The Resource Based Economy mind virus

We've seen the Zeitgeist films and sadly they're still taking a hold on impressionable young minds that could be doing something useful instead. Despite its shoddy research, its baseless assertions and its gross generalisations (or perhaps because of them), a few things about the films stand out:

1. We have to get rid of all monetary systems.
2. The answer to all our woes is a Resource Based Economy.

Bad ideas have a habit of outliving good ones, perhaps because they are neat, plausible and wrong. These are all hallmarks of the kind of thinking that does not require much thinking, and as we know thinking is the hardest work of all. Perhaps this is why the bad ideas keep being perpetuated, while paradoxically the good ones are also neat, plausible and slightly less wrong. Why the good ideas don't get perpetuated as readily is beyond me.

Here's an image of Frank Zappa. Because Zappa is god.

 

Why should we get rid of a monetary system?

The Zeitgeist films try very hard to blame all our current problems on a monetary system. This is probably because the Zeitgeist movement conflates a fractional reserve banking system with monetary systems everywhere. Most people are economically illiterate and the notion that money is the root of all evil is not exactly a hard-earned conclusion.

"Money is a matter of functions four, a medium, a measure, a standard, a store".

Let's picture a world without money to highlight why there is money in the first place: If all we have are commodities without a currency to mediate, we are reliant on the coincidence of wants. To simplify the point, let's forget all the other complications such as a lack of a store of value, a lack of a unit of account, a lack of a standard for deferred payment, and all the other benefits that money gives us. Let's just focus on the coincidence of wants.

Suggest that you are a dental floss salesman from Montana. You go to the dentist. Your dentist is already well-stocked when it comes to dental paraphernalia and he does not require more dental floss. You are living in a society that has been exorcised of all money. How do you pay for your dentist visit?

This is perhaps why some anthropologists claim that debt is the first instance of money. Maybe some barterers got sick of getting the same goods from the same people and just said let's stick to I.O.U.s. Just like Menger's original account of where money originated, this is pure speculation and the functions of money do not rely on the order of things. It does however show two things:

1. Without money, we still need a coincidence of wants. This coincidence of wants presents an unsolvable problem. To be more succinct, it is impossible to please everyone.
2. The Resource Based Economy relies on commodities and conveniently ignores services that are provided by skilled people. This is perhaps because its chief evangelist is not a trained engineer and is unfamiliar with the kind of perseverance it takes to become skilled in a discipline. The Resource Based Economy just assumes we'd all be happy to get our daily bread from spambots and go on our merry way while automatically just obtaining the kind of skills required to maintain the spambots. If this is the case, why is there such high incidence of crime amongst people on welfare who do have the bare minimum that anyone could ask for given to them? But I'm getting ahead of myself, let's see what an RBE is.

 What is a Resource Based Economy?

Before we get to the Venus Project, it is worth noting what economics is. Economics is a social science primarily concerned with the production, consumption and distribution of resources. A Resource Based Economy thus refers to an economic problem per definition. Any notions that a Resource Based Economy is a radically new idea are thus misguided and testifies plainly of ignorance of economics as a field.


The Zeitgeist evangelists are familiar with the term as a reference to a system where information, goods and services are freely available. Their Resource Based Economy (RBE) relies fundamentally on the "average man" - a notion that first inspired the Socialism and Communism from which Zeitgeist bildungsphilisters are trying to separate themselves at all non-monetary costs.

This begs quite a few questions:

