Dismissing a planned economy by labelling it as Marxist, or something, is not good enough. Anyone can label something and we can set that a side as a rhetorical technique, rather than a systemic criticism of an RBE. Critics of the RBE say they don't want a planned economy, but go on to suggest they will be forced to have one, and/or that as they have failed before, they will fail again. One critic even tries to demand that everyone read the book "Seeing like a state" which shows why (he argues) the RBE will fail, because it is like (he argues) the examples in the book that failed.
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" is a maxim I was brought up on, and I really don't see why an RBE should fail just because previous planned economies have failed. We should learn from our mistakes, but giving up is not necessarily the outcome.
I think the objection to a planned economy in practice is a cypher for the planned economy in principle - but this brings us back to the labelling argument. A planned economy comes from an ideological framework to which I don't subscribe (ie it is Marxist, Communist) and this makes it wrong.
Economy is from the Greek oikonomos - meaning something like the rules/strategy/plans of running a household. We see, with households, small scale 'planned economies' in which resources and work are shared, resources conserved, work minimised (efficiency maximised) and so on. Is this household level "economising" scaleable to a planetary level, and do we want to apply it at a planetary level?
Well, TVP/TZM argue that using technology we can technically scale up to a planetary level and start to quantify what we have in our global fridge and larder, so to speak. We would all know what resources we have and where they are, courtesy of (in essence) the internet. I don't think anyone can really argue that knowing what we have in total is wrong in itself, nor that it is not useful. The problem seems to be that the infrastructure that enables this knowledge to be managed and shared could be usurped by an elite who wish to control it for ends other than the fair sharing of the resources we're aiming for.
But this controlling elite is what we already have, though it currently operates through the monetary system. The amount of money in this system is constantly increasing over time (give or take some minor blips) basically because of interest (paying back more than you borrowed), but we know that resources are not increasing over time, so therefore the amount of money per unit of resource is constantly increasing. Inflation. But having money is still linked to access to resources by the system as designed. Those who have enough money to lend can accrue more money because of interest. Those who need to borrow money have to work to pay it back - another design feature of the system.
Because money is the key to accessing resources, people seek to get more of it, and through the price mechanism something that is scarce has a higher price. Therefore scarcity is good in this system. Where it exists it is good, and where it doesn't exist it should logically be created.
Let's come back to the household scale and examine this system to see if its faults show up more clearly. The head of this household says to the members that in order to have an allocation of the households resources they must have access to some tokens that s/he has created and controls. S/he lends you some of these tokens, but you have to pay back more than you lent, but you can only get the tokens from one source, and s/he therefore has to create more tokens to lend to you, to pay back the interest with, but these themselves also attract interest.
To get these tokens to pay back you have to work, and so do the others in the household, apart from the head. If there's no work to do there's no tokens, so work is artificially created. I could go on.
In a real life house, labour saving devices are welcomed, because they mean less work. A well managed household knows what resources it has, and conserves them. Now subsitute "planet" for "house[hold]" and see if you can understand why it should be any different.
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The resource based economy (RBE) includes money less economy (MLE). It is the MLE that is more important. I do not know why people are bringing in RBE inside MLE. May be people are afraid of talking about MLE and trying to hide it behind RBE.
ReplyDeleteThere will be no need for RBE once you implement MLE. Under MLE many resources will
automatically become abundant. Today everybody wants to live in a big house. It gives a status symbol; it recognizes achievements; rising price of house gives a financial investment. In MLE house will be free. There will be no status associated with big house. Eventually no one will like big houses. The resources needed to build houses will become abundant.
All we need is MLE. The RBE assumes that in MLE the demands of resources will remain same. That assumption is wrong. In MLE the philosophy of people will completely change.
However there is a bigger problem. Who will bell the cat? How can you remove money power to implement the MLE. The money power is with all the rich people, the CEOs, the central banks, the IMF, military, CIA, FBI etc. How can you remove them.
History shows that the people's movement never brought freedom from the suppressors. Always a power bigger than suppressor was necessary. To free the Asian and African colonies from imperialism, a bigger power of Hitler was necessary. Gandhi could not free India. Revolution from people will not be able to bring MLE.
Thus I do not have any confidence that MLE can be implemented. The Nobel Laureate in economics, Milton Friedman, said this about the central bank: “One unsolved economic problem of the day is how to get rid of the Federal Reserve”.
Not having money is an element of an RBE, but for me the most important element is basing the economy on what useful resources we actually have. If we do that money makes no sense. I don't think we have to lead with abolishing money.
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