Armitage

How can we falsify a simple, self-evident fact? Reasoning about it would be insulting your intellect. There is nothing to reason about, this is a problem of observation. Perhaps this is too simple to see, you expect logic to figure out, there is nothing to figure out. I don't need to reason from first principles, all I need is to look at society and ask, does the market/money/capitalism/competition harm the society today? Empirically. Market can be effective only as long as it can change people's behavior. Does this change harm people? If so, then it is coercion, even violence. Subtler perhaps, indirect, but harmful and that is hardly open for dispute. Is it too bad? No, not too bad. It's much better than nothing, better than no economy at all. But do we have to put up with that in the age of automation and digitalization? No, I don't think so. That's what I think. It doesn't even seem that radical to me and I wonder what is there to misunderstand.

I'm sure you mean this in irony, because from what I saw, Stefan's heart is hard as stone when market is the topic. You have touched upon an important point. Today the tradition is, prices are prices, take them or leave them. We do not have a choice. All price competition takes place between salesmen or corporation, typically through cartels. This was not so in the past, in the past people routinely haggled for prices, that's what markets were for. In some cultures like Middle East or India, haggling is considered expressing a polite interest and it is expected that you will haggle. It's part of the fun. So a fixed price is another piece of power and freedom taken from us, probably to make supermarkets possible. Tell me, why don't we haggle anymore? Why do we take all prices at face value? Is it the power that social convention has over us? Oh, but capitalism is a system! My early education is automation, which involves regulation of systems and general electrician's stuff. It is useful to understand The Venus Project, which is very automation-based, but also capitalism or any other system. From the point of view of the systems theory, capitalism as archetype is a system of positive feedback. This is what every single economic unit in capitalism has to do, if it wants to last. And the whole world might be said to be in the state of resonance, the unpleasant high-pitched sound you hear when someone drops the microphone. All the energy is concentrated in the highest bands of frequency spectrum. Every engineer will tell you that positive feedback works, the problem isn't that it wouldn't work. The problem is, that it works too much and burns out the hardware. Works so great, until the last moment. I suggest you read Max Weber's Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. Don't worry, it praises the virtues of capitalism. It's just an introductory paper, but it tells you a lot how people learned to invest surplus back into business, which the principle of positive feedback. You are right, positive feedback does not have a goal, but it does not need one, it's a self-reinforcing process. Originally people gave it a goal (protestant Heaven) but later forgot it and capitalism remained.

Not on this board, it doesn't even seem possible to me. Isn't this world violent enough? Aren't internet boards the refuge? Yes, talking to Stefan is the main point. But I never give up. I have so much to give and I see so much need. Sociology, the distant sister of economy is totally unknown here. Society is meant to be seen with sociology, economy is just second opinion.

You think that "government is tyranny" and "spanking is violence" is not mangling of concepts, but the deepest discoveries that place you or Stef at the forefront of social innovation. Well, so do I, and it was a discovery for me too. And where were you or me doubting and falsifying? Wasn't this too well hidden in plain sight for us, before Stef came and said how it really is? What if I say there are more things in plain sight that need to be called their true names? More concepts that need some well-deserved mangling to see what they really are? Government is not the only one who uses silly euphemisms to cover bad things. I think arguments don't work here. We all have very good arguments. My arguments can be just a little better than yours and that is not enough to make you abandon a part of you. I'd say right now you are saturated, you have more than enough social innovation that you can handle. Maybe if you process Stef's message, you will find yourself ready for more than that and you will doubt more things, that Stefan doesn't. After all, you can't bash the government and spanking forever, we learn new things all the time. I don't want to brag, but I can absorb social innovation from Stef and Peter Joseph or Jacque Fresco simultaneously, having before upgraded my vanilla soc/dem upbringing by Austrian school. So many people have puzzle pieces of social innovation and nobody has them all, one has to have a nose for them and collect them here and there and reason enough to put them into context. The upside is, I am socially innovative. The downside is, nobody understands me, they think I'm too radical.