1. Where do these skills and services come from? The information content of virtually any tertiary education is already freely available (see Khan Academy for one), but this has not yielded the masses of skilled semi-professionals that it could have yielded. By contrast, voluntary free association has yielded many fruitful projects, amongst them Wikipedia and SETI@home (and no, these are not examples of gift economies, these are examples of Collective Intelligence). 
2. What about people who prefer having more of a given commodity than is provided by the spambots? We are told that the Venus Project does not rely on bartering or on a monetary system. What if I like hoarding chickens and I end up with more chickens than anyone in the Venus Project? Are the spambots going to dish my chickens out to all and sundry, in which case I have no more incentive to keep them in addition to experiencing the tyranny of social engineering first hand? What if my chickens require more land than my allocated land? Will the Venus Project assure me the property rights to enlarge my coop, or will I have to conduct a chicken coup d'edat? Death to the naked apes! Power to the flightless birds!
3. How does this system deal with scarcity? Some commodities are in fact scarce and this is more or less reflected in their monetary value, give or take a few hiccups. If we share scarce resources equally, we'd all be fitted with essentially a pittance of that resource that is of no use to anyone.
4. How does this system prevent bartering, trading and all the other innately human impulses that give rise to inequality in the first place?

The dangers of this system are not contained in its misguided calls for getting rid of currency, but in its social engineering implications. Social engineering is nothing new: It has been tried and tested and it doesn't work. The reason why it doesn't work is because the needs and wants of a group of individuals cannot be accurately portrayed by merely averaging out their individual whims and conveniently ignoring the outliers. Many of the brightest, most highly qualified engineers have tried, and failed. This is nothing but the principle of 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' in denial and in disguise.

Is it a good idea to unravel all the gains of the Age of Enlightenment to return to a serfdom? Except now it's an improvement because of social engineering, scientific socialism, and the consolement that the serfdom is run by the same kind of bots that crashed Wall Street?

Metacritique of "The Objectivist Ethics"

The following responds to a critique of "The Objectivist Ethics". Regular readers might have guessed that I am a bit of a Randroid. My numbering corresponds to the numbering of the author. To follow things smoothly, you have to read the critique and my metacritique next to each other.

1. Rand's argument

Objection to i
The fact that Ayn Rand does not offer an argument for 1 does not make it false. This piece does not offer a counter argument. That besides, Ayn Rand bases Objectivism on axioms. Per definition, axioms are not proven but assumed to be true.

Objection to ii
The alternatives need to be there for either schools of value to be satisfied. Absolute good is in contrast with less good options, relative good is in contrast with other worse options. A million US dollars, or South African Rand, has to be compared with something of lesser value (a million Zimbabwean Dollars, for instance) to be considered valuable.

Objection to iii
Non-living things cannot make value judgements as far as we know. This is the point of the fact that they cannot face alternatives: they cannot choose to be living things. We can.

Objection to iv
These two interpretations, oddly enough, seem to reinforce the idea that value has to be of value to someone. Value as a verb implies an agent that values. Value as an absolute implies comparison with less valuable or more valuable things, which begs the question valuable to whom? This again implies an agent that compares.

Objection to v
The implicit premise 7 is derived incorrectly.

Rand's premise: 6. Every living thing acts to maintain its life, for its own sake.
The author's implied premise: 7. There is no other thing that they act to gain or keep for its own sake.

In other words, agent does x because of y. This does not mean that an agent can't do z because of y (or an agent can't do other things merely for their own sake). Rather, Rand's implied premise seems to be that an agent cannot do x because of z (namely an agent cannot act to maintain itself for the sake of someone else), not that there are no other things that agents do for their own sake.

The author focuses on this incorrect premise 7, thus v is a classic strawman argument. It is important to read the entire 6 and to understand that agents act to maintain themselves for their own sake. v claims that this implies innate values, which it does not. As per 2 and 3, Rand claims that agents choose among alternatives according to what they value. Thus, values cannot be innate as instinct. They are a result of volition. Rocks cannot act to satisfy value systems, regardless of the value their kinetic energy might have to us.

Objection to vi
This breaks up 6 and gets lost in semantics. Again, 6 claims agents maintain themselves for themselves. Nothing more.

Objection to vii
This again focuses on the incorrectly derived premise 10. Rand stated that an agent's life is its ultimate value, at the heart of its values. This is why Rand stated that life is valuable for its own sake. It is thus rational to act in order to promote life. The derived premise states that Rand claimed it is rational to act in order to promote one's values. This does not follow from Rand's statements (unless one's values are necessarily in tune with promoting one's life), as Rand claimed that values are volition.

