Friend of the Planet

Well, the title says it all, I guess. I'm new here, so I thought, let's make an introduction post.

I'm a 17 years boy old from the Netherlands. I love playing(and collecting) Warhammer, MageKnight and games like that. While usually lighthearted, I enjoy having a philosophical discussion every once in a while. For those of you thinking I'm some guy with enough IQ to talk Einstein under the table, well, I'm not...Never pretended to be either, though it may seem like that(my apologies for that). I absolutely suck at school, most notably maths, economics and the like. The only things I'm really good at are English, strategy/tactics, and, if you could classify it as such, philosophy.

Let's give an explanation for my kind of fuzzy sounding displayed name now...For some time, I was terribly afraid of death, not being able to believe in an afterlife. So I did some internet searching, and found some articles about cryonics and nanotechnology. Cryonics involves freezing someone's body, thawing and resurrecting it when the appropriate technology becomes available. This technology is nanotech. I can't explicitely explain how this tech works, but it's sufficient to say it's a technology that allows for endless possibilities, including the purification of the Earth's air and water, prolonging life for many many years, and even more incredible stuff. Sounds impossible to accomplish...And in our current society, it is.

Money is the worst enemy. The whole idea of trading, as human as it may be, is wrong, IMHO.But, as it is human(thus in our nature), it's also hard to get rid of. A perfect solution would be to create a mentality of sharing... Caring about each other plays a great role in this. Now, you think, what has that got to do with nanotech(NT) and the like? Simple...A hard to research tech like NT costs great amounts of money, which isn't always readily available, thus hampering the progress on the research.

So I began contemplating on how to deal with this...Just banning money and trade isn't going to work...Not on it's own, anyway. So I thought that, if all people just learn to give, and expect nothing back, we might have a chance of succeeding.

This, too, sounds impossible. It isn't. It is, however, extremely hard. I'm trying my utmost best to lock away any greed within myself, but I can't always succeed, of course. mean, I'm only seventeen, and have only started doing this for a month or so. Anyways, I have learned that respecting life of any kind plays a tremendous part in learning to give, rather than trade and bargain. Do you really think corporations like Philips care about the people? Neh...They just want $$$. Respecting life, respecting everyone as an individual, including nature with it's animals, plants and even disasters. Though that last one doesn't include death. Why should we die after a certain amount of time? There's no purpose to it...And if the only problem was overcrowding, why can people have children, then? I'm not denying anyone the chance to live, be they as yet unborn, or already born, but I just don't see the plan behind all this.

The following is just a speculation...

Is this some kind of test God deviced when he told Adam and Eve not to take the fruit? Taking the fruit like they did was greed, too, inspired by their inner demons(the snake, for those who didn't get it ). God saw this as a flaw, and decided to alter humanity, by making Adam and Eve mortal, and able to create children, of which the ultimate offspring would be the ones which God would like humanity to be...Free of greed. Free of their inner demons.

Well, if you took the time to crunch through the whole text, my compliments. It's probaby a very boring thing to read, since I'm not really someone who's able to create fun and easy to read essays/speeches. I just say what I think, in either a plan way, a blunt way, or just a combination of the two.

Anyways, I'd like to hear what you all think of my theory...Mind you, it's still at it's developing stage...I don't have my mind set about all this yet...There are some things that need to be polished up, some other things are robably utter crap, etc...Anyway, I've babbled enough, already, so I'll shut up now .

AspenMama

Greetings Friend! In case you didn't realize this, you have arrived at The Secular Web. We are a group largely consisting of atheists and agnostics.

As this isn't the proper place to debate your theories, I am moving this thread to a better forum.

Welcome.

Friend of the Planet

Yes, I know you're mostly atheists and the like. I never said my theory is strongly based on a theistical vision. The example of Adam and Eve was just a way a Christ could see it. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about that.

Also, after reading my post again, I noticed it has a very arrogant overtone. At least in the beginning...My apologies. Didn't mean it that way.

Heleilu

Welcome to the board!

Just out of curiosity, why do you think that trading is the root of all evil? As long as there is private property, trading will be good rather than evil. Sharing would be nice, but there are also lots of costs associated with sharing. One cost is the cost of locating someone to share with. Does anyone else really want to share a copy of La Dangxera Lingvo with me, at least anyone within 200 kilometers? Another cost is allocating time. After all, if we're 230 kilometers apart, we can't read the book at the same time. A third difficulty is that the "sharing" model somewhat explains what to do with goods already in existence, but it doesn't seem to explain how inputs are to be acquired. It explains what to do with the copy of La Dangxera Lingvo once it exists, but it doesn't explain how to get the ink, paper, and labor to make the book. The inputs can't be "shared", because they have already been used to make outputs and can't be put back into circulation in their original forms. This leads to the problem of goods that can only be consumed once, such as food or airplane tickets. La Dangxera Lingvo can be consumed until the book falls apart, but a ticket to Fortaleza, Brasil on Flight UKE-O can only be consumed once. Ditto for a meal in a cafe in Fortaleza; I can "share" the food, but the food still can't be consumed twice. The final argument against an economic system based on sharing is to listen to little kids. If you don't have small sisters or brothers yourself, Friend of the Planet, pay a visit to a preschool.