My parents weren't perfect, but they always meant well. If I have any problem, it's with my dad, who got himself a lover and betrayed the family - that's what really gets my goat. True, 50 % of marriages divorce, but I'd never tell him the type, he works as sort of a psychological and marriage counselor himself. Having an affair does things to men, they try to justify that by slandering the wife.Let's just say the digital age preserved some internet conversation my dad had with his mistress over the net and it was not a nice read. It was incredibly risky, you see? And yet Stef preferred this instead of the common drudgery at the conveyor belt or 9-5 office paperwork, both of which would make his daughter a part-time orphan and would not have any higher philosophical meaning whatsoever, much less helpful to anyone. So there is something seriously wrong with most of jobs. When Stef talks about the benefits of market and work, I feel like he he praises what he did his best to get away from and took enormous risks too. Neither does bide well for capitalism.And yes, I expect we must have everything for free. We care for our children for free, we take from the nature for free and the machines work for free, not for money. Money are imaginary, what is real is energy, information, time and resources. Our problem is, we don't apply the technology consistently enough. The idiotic primitive "technology" we use is wage slaves holding green papers with numbers and running back and forth, pretending to be electrons in a great computer of market calculation. Oh, c'mon! Arguments that explain everything, explain nothing. I can only be glad that Stef is not a follower of Sigmund Freud. I wouldn't call the structural violence quantum or nanoscale, I'd call us callused by the structural violence beyond noticing. So when the speed of modern life increases greatly and social pathology with it, we seek explanations everywhere but in the system itself. We think there is a quick fix. There's not, structural violence is an integral part of the system. If we want a stress-free life, we need a whole different system, not based on competition.

If you read the book "The secret lives of INTPs" by Anna Moss, you notice one thing. INTPs are somewhat sensitive to what others consider a commonplace thing. Others, outwardly oriented find it less of a bother to take out trash manually than an INTP inventing a new elaborate system of taking the trash out, which nonetheless saves the work for the future. Similarly, most people find it less of a bother to participate in society and the life routine than to think if all the daily pains and annoyances are all that necessary, if some of them might be remedied by a more intelligent arrangement. Have you ever worked in a friendly job collective and then it came to differences in money, promotion or who gets fired? Did the friendly relationships stay as strong as ever? Turns out there is a lot of inherent stress (structural violence) in our society, Stefan with his focus on childhood spanking (culturally acceptable) and traumatized soldiers (culturally acceptable) uncovered just a tip of the iceberg of suffering that is completely needless and preventable. We are so resilient and de-sensitized that we ignore the suffering that is today totally unnecessary. Well, some of us aren't so resilient and so they notice the absurdity of today's world (and market!) when someone shows them. And we see what to do about that.