You may choose to have any values whatsoever, and acting to satisfy them is not necessarily tantamount to promoting your life. Rand claimed that it is rational to act to promote your life, therefore you should choose values accordingly. NOT that you should act to promote your values. If this were true and your values were not chosen to promote your life, your values - and not your life - would have the ultimate value.

vii begs the question why is it rational to act to satisfy values, if they do not promote your own life? This, I belief, is the point Rand was trying to make. We should, therefore, act to promote our own lives, and allow others to act to promote their own lives. This is the real meaning of altruism: to allow agents to live for their own sake and not to require other agents to live for your own sake, or to live for the sake of others.

Objection to viii
Another strawman argument. Rand did not claim that living without 100% reason results in instant death. She merely claimed that we as agents should be allowed to use our ultimate survival tool, namely reason. Reason here refers to acting in your own best interest in order to maintain your life, and allowing others the same course of action. This because the assumption is that life has value for agents, for its own sake.

3. General arguments against ethical egoism

This argument does not follow from Objectivist ethics. This argument begs the question who is forcing you to torture 500 people for the benefit of a dime? This scenario implies the absence of volition, which means Objectivist values do not apply.

4. Attacking straw men

Rand never claimed that moral values are arbitrary. Rand claimed that values should be based on that which keeps you alive. This is hardly arbitrary.

By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work. - Ayn Rand, Wikiquote.

This contradicts what the author claims about Rand's values. Another strawman argument, based on the incorrectly derived premise 7, which as discussed was not Rand's implied premise but of the author's own invention.

5. Man qua man and fudge words

Rand never claimed that life is a state of not being dead. On the contrary, to claim this is to miss the entire point of egoism. With Man Qua Man, Rand claimed this:

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life. - Ayn Rand, Wikiquote.

The author again conducts a strawman argument by claiming Rand claims Life Qua Existence (which is the kind of Latin that Monty Python would probably not approve), and neglecting the basic purpose of Objectivist ethics, namely happiness.

Simply being alive is thus not the same as Rand's notions of acting in a rational manner to promote living in happiness.

6. Rand's intuitions

That is why there are no divergent views about mathematical theorems--when Euclid wrote his Elements, no one disagreed with it or presented arguments against it. That's because Euclid had actually proved his theorems.

Mathematics isn' t my field, but as far as I understand there is actually quite a bit of controversy concerning the axioms of mathematics. Particularly Euclid's axioms, which falls apart when gravity becomes too strong, becoming a mere approximation of physical space.

Besides, Euclid' s theorems are proved in exactly the same manner that Ayn Rand proved her Objectivist ethics, namely by defining axioms (self-evident truths) and arguing from them. Euclid never actually proved his axioms either, which is why they are called axioms.

If Euclidean geometry were so uncontroversial, why do we need Non-Euclidean geometry?

When we confront this sort of thing, it is imperative that we remember that Rand gave no argument for ethical egoism. She assumed egoism, discussed other propositions at some length, and then said that she proved it.

Again, not true. Rand proposed certain axioms and argued for egoism from these axioms. In this manner, Rand's theorems are proved just as much as Euclid' s theorems are proved, with the validity depending on the validity of the underlying axioms.

Now, I am not saying this means the concepts are illegitimate, nor does this, by itself, show that her argument is wrong (though the objections I raised in section 2 do).

The author does not claim that Rand was wrong, just that Rand was not right. What exactly does the author claim then? How do the objections raised in section 2 swing this either way?

The author in question focuses on absolute self-interest (more akin to selfishness), and neglects to consider the term 'rational self-interest' as a whole. The author does not actually critique Objectivist Ethics (which argues for rational self-interest) at all, but argues against irrational self-interest at the expense of another agent's rational self-interest. The irony is that altruism presumes it is noteworthy to act in the best interest of others, except if others want to act in their own best interest, as this would be selfish. Thus, under altruism, it is impossible to act in anybody's best interest, as nobody else can know your best interest, and acting in your own best interest is not selfless and thus not altruistic.