BTW, I'm an economics student in college, and trading probably goes pretty far back into my ancestry -- it yielded my surname

Friend of the Planet

Well, part of the problem with the statement 'trading is the root of all evil' is that it's damn hard to come up with a way to abolish it, mostly because of the way humans think. I'll try to answer te points you gave, however.

Point one's where you start to misunderstand my words. When I say to share, I don't mean share everything you've got, but rather, produce whatever you were producing before this system, and when you produced enough, go to the market or wherever you want to, to give the products away. You'll probably then say 'why produce it/ You don't get anything back for it'. True, you don't get anything back for it, but you don't need to, because you can take things yourself from others on the market as well.

Of course, this taking of stuff must be divided fairly, so no more than a certain number of products per customer. The limit is set by the number of products available, and the need for it. You don't really need more than one TV, so 1 TV per household is the limit. Luxury stuff should also have a limit per year, so that people don't end up with 365 TVs in a year or something equally ridiculous. Besides, that would eat up natural resources damn fast.

Now, about goods that can't be bought, or given, like being a policeman, or being a programmer at an office. These people should just do their work, without expecting to get a reward out of it other than the satisfaction of helping other people with their needs. What else should be gained from it? I mean, you're doing the work because you like doing it, not because of anything else.

And I'm very sorry for all those people who study economics(I got that subject too at school, but I really suck at it. My grades never pass the 4(on a scale of 1-10)), but they should either find aother study, or continue this study in such a way as to device ways to improve the tradeless economics structure. I'm no economic myself, so solving all negative effects of this isn't something I could be doing by myself. I doubt even a good economic could do so...

But the biggest problem with this would always be the human nature. We expect something real back, something we can touch, but that's not the way it should work. That's why I'm trying to become completely selfless myself, while not letting others take advantage of that, something which people do try to do, sadly.

braces_for_impact

It sounds nice on the surface. But, life doesn't work that way, reality check here. Sounds like socialism to me. Limit your freedom. People don't need more than one tv, but what if I want two? Who decides what and how many of any objects are reasonable for someone to have? Bottom line is this, you could take all you wished from the wealthy and middle class and redistribute it to the poor and you know what you would have? An entire planet of poor people. There simply isn't enough wealth to distribute amongst the entire planet to make everyone have a comfortable lifestyle; much less be out of poverty. On the other hand, wealthy people don't usually get that way by themselves. They need people to work for them, there are jobs to be done, and someone has to do it. When was the last time you got employment from a poor person? I'm thankful I live in a country where I have the freedom to be that hard worker, with the capacity to become wealthy myself, and hire my own workers, thus perpetuating the system. Capitalism is not bad, it is not evil, and it works with people's natural greed to create better lifestyles for as many as possible. I'm not saying it's a perfect system, but IMHO it's the best out there right now. Take a look at those poor, overpopulated countries. How many have a capitalist society? Most are run by petty, greedy dictators who deny their citizens basic human rights. That's where effort should be spent to raise the standard of living for all earths' inhabitants. Extend the US bill of rights to the entire planet, and oust those that would harm or limit freedom of their own citizens. Give everyone the potential.

Heleilu

I definitely misunderstood what you were saying. That negates some of my criticisms, but not all, and also introduces some new ones. You studied economics in school, so you remember the "free-rider problem", right? That's a problem in the provision of public goods where each person has an incentive not to pay for a public good because his/her own contribution doesn't have a direct relationship to the amount of the public good produced. I think this is the problem that would doom your system. Whenever you started rationing to counteract this, a black market would spring up. Say you have one family that likes TV and lives close to the center of town, and another family that can't stand TV and lives quite far out. As long as you ration TVs and cars, the two families will have an incentive to trade.

Another problem with this model is technological innovation. You'll end up with hundreds of people producing 8-track players, laserdiscs, and 5 1/4" disk drives despite the fact that all have long since been superseded. There's no incentive to produce efficiently, or to even produce a product for which there is a demand.

As for services, like being a doctor or a policeman, the first problem is renumeration. Doctors have to eat too. I presume the "donatory" (since it's not really a market) would take care of their needs as well. The second problem is attracting enough people to the right jobs. There will be some people who just love what they do, which is nice. But, to be honest, how much of a demand is there for linguists, beta testers, and professional tennis players? And how many people really want to become janitors or cashiers at K-Mart? I don't mean to pick on janitors or cashiers, but I'd much rather become one of the former three than one of the latter two. You would probably end up with a glut of beta testers and a dire shortage of garbage workers.

I get decent grades in economics, usually in the low A range on an A, B, C, D, F scale. In your scale, that would be about a 9.2, with a 6 or below being failure. So economics is fundamentally immoral? I've heard some complaints about the dismal science, but that's a new one I don't see how positive economics, the economics that attempts to describe economic behavior, is any more immoral than psychology or anthropology. Normative economics, on the other hand...can cause a lot of damage. So can psychology.

I think you've found the problem with all utopian schemes. They all assume that people will act in the interest of the group when that goes against self-interest.

BTW, have you heard of something called "participatory economics" or parecon for short? It sounds like your sort of idea.

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Heleilu ]</p>