Yes, it is too simple to be true. "Freely exchanging" is an oxymoron, it involves giving up things that we might use, such as money. I don't have a numbered sequence, but this post comes close to it. http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/37703-a-fresh-i-hope-perspective-on-the-zeitgiest-debate/#entry345415 Capitalism is not synonymous with economy and economy is not synonymous with nature. Why? Because in capitalism we have a trade exchange, while in nature we do not give anything back, we do not exchange. This is not a question of nature being conscious or having rights. It is a question of systems theory and nature is an integrated system just like any other, including our economy or physiology. Does the nature need to be owned, in order to be managed sensibly without exhaustion? In that case, capitalism is inherently not sensible, because it must be compensated by enforcement of law, such as ownership. So you admit that you are not informed of the sociological science, its content, importance, authors and so on? I recommend you to grab a read of Harrington's "Modern social theories" to catch up a little. Sometimes I wonder what would be left of the Ancap movement, if they studied sociology, because none of them seem to. This is not an appeal to authority, because I don't expect you to know who was Durkheim, the same way you know who was Einstein. But I find it absurd to interpret society from the view of economy and not sociology. Economy is a big topic in sociology, but it is rounded out by the actual sociology. Ancap is economism, explaining everything with economy. And as Christopher Hitchens said, answers that explain everything, explain nothing.As for the voluntary market, see the link. As for the second "argument", corporations do not play for the WIN-WIN ratio or the highest overall yield of game theory. They play for the highest individual profit, because they and their competitors and customers are separate and have opposite interests. They engage in great manipulation of environment (buy politicians) to make this possible. This is generally not possible in digital environment. (hence Stef provides his stuff for free, because he's a great guy and knows people would pirate it anyway) I regret we are unable of having conversation, because we are so prone to blame everything on childhood abuse. I have no right to claim I was abused as a child, because I wasn't. The things I hear on Stef's podcast, I shudder and I'm glad none of that happened in my home. I've got a plenty of problems, but they kicked in much later.I study sociology (having studied many other subjects) and so I must think broadly. We are on physiological level motivated by forces of biology in time. Forces, I say. We are forced and it matters not if that force comes from unconscious natural processes. We only don't notice them or not consider them as forces, because most of us didn't go hungry too much or homeless over the winter. We instead submit to subtler social forces of capitalism and education to secure us from the worse forces of nature. But it's still not a voluntary activity and there are still consequences, see the link above.Yes, in the current system it's impossible to get anything for free, because between us and nature are antagonistic parties with their own private interests - buyers, sellers, corporations, banks... In the current economyTVP is an economy of sophisticated dark passengers on Earth, where between a person and natural resources is nothing but a mindless, automated system that has no vested interest in our payback. The automated system puts a cap on consumption if renewal rate of resource is exceeded, this is where the massive research facilities of TVP kick in, to look for substitutes, which is something that science is very good at. News for you: TVP does not have a magical algorithm of economic calculation. All it does is like Amazon warehouse management, or a glorified phone exchange. It asks people for preference and industry for resources (condition of automated mass production and strategic access) and then adds one and one together.Furthermore, if we have a proven scientific knowledge of universally applicable social organization and human behavior, we are morally obliged to use it, or people get hurt needlessly. TVP is application of this knowledge. The concept proof of TVP is no different from building and running a NASA facility. And TVP itself is no different from the full-scale continental or global industry we see today, it is not a cornucopia, competitive against all odds. It's a cooperative economy, relying on effectiveness of standardized mass production and design, peak efficiency in technology and integrated automated management of resources, so that the tragedy of commons can't happen.Ancap has a very limited and outdated notion of freedom, way below the technological capability of 21st century. We are only as free as much purchasing power we have and as our cultural indoctrination allows us. If I lived in 19th century, I'd be all for Ancap, because if nothing else it works, but we should have jumped off that bandwagon long ago, it won't get us any further, not against automated industry. Economy is getting automated and that is a proof that RBE works. One of the greatest industries of today is the industry of job elimination, that's what engineers and programmers do. Human labor is obsolete and money are obsolete too, machines do not run on money. Problem is, people do. If parents have fights or arguments, it's abusive, no matter if that's because of alcoholism, bad communication or money problems. It does not bide well for capitalism either way. Stef would realize that if he wasn't working from home at the best job on Earth. As for the family, I mentioned purely the internally economic aspect. Once the groceries are bought, the price tags are useless. They are managed directly as inventory in our minds. Family household economy is a RBE, so is the physiology of our bodies. Behind our doors and mouths, we do not have endless growth, market corrections, economic boom and bust and when the bankrupcy comes to our body, it comes but once.

Do you mean e-mail that I will call in for the Sunday debate? Yes, it's about time I do that. Otherwise, is it realistic to carry an e-mail conversation with him? Many podcast hosts just don't have time. Debate on podcast is much more effective. But where should I start? Should I defend TVP as the real alternative to capitalism, so that Stef is not so threatened if I criticize capitalism, which he sees as the only viable and moral form of economy?

