Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 97. (Read 288375 times)

The acquisition of knowledge is the default impetus of children, broadly speaking. Absorbing our surroundings, our culture and ideas is the fundamental behavior that has allowed us to become a dominant species. The limitless and and nearly inexhaustible desire to learn is slowly eroded by institutions and situations in which children are not provided an environment that promotes this activity. Increasingly in the monetary system, we abandon children to watch television, sit still, shut up and learn inside of government run child warehouses that promote social norms, competition and stratification, and then we are shoved into a dwindling job market that rewards dulling, repetitious and uncritical or thoughtless labor, menial servitude or other irrelevant services that sap our energy, desire and spirit. Nothing in our current system promotes cooperation for the betterment of all people everywhere. Instead we are forced to chip away at each other bit by bit while engaging in a monetary system that is currently self destructing. Social cohesion, concern for others and the desire to sustainably utilize our resources for the benefit of everyone is the farthest thing from our minds in the dominant culture. "Education" has only become "hard work" because the system has deemed it antithetical to the profit motive, and therefor has molded it to allow only the misinformed, mislead and misguided consuming masses to become "successful" in it. Given the state of our technological capability, scientific understanding and global interconnectedness, it is absolutely shameful that we continue to allow ourselves and others to be treated this way.

It is a result of the class war that has been going on for centuries. The rich are fighting a war they don't want anyone to know about. They believe in an "opulent" minority who is suited to rule over all others and make decisions that are "best" for the "stupid" masses.

Free money would reduce speculation too. Not trade or options, since it would still be arbitrage.

By the way, is wall street a more complex system than the biosphere, that RBE claims can be managed with algorithms?
Isn't the algorithms that suggest you films also a problem within RBE?

http://youtu.be/TDaFwnOiKVE

An interesting look at how we have bent our technology to serve the monetary system, in turn shaping the world we all share.

Regulations and patents are the opposite of a free market.


When I say profit I mean what a business gets from its earnings after it discounts its costs.
Most people produce for wages, not profits.


I'm talking about the source of the artificial scarcity we agree exist within capitalism.


What money I don't understand? Gold, the dollar, bitcoin, LETS, Ripple, freigeld, Terra or freicoin?
You like it or not they all produce different effects on how resources are managed.
Probably the more similar between them are gold and bitcoin.
Nice argument though.


That's why capital-money can exact the basic interest from the wares.


"The economy", in general, requires infinite growth?
I don't agree at all. But if that's true, then RBE and socialism (as forms of economies), also need infinite growth.
There's no exit then?
You mean only fiat capital-money issued on debt through state legislation monetary systems? Then we agree, but that's not free market.


Simply you can't. That's why the current system is going to collapse.


Not capital-money, but free money. If money rots like freigeld you don't really want to store it at home.
All LETS communities do this with every transaction they make (well, some transactions just pay back debts). Sane people in my opinion.


No, I mean useful occupations like new machines operators, programmers, engineers, artists that take advantage of new technologies...


I would bet that within the latest artificially created by the fed and other central banks booms (.com bubble, real state bubble, now national debt bubble...), but that produced lots of useless jobs and malinvestments.
Miss-allocation of resources in summary. After that massive unemployment comes.


I don't claim is not real, I claim it doesn't last forever.


Time banking, yes. With LETS or (better) Ripple, you can trade any good or service.


No, the more you want from others the more you have to give to others. If you need nothing you don't need a job.


It depends on the system, but usually an hour of work can be paid with more than an hour bill. A LETS hour is supposed to mean an hour of unskilled labor.


My question was how can mutual credit moneys like time banking create artificial scarcity.


You mean define the human needs/wants scientifically? No, thanks.
By the way, I'm happy that you mention apple because I predict it will lose an important part of its market share for contributing with artificial scarcity.
On the other hand, google is a perfect example on how to make profit by creating abundance for other companies.

Then we shall find a intelligent way to fulfill human needs thanks to scientific methods and not acting like retards creating gazillions ipads that are designed to fail and cant be upgraded with all the externalized costs attached.


I tried to point out that regulations and patents are en effect not a a cause.


What exactly does that mean. You dont produce if you dont have profit. Abudance = no profit.

You are talking about some virtual money sequences i talk about actual products that goes into people hands.


You dont understand the concept.

If money dont circulate economy stops.

Infinite growth paradigm directly relates to the fact that for economy to work requires infinite growth of production and consumption. How the hell are you suppose to sustain that on a finite planet ?



You mean interest on borrowed money ? Yes they are a problem since they dont exists in money supply.
How are you suppose to achieve that.
Who in his right mind gonna lend money without attaching any interest ?


