource Based Economy, problem is:
People are conditioned to be greedy and indoctrinated so:

A lot of people will suffer and die, maybe in thousand years
when all people are allmost wiped out, beside two:
Adam & Eve (Romeo & Julia) (Bonnie & Clyde) (Alice & Bob)
They will watch Jacque Fresco's video and get some sense.

http://youtu.be/4cnuRRWZxSE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5jh_lN9TWw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hgA9j-4dB0

http://youtu.be/3nsoN-LS8RQ

Welfare, as I understand it, is someone receiving money for no work. What I am talking about is someone working, and paying that money to someone else. Rather the opposite of welfare.



At least until the more recent perversion of them, laws were not about giving people rights. It wasn't like, "Well, here's this new thing, let's pass a law allowing people to use it." People had rights by default, and laws were only passed to restrict certain activities. So no one would be excluded. The only things international law cover is how to settle disputes, and which activities are generally frowned upon.


[/quote]

Who excluded Haiti from society, and how? I'm not too familiar with it, aside from that it exists next to a country that is open to business and tourism, and is much more affluent because of it.

Did you just inadvertently invent welfare as a band-aid to the horrible dysfunctionality of your hyper-libertarian fantasy state?  Talk about coming full circle.



The excluded can't be expected to abide by the rules of their excluders, their is no legitimacy without reciprocity.  In contrast the international laws you speak of DO actually try to include everyone under some umbrella of rights even if it more rhetoric then reality right now, oh and guess what they frown on mercenaries.



A better example would be Haiti, that's what happens when you try to exclude 90% of people from society and treat them only as economic instruments, they will tear the system down even if they are going to be no better off afterwards.

You can change incentives to make it easier or more worthwhile for them to repair their reputation. For instance by buying reparations. If the reparation fee it too high, those people will organize and break the rules, making things for costly for those charging those fees. So the fees will come down until they are sufficiently punitive, but not so much that they lead to roving gangs of bandits. I.e. let the market decide


What? Why? Things like don't kill, don't steal, and don't commit fraud are pretty universal. As for the more detailed stuff, yeah, it would have been a problem if we were starting out from scratch, but there is already a vast amount of legal precedent to base things on. Heck, we even have a body of international law to use, which is currently being developed more and more thanks to globalization and International trade. Plus just because societies are broken into cells, doesn't mean the services they use are. There could be a large security company that many cells subscribe to that can easily overpower the few marauding outlaw cells.


When was the last time Australia decided to invade someone?

That's because you are only looking at it from the point if view of the person being denied access. Look at it from the point of view of the person who actually owns something. He is free to decide who is allowed on their property and what rules they should follow. As someone who has a house or an apartment, would you be OK with random strangers coming into your room, and setting up a heroin den or something there? If not, then you have freedom to decide what to do with your place of residence. If some other entity decides that heroin addicts should use your place to hang out and do drugs despite your objections to such, then you're not free.

Yeah, but all you'll be doing is giving incentive for the excluded people to organize and break the system that excluded them.
You will have reached nothing because the smaller cell-like society will have no large organisation to operate off of because all the rules/laws the cells created are different. The cells would require some streamlining of their laws and that stuff takes ages. Meanwhile the angry excluded mob will come for your head, one cell at a time.
It would be a mess..

I mean, how the hell can you honestly think that if you put some people outside of society that that will be the end of your problems? I'd say you're clueless as to what a human actually is.


Usually

Don't you know about the Native Americans?

They were slaves until the Europeans came and introduced them to private property.

Oh wait, I think I got that backwards.

This is probably one of the most oxymoronic and absurd things I've read.

You deal with assholes in a free society via access control and performance bonds.

In a statist society such as we have now, most of the society is public access due to the government owning streets.

In a free society, you're always on private property, either your own or someone else's, and thus access control is far, far easier.

Most roads and commercial space will be for-profit ventures and allow people on quite readily, but will ask you to abide by certain common-sense rules and laws--a usage agreement of sorts. You may also be asked to post a performance bond which is forfeit if you break those rules.

Thus, people who cannot control themselves will become bad performance-bond risks, and bond-issuers will not take a chance on them, relegating them to the company of people so like-minded.

Criminals, thieves, those whom like to fight, will find themselves excluded from polite society because they either can't rent performance bonds necessary to get into such places, or because they are refused entry at the door due to being blacklisted because of past behavior.

