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Energy Accounting.
So here is a solution I would like to put forward. It is not so much about alternative money but about economics.
It is not my creation but I heartily endorse it.
What if every human being on the planet received a portion of the energy value of the total resources; natural and technological?
Imagine the incredible growth and sustainablity we could create!
The drop in waste created by profit imperitive and competition.
The drop in crime if there is no incentive to steal.
The drop in sickness and disease if true health care costs no more than the current disease and symptom care that is offered today.
What if every human being's needs are provided for from cradle to grave?
This has been answered more than once by a sentiment that goes:....
"if people dont have to work, they wont"
If that were true there would be no purpose for hobbies, for retired people to volunteer etc.
The point being that people are creative and all of us have the need to feel useful and to contribute. No, we may not want to dig ditches or clean toilets; we already have adequate technology for that anyway.
But if we are freed from the drudgery of a job we dislike, we do find satisfaction in pursuing those things which interest us. We can invest a lot more energy in something that feels like play rather than something that feels like work.
In our current system human potential is going to waste. Free them from having to earn a living for themselves and their families and everyone benefits.
The much misunderstood resource of human engenuity is our greatest.
The Venus Project web site has an excellent article on Resource Based Economy.
www.thevenusproject.com/resource_eco.htm
Buckminster Fuller in his book Critical Path mentioned that at least 75% of the jobs at the time of writing were not providing any life support. He mentions professions such as lawyers, insurance brokers and poloticians. But there are many more.
Life support being pretty self explanatory.
Technocracy for most of us is a bad word. Wikipedia defines it thus: a government run by the highly educated
However, nothing could be further from the truth. Technocracy is not a form of government at all but a scientific way of using technology to manage resources for the good of all. The Technical Alliance created during the Great Depression laid our practical plans for this as it related to North America.
www.technocracy.ca/modules.php
Again: Resource Based Economy as described on the Venus Project web page..
Rather than repeat information on these 2 web sites, I merely post them and let you make up your own mind.
Now more than every we have the technology to accomplish this. If this has already been mentioned here I apologize.
So here is a solution I would like to put forward. It is not so much about alternative money but about economics.
It is not my creation but I heartily endorse it.
What if every human being on the planet received a portion of the energy value of the total resources; natural and technological?
Imagine the incredible growth and sustainablity we could create!
The drop in waste created by profit imperitive and competition.
The drop in crime if there is no incentive to steal.
The drop in sickness and disease if true health care costs no more than the current disease and symptom care that is offered today.
What if every human being's needs are provided for from cradle to grave?
This has been answered more than once by a sentiment that goes:....
"if people dont have to work, they wont"
If that were true there would be no purpose for hobbies, for retired people to volunteer etc.
The point being that people are creative and all of us have the need to feel useful and to contribute. No, we may not want to dig ditches or clean toilets; we already have adequate technology for that anyway.
But if we are freed from the drudgery of a job we dislike, we do find satisfaction in pursuing those things which interest us. We can invest a lot more energy in something that feels like play rather than something that feels like work.
In our current system human potential is going to waste. Free them from having to earn a living for themselves and their families and everyone benefits.
The much misunderstood resource of human engenuity is our greatest.
The Venus Project web site has an excellent article on Resource Based Economy.
www.thevenusproject.com/resource_eco.htm
Buckminster Fuller in his book Critical Path mentioned that at least 75% of the jobs at the time of writing were not providing any life support. He mentions professions such as lawyers, insurance brokers and poloticians. But there are many more.
Life support being pretty self explanatory.
Technocracy for most of us is a bad word. Wikipedia defines it thus: a government run by the highly educated
However, nothing could be further from the truth. Technocracy is not a form of government at all but a scientific way of using technology to manage resources for the good of all. The Technical Alliance created during the Great Depression laid our practical plans for this as it related to North America.
www.technocracy.ca/modules.php
Again: Resource Based Economy as described on the Venus Project web page..
Rather than repeat information on these 2 web sites, I merely post them and let you make up your own mind.
Now more than every we have the technology to accomplish this. If this has already been mentioned here I apologize.
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Re: Resource Based Economy
Sat, April 7, 2007 - 8:15 PMThanks for the wonderful post, Shera. I read through the Venus Project's "resourse-based economy" proposal and found it very appealing.
Indeed, money (or currency) is hardly essential to human well-being. Communities existed before money and (hopefully) will exist after money. A culture based on scarcity and fear promotes corrosive competition and divisiveness. A culture built on the reality of abundance and interdependence promoted human contentment and genuine efficiency.
Is anyone here familiar with Edward Bellamy's late 19th century utopian novel "Looking Backward?" The future society he outlines resembles the one discussed in the Venus Project.
I have been longing for such a transformation for as long as I can remember. The one practical step I have taken recently to support its manifestation is to plant lots of extra herb and vegetable seeds. I am giving away the vegetable seedlings by word of mouth, primarily. I have found it to be a fun, rewarding project. It seems that people really appreciate receiving plants, and the cash expense for me is very low. The "cost" is more the effort and consistency of daily care to get the seedlings going.
What are some other things we can do to begin to move in this direction?