You mean like government employees , marketers , bankers , and other useless occupations ?

When was the last time new massive occupation were created ? It was development of Internet which at the same time make a lot of jobs obsolete. Since then we are in a constant downward spiral of really useful jobs.

Beside numbers dont agree with your statement , technological unemployment is very real.


I am not really familiar with those concepts so please correct me if see it wrong but after brief look at time banking.

I can see it can only apply to services.
Needs for jobs must be artificially maintained.
Limited ability to earn "money" since time is always constant.

How is that gonna create abundance in the world ?

Well, let's use two different words. Nature is finite no matter how good technology, there's only a limited amount of every element on earth.
RBE is based on having more of every resource than people wants, but people can always want more.

I agree with "Scarcity is artificially sustained in todays world", but it's not free market's fault. The sources of artificial scarcity are IMO governments (regulations, patents, state enabled monopolies...) and interest.
Within a free market barter society there's no interest and no artificial scarcity. The same can be said of a free market based on free money.
Profits drop to zero by competition, basic interest and capital yields don't.

Can't be fair play in sports (also based on competition)?
Infinite growth paradigm is not even part of interest an traditional money, is just part of the "always growing monetary base" national currencies that we have today.
Yes interest leads to short-term thinking and thus hurts sustainability. But you can remove interest from a free market.
Technological unemployment doesn't last: people learn new professions. The main sources of unemployment are again regulations and interest.

The main issue here is artificial scarcity. Please explain me how, for example, a time banking system (or more generally, a LETS; or even more generally Ripple) leads to artificial scarcity.

Scarcity can be overcomed due to technological progress, nature doesn't produce technology but we can. We have plenty of renewable energy resources around to achieve that.

The problem is it wont happen via profit mechanism. Supply and demand at its finest.

If supply of goods reach to the point that something is abundant its prices reaches 0 thus you cant make profit thus there is no incentive for such a thing to happen in the first place.

Scarcity is artificially sustained in todays world.


I dont think it is possible to eliminate coercion from a system based on competition and in builded scarcity , the system that teaches us from the beginning of the life to screw other people over.

Assuming it would be possible , ideal free market still doesn't address a lot of major issues like scarcity of resources , infinite growth paradigm , technological unemployment or sustaining of environment.

But there's scarcity in nature, that's not about the system.


Very good.


Ok, what about eliminating coercion through education and letting non coercive free market entrepreneurs be?

Education is hard work. If everything is voluntary, and everyone's basic needs are provided for, I'm not sure why the majority of the population would have an incentive to do this hard work. At which point, our biological, genetically ingrained,  instinct of competing to be the alpha male, whether through accumulating/hoarding wealth, or by being an ahole to other people around you (and maybe trying to subjugate them) would emerge, societal "conditioning" be damned.

No and Yes(somehow)

Its not there is something wrong with barter, it means that if barter is required there is something wrong with envoirment = scarcity.

Well yes.


No idea.

No, every prohibition is just dealing with effects not causes.

Free market leads to destruction of free market , to monopolies too.

Coercion will always come since there is huge incentive to do so . Coercion is rewarded in monetary based system.

No mafia and international banksters are not examples of free market enterprises but it is in their incentive to limit free market as possible as for any company that is allready making buck and they have position on the market. This is crucial to understand the true causes of regulation, patents and so on, something that free marketers are blinded to see.

IF YOU HAVE ALLREADY POSITION ON FREE MARKET IT IS IN YOUR INCENTIVE TO DESTROY IT ( destroy free market )

Imagine a pure bartering economy where you pay taxes with wares. Would that state be save from corruption?
Is there something wrong with barter too?
Wait, we don't have to imagine, there's corruption within socialist countries. Mhmm, I think I've talked about sociolismo before in this thread...Then someone said that the RBE would be voluntary (not a socialist state) and money would not be prohibited, just disappear with time and education.
Do you agree with that?
Do you think money could hurt RBE communes?
Do you think money should be prohibited in your RBE future?


So "free market leads to monopolies" again?
Not without coercion. You can't take the mafia and international banksters as examples of free market enterprises.

That would explain your post. Maybe you should read it after all , i have only thing to add right now.


If hard work would be a measurement of wealth slaves would be the richest

I haven't read the thread more than the first few comments and the last page. I also don't know a lot about project venus and zeitgeist.

But this resource based economy thing rings a bell with me.

Imagine a future world where robots do all the work and supercomputer AI do all work related thinking. Humans can no longer perform labour, they can only own these robots or own the resources they use. In this circumstance, under the current system, there would be zero social mobility.

