Do you think a resource based economy advocated by The Zeitgeist Movement is a viable solution to our economic, energy and environment problems? The elimination of money is a very radical idea. If Von Mises were alive today, what would he say?
Do you think a resource based economy advocated by The Zeitgeist Movement is a viable solution to our economic, energy and environment problems?
The Venus Project's "resource-based economy" works on the principle that modern technology can effectively bring about superabundance. The argument is if all the world's resources were made available to some type of central planning board then there would be no scarcity, as this board could decide exactly what to make and in how much quantity. Their website uses the following example,
Consider the following examples: At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.
Yes, the United States built a very large amount of aircraft in a very short amount of time, and it was for the most part centrally planned. But, the construction of war material came at the cost of consumer goods and private capital goods (IIRC, the fall in private production was ~90%; I can't really remember the exact figure now), and so obviously there was not enough resources to distribute between both war material production and civilian production - otherwise, governments would already be implenting those techniques.
The elimination of money is a very radical idea. If Von Mises were alive today, what would he say?
Resources are scarce. Money is used as the best rationing system for scarce resources. Without money we are bound to use subpar rationing systems. I write about this in "A Primer on Austrian Economics",
There is no objection amongst economists that given the existence of scarcity, the market is in need of a rationing device. Most economists, except those in extreme favor of centralized rationing, will also agree with the notion that price is the best rationing device of the market. While price hardly acts as a measure of value, due to the fact that no object has an objective value, it nevertheless serves as a useful tool to coordinate production by serving as a conveyor of information between different market agents and a method by which an individual can decide whether or not a particular action is economical.
In a socialistic economy, where prices are absent, this coordination would simply not exist. There would be no host of individual agents communicating through the price mechanism and allocating resources by means of subjective ratiocination. As a result, all meaningful economic activity would come to a halt. Complex programs would be impossible to complete economically, since without a price mechanism there would be no way for a central planner to distribute resources according to their most economical use. Thus, socialist economies are bound to fail.
"Perhaps I have an excellent grasp of economics, which is why I find it a naive and foolish paradigm. Can you honestly tell me that the wealth in real terms which has been generated in the last hundred years came from money? Or did it come from applied technology? Do you think we cannot have one without the other? "
Nobody here is going to claim that money is in itself representitive of real wealth. That was the flaw of the Merchantilists, and continues to be the flaw of certain versions of Keynesiam. However while money =/= wealth, money serves an important function in helping to coordinate the use of resources in order to produce wealth.