Earth is the euphemism for "the thing that keeps us alive". Earth is not our property, we are its extension. If Earth made the laws, we would be Earth's property, because Earth made us of its own material. We should look away from the legalism of law and realize, that laws are like computer code, they can simulate reality or create a virtual reality. Legal norms like ownership can be given, taken away and re-defined. The Communist constitution had four types of ownership. The social democratic constitution has one type, but with four or five exceptions when it can be restricted.The Libertarian ideal of Common law is basically an open-source law which can say anything it wants, because it is not statist. But Bolivia recently made a classical statist law that gives Earth rights and it is perfectly legal and legitimate to give or take rights away. It'just a paper. Paper invented legal persons known as corporations and I heard they have now in USA some kind of human rights. If that is possible, for something that does not even physically exist, then it damn well is possible for Earth.It has nothing to do with being human. Nothing at all, unless you've got a damn good definition of a human and damn good justification for it. Chimps are 98 % human, genetically speaking. Banana is about 30 % human. Human is a legal fiction, like "mental health", which medically does not exist. The point was, that within family we do solve the economical information problem without money, we keep track of stuff in our own head, as it is a computer, and so family is within itself a Resource-Based Economy. RBE is principially possible and we all grew up in it. Nobody pays their dinner at the family table. No, that was a parody of Peter parodying capitalism. It's the reality of "pay or perish", which is so familiar to every leftist. Market is a problem, capitalism means never solving this problem totally, only postponing it for a price. Give man a fish, you're at loss. Sell the man a fish, you get profit. Teach the man to fish, and he'll be free and you won't earn a dime but gain a competitor. Employ the man to fish for you and you'll live off the profit comfortably till the rest of your life. It is coercion, but from the side of women! Historically, they always wanted a monopoly on their men. Indeed it would be, because this is not how TVP works. The only ones who have the information on who wants what are the people themselves. A global digital network links them to the computer, which is just a correlation center, a glorified Amazon storage management. What counts aren't money, but direct clicks, direct digital demand. Sure there would be a lot of statistical calculations involved, but the basis is people providing the data on what they want. But they don't want it badly enough, so why should a global economic system be designed to meet such needs, while neglecting needs of life and death? Do you say all needs are equal, the need to stay alive and the need to have a golden car? If so, then you are a relativist and as Xelent said, relativist is the worst kind of leftist. Either that, or Xelent is full of crap. I'm OK with both choices Does that mean Einstein was also right about you? I wonder when it would become profitable, according to free market, to invent computers and cure black plague. Why can't people just click on web application what they want ordered and delivered? Provided that all the articles are produced by automated lines which can speed up or slow down depending on the rate of demand. Yeah, but in both cases the chicken is equally in exile and homeless. In RBE it means Earth is our home, we are shareholders of Earth and so we have access to free living anywhere. (also, all the cities look almost the same ) Stefan's daughter is a criminal? She's stealing and committing violent acts against other people??? No, but criminals are people too. Today, most of them are not even responsible, they are driven to crime by their environment. And they are a valuable source of information on what made them commit the crime, about the environment. Which is a useful information in a system which uses design of the environment, such as TVP. In anarcho-capitalism, the environment is still a wild frontier and nobody knows what's in there. All the cultural stupidity of past generations, petrified into traditions and habitus is permitted to exist, under the label of freedom.