Today, rich people are rich because they work hard, and poor people are poor because they work less.  If a poor person wants a car, he can work harder and make more money, then use the money to buy a car. Through the powers of free market, the labour he injects into the economy would ripple through the economy and "create" a car out of nothing, because in whatever he does for a living, the amount of labour he just did, can be saved by other workers and instead used to extract the necessary resources and build a car from them. This is the theoretical and pure form of capitalist economy.

In a future, human labour-less world the poor person would have no way of change his relative situation. As robots would always work at their highest level, there would be no difference between lazy humans and hard working humans because it would be impossible for a human to do labour and then "create" something in the way I just described.

So essentially the only thing that matters is the world resources and the relative distribution of these. This is the situation we are currently headed for, as rich people who depend on stock (which scales with science) become richer, and working people who depend on labour (which science makes obsolete) become relatively poorer.

Eventually we're gonna have a situtation where resources will be finite and the output of the human species industry completely disconnected from the humans. The only way to own something is by already having owned it. The only real way to obtain "new" wealth is through inheritance when other people die. In this situation, if you own a car, you are a basically taking a car from finite pool of cars on earth, essentially taking a car from someone else. Now this is not really that bad, because if you didn't have a car, someone would have taken that car from you.

The problem happens when you have 10 cars. Now you are suddenly "causing" lots of people to be without a vehicle. And this is why I think that in the future, if our morals continue to be the same as now, being rich will be a crime. It will basically be the same as stealing from the poor, and the only thing rich people would have to back up their resource claims was that their ancestors were rich, so they deserve to be rich too.

But what about the fact that government is controlled by people with a lot of money that emerged from a monetary system .

Dont you see it as natural tendency , free market that cant exists becuase it is destroyed by people allready on it the moment they gain a lot of money and money = power.

Why compete if you can control = the most efficient way to behave on a free market envoirment.

But how did they got that greater purchasing power?
I want to know your answer, but mine would be:
Providing a service that someone else consider valuable, owning capital or stealing through violence and/or the State.
I want to end capitalism without ending money and free market. 
I want to reduce the state so it cannot be used to abuse.
But a more skilled worker can get more resources and I don't want to change that.


And how is stupidity encouraged?
I would say that mainly through public education and TV (a market regulated by the government since the waves belong to it).
And again, the free market doesn't need stupidity. Does it?


Ask me whatever you think I don't understand about RBE and I'll answer you like an advocate would do it. But I won't believe those answers are correct.
That may be a way to prove that I understand you. Of course, different RBE advocates are wrong in different issues and I still can't read minds.
It can also be a funny game, you ask a question and I try to guess your answer.

Again, have you assimilated my ideas about free money?
Do you understand the implications of removing interest from the monetary system?

Those limits imposed in a monetary system where a minority have access to the majority of the resources just because they have the most purchasing power.

More accurately, stupidity would not be encouraged, rewarded or promoted the way it is inside of a monetary system.

I'm sure that you believe that you understand these ideas, but the questions you are asking and the ideas you are promoting indicate that you have much more to learn. I am fortunate in that I enjoy learning, perhaps more than others.

"...imaginary and arbitrary limits..."
What are those imaginary limits then?


So there's no stupid people within the RBE. Wasn't all voluntary? What if people reject the "correct education", whatever that is?


A decade, are you serious? I think I've assimilated the main ideas behind the RBE very well, and faster than you. But I still think is not a viable (or desirable, if something is not voluntary there) solution.
I think that your belief "money = bad" is not very scientific. I recommend you a book (that I haven't read yet, just some parts): "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis" by Ludwig von Mises. There he explains why a society without pricing mechanism is not a good idea.
Have you assimilated my ideas about free money?
I guess you haven't read Gesell's book. That's something you got in common with most libertarians here.
In summary he explains how interest impose artificial limits (but very real limits) and how to make a money system that lacks interest.
He's proposal is not the only way to achieve it. LETS and Ripple can do it too.

You shouldn't assume that when people doesn't agree with you is because they don't understand you.

Access abundance given the carrying capacity of the earth is not the same as infinite resources.

All behavior is emergent, but the environment plays a significant role in the result. A better environment produces better behavior, generally speaking.

Many people here do not seem to be able to assimilate the ideas I'm talking about very rapidly. That is fine though, because it took me nearly a decade to understand it myself.

1) Nature has very real limits. When you want, the planet is infinite, when you don't want resources are scarce. How is this possible?

2) Stupidity emerges. You don't need planned stupidity although it helps (see public education in the US).

3) Are we stupid because we think money is a great tool and you don't?