We live in a society that is culturally going downhill, that has been glorifying low-class behavior and mannerisms. I think in a free society this trend would reverse and people would once again aspire to truly fine behavior, manners, and beauty both in action, form, and thought; in short a cultural renaissance.

If you don't think that the oil companies are destroying the environment here in the US, then you haven't been paying attention.

The state in that country was almost nonexistent. Shell had free reign and there was noone to stop them. If Shell would have tried this in europe or the US the state would have stopped them. The protection agains selfish companies is one of the tasks people expect the state to do.

So yes, in that case a bigger state would have helped.

But don't get me wrong, i wouldn't want the state to control everything and i would not want to hand over all control to the state.
The state, in exactly the same way as companies, can grow selfish and corrupt.
The core of the problem is about keeping large organisations in check. They tend to become entities on their own and without firm internal of external guidence they will become spoilt brats that are perfectly capable of destroying themselfs and/or their environment.
The other side of the same problem is that we need these large organisations to have this level of civilization.
What seems to be the best compromise is some form of people controlled structure that makes a set of rules and makes sure everyone keeps themselfs to it. Of course to be able to keep these rules you will need to be able to mobilize a larger enough force...

Another problem is the financial world.
It has given the world a much more complex financial dynamic with derivatives and other risk management toys.
What this has done is push politics into finance, at the same time making it harder for the politic to manage their budgets and putting politicians further away from the people they serve. In the end people get less representation and that is why democracy is failing.
I see this more as a problem with the incentives and reward systems in a capitalistic state than a problem with states themselfs.

What happened to those exploited, underpaid children since then? And what were their options before?

Also, can you provide some examples of a monopoly?

I'm not a protector. I'm just watching the show. It will all go to hell anyway.
I'm just pissed of at the fringe groups that try to change the script all the time.

Problem is it's an ecosystem supported top down by (for instance) Nike execs all the way down to the workers realistically will never be able to become a Nike exec. Nike parasites on the low position of these people and will work hard to keep the situation that way as long as possible. Nike fully knew these people were payed very very little and didn't make sure they were payed anything that we would consider reasonable. They tell excuses that these people get opportunities while they pay them salaries that would be completely unacceptable in the western world. They have the power to give those people more yet they choose to cultivate these environments of near slavery.
They are always responsible, they just didn't take that responsibility and there was noone to force them to do so.
It is just an example of what big companies naturally do when left to themselfs. They don't give a shit about people or the earth or governments or whatnot if they don't have to.
So the lesson here is that you need a force at least as big as the potential conglomerate you whish to run loose in your free economy to prevent things from going astray.

Microsoft had a near monopoly on operating systems and arranged for various vendor lock-in arrangements that basically slowly tricked society into getting hooked on microsoft products. They infiltrated some key structures and leveraged compatibility.
And coercion doesn't allways mean you push someone in a certain direction. It can also mean that you manipulate the choices people perceive to make them walk 'freely' in a direction you desire.
In that respect microsoft has been pretty abusive in the past, but more recently other companies like google and facebook really hit the nail when it comes to parasitic relations with their customers. No other companies have ever turned their customers into their product so successfully. A lot of psychology goes into those to make them seem 'non-evil' but that doesn't mean they aren't. At least their product base makes their lifes easier by providing detailed reports of their lifes. Broadcasting the message of 'we're not evil' becomes pretty simple if your receivers tell you how they want to hear it...
Caveat emptor is quite a risk when your livelyhood depends on a deal. This is not a mechanism most people would want to prevail in society. People want more security. They don't want someone to sell a huge party of poisonous wine so that 10% of the population dies while he goes of to live on an island. They also don't want to check every bottle on the market for poison. So some rules are desirable.
Well, if you didn't think those were examples of oppression then you sure have a shallow definition of freedom.
If i candidly pump the water from under your land and you have no idea why your crop fails and i sell the water to you on a free market, is that coercion? And can you still call such a market free? And how will you prevent such a thing without rules or laws that can be enforced with violence?

Thank god for the self-appointed protectors of the people against the erosive forces that threaten society!

I realy need to sleep, but i couldn't resist.

You do know that assholes are usually only a part of some larger organism, right?
It can be very profitable for a relatively non-evil company to do relatively evil things if you can handle the PR. If the many multinationals didn't play it on the edge of morality they wouldn't get over the edge so often. In the end they expand the edges of morality to gain new territory for profit. And that is an erosive force to society.