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Re: Resource Based Economy
Sat, April 7, 2007 - 9:29 PMOne of the first people to propose something similar was C. H. Douglas in 1924, he called it social credit. -
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Re: Resource Based Economy
Sun, April 8, 2007 - 6:36 AMOh yes! Looking Backward. I enjoyed that book too. A guy goes to sleep in one century and wakes up in another one. As far as I know it is out of print but I found it listed on my local Library's online listings.
As I remember it , the future society is around the turn of the 20th century...
Rahim, I love that you are "doing" something rather than just waiting for someone else. My "doing" involves printing booklets on my home printer and distributing them where I hope they can do the most good. The booklets themselves have a lot of practical information about staying free of police, law and taxation. I live in the inner city where police influence ismore about harrassment that protecting the public.
As for Social Credit, I think it lost it's way when the So Cred party came on the scene. Very popular in farming communities...but now people think of it as a political idea, when it is not.
Any system of distribution carries with it the possibility for abuse somewhere along the line. So, I think the most important part of any of this is to empower everyone to make their own choices.
Holographic in nature so that it can be built from the ground up by anyone. Although upon typing that, I realize it sounds rather idealistic. Just wishing I could have said it better.
The one thing we can do to create a better system, like Venus Project or any other--is to share information.
My Christmas gift to my community was to create several dozen CD case calendars with Venus Project photos with subtle acknowledgement to VP. They were very cheap to make and fun to give away. Also to buy the Future by Design DVD and donate it to my local library after I had watched it.
So, although I feel like rushing towards this goal or something similar, I honestly think that information sharing is best for this stage of the game. More people who understand that this is possible can bring new ideas and resources to bring it about.
Although the forum on Venus Project web site has some people on there who are working at actively building prototype communites. -
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Re: Resource Based Economy
Sun, April 8, 2007 - 7:18 AMNo actually Major C. H. Douglas was an engineer and he wrote a book that showed that the present (at that time in 1924) financial system was not sustainable. He predicted many of the problems with globalization we are seeing today. He presented a mathematical proof for the unsustainability and offered an alternative social credit. You are right that this was what the social credit parties were based on however none of them ever implemented his idea of social credit, as they would have to outlaw the present banking practices. -
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Re: Resource Based Economy
Thu, April 26, 2007 - 8:41 PM"It's Your Money They Want
Now this book of Mr. Maynard Keynes to which I have referred, represents apparently a sudden conversion on the part of the author to the monetary theories of Silvio Gesell, the originator of the idea of "disappearing money," that is, money that loses its value month by month unless spent (as if money did not disappear fast enough already).
The idea is that if you have got a lOs. note today you have to put a penny stamp on it a fortnight hence to keep it worth lOs., and another penny stamp in a further fortnight's time so that it shall still remain at the value of lOs. Gesell's theory was that the trouble with the world was that people saved money so that what you had to do was to make them spend it faster.
Disappearing money is the heaviest form of continuous taxation ever devised.
The theory behind this idea of Gesell's was that what is required is to stimulate trade - that you have to get people frantically buying goods - a perfectly sound idea so long as the objective of life is merely trading."
When a lOs. note becomes worth only 9s. 11d. tomorrow, a man will go and buy something and so stimulate trade. In fact you have exactly the same state of affairs as existed at the time of the stupendous German inflation of the mark.
When a waiter received payment in millions of marks he hardly waited to throw down his napkin before dashing out to buy something, because the value was disappearing so rapidly that what he bought one minute would require a billion marks ten minutes hence.
Government by Money
These taxation schemes - I am not now talking of any particular theory, I am talking of conceptions of life - all these schemes are based on the assumption that you have to stimulate something or other. They are an attempt to produce a psychological effect by means of the monetary system. In other words, the monetary system is regarded not as a convenience for doing something which you decide yourself you want to do, but to make you do something because of the monetary system.
I am not going into Social Credit technique tonight; I merely want to repeat that our conception of a monetary system is that it should be a system reflecting the facts, and it should be those facts, and not the monetary system that determine our action.
When a monetary system dictates your actions, then you are governed by money, and you have the most subtle, dangerous and undesirable form of government that the perverted mind of man - if it is the mind of man - has ever conceived. "
www.alor.org/Library/App...ality.htm#1a
I apologize for some of the spelling and grammatical mistakes above. I'm used to spellcheck and tried to change a sentence after I wrote it,and left some words intact.
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Re: Resource Based Economy
Wed, April 25, 2007 - 7:12 PMYou are correct, Douglas was the first that I know of to talk of "time energy units":
"Now, time is an easily measurable factor, and although we cannot measure human potential, because we have at present no standard, it is, nevertheless, true that for a given process the number of human time-energy units required for a given output is quite definite, and therefore, the cheapest terms on which the individual can liquidate his debt to nature in respect of food, clothes and shelter, is clearly dependent on process; that is to say on the time-energy units other than human that he can press into his service and by getting free of this debt with the minimum expenditure of time-energy units of which his individual supply varies, but is, nevertheless, quite definite at any given time, he clearly is so much the rich in the most real sense in that he can control the use to be made of his remaining stock.
But, and it is vital to the whole argument, improved process must be made the servant of this objective, that is to say, a process which is improved must, by the operation of a suitable econimic system decrease the time-energy units demanded from the community, or to put the matter another way all improvements in process should be made to pay a dividend to the community." (C.H. Douglas, "Economic Democracy")
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