You're right, absolutism is probably a better word. And from what I see, we do not need to try our luck in the market gamble at all. We have the technology to eradicate human servitude, just like we eradicated plague, typhus and cholera. (not really a market venture - once something is cured, a market is destroyed and productivity is released into someone else's hands)Because either we build a resource-based economy where people can freely use the production as equal shareholders, or corporations will automate everything and lock us out of it, because we won't have the opportunity to earn money and they will not need our labor anymore. That is quite a sinister version of the future, but it is happening right now. RBE is not a hypothetical concept, it is an incoming train on which we can either jump, or be overrun by it. Libertarianism was good 100 years ago, when machines couldn't speak and understand human speech. We have the technology because the wars and governments drove us to it, but now that it is here, the genie will not go back to bottle again, even if in a strictly Libertarian world this would not be invented so soon. Actually, I don't feel good about this Peter's argument. There seem to be some hidden intuitive leaps, I see where's he coming from, but he should keep things simple. The fact is, "rent-seeking" is the best investment that anyone can make, investment into bribing the government, considering financial input and output. Input is high, but output is immeasurably greater. It's the best business opportunity ever invented, it's a temptation greater than a market can possibly resist. If I won't do it, somebody will, so let it be me. As for Peter's argument, it is very tricky, because it involves several intuitive quantum leaps. Let me try. Market is based on competition. Agreed? In competition, there are winners and there are losers. Still with me so far? Winning and losing is decided by power. That's obvious. The ultimate power is violence. OK. Now, who has the monopoly on violence? The government. So the government is the best investment. But I have met Libertarians who have market classified as cooperation, where everyone wins and everyone is happy. Well, I don't say that never happens, but I'd say that is more of an exception. I don't think you classify the market right. I'd say market is not an absence or opposite of violence, it is only less of the same in diluted doses, a dampened violence. It is a form of symbolical rule-based competition and competition does involve frustration. People want to take what they want, but rules say taking is stealing and stealing is punished. So we suppress our natural impulse to take and instead work long hours to get enough number tokens and then give them up. That is very frustrating, but it also diverts attention from the natural impulse to take, so much that we only see it in small children. The violence is dampened, veiled and spread to such a degree, that it becomes "only" a frustration, people can bite the bullet when the market exchange does not go well for them and thus society can work less or more smoothly. Society does not need a perfect non-violence to hold together, only good enough, social coherence depends on many other factors. This suppressing violence below threshold of frustration is a great historical invention, because it allowed people to live alongside each other in greater groups, develop trade, thus division of labor, thus better productivity and technology and so on. So there was nothing wrong with that, for most of the history money were not a part of everyday life, 90 % of people were farmers and they could grow food, they rarely bought it from strangers, often just exchanged food with people they knew. Their servitude was feudal, they gave food to the feudal lord. People were not free, but they had stability spanning whole centuries. Money were something extraordinary, you could buy out sins or pay for a murder with money. They were not meant for everyday use. The society had a stable order. Money are the agent of instability, they can get you to the top of social ladder in a moment, in next moment you can be millions in debt. Such is the stress of modern life. People can withstand some degree of frustration, or have some ways to dissolve it (in beer every evening) so the everyday frustration is normally not even noticed. People get worn out over long periods of time and think this is normal. But every market exchange has an element of frustration, because you give up things (money) that you could still use for *anything in the world*. And this counts, on large scale of society, or people wouldn't try to get around it, worship wealth and get rich or rob banks. To ascertain this, Fresco had to visit a primitive non-capitalistic society, to see human beings without chronic frustration for the first time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoGc7E1Se58 Yeah, people are supposed to get hurt and traumatized, or it wouldn't be a proper love and economy! (sarcasm) No wonder people invented online dating services, typology matches, books about relationships, relationship advisors, masturbation toys and especially contraception. If it was all right and natural, they wouldn't bother, they'd just go for the real thing. Romantic relationships are much distorted today by commodification of sex and nudity, thus it can have the same common source as the structural violence of capitalism. Our romantic customs are just whispering mail from olden times, colored by popculture illusions about how love works. No wonder people get hurt. It's an elaborate form of lying. Please look here, this is the best post so far I've made about an example of what I think is Stefan's problem. Tell me what do you think about it. Do you agree with me? Nonetheless, the main goal is to get to talk with Stefan himself. I don't know yet where to start or how to break the bad news to him. Maybe he doesn't see any economic alternative to capitalism, that's why he holds on the capitalism so strongly. And he's right, there is no easy parametric fix, short of rebuilding the whole world and economic system in an entirely different way.http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/37271-peter-joseph-on-stefan-molyneux-the-art-of-nonsense/page-2#entry345238 That may be logically consistent, but the problem is, it's not about logic. Bad emotions, stress and suffering still get generated in huge amounts and damage the society, no matter of who is right. If there is any difference to outright violence, it is only in degree and doses we are exposed to more regularly, but overall the impact is high. If we get a slap on the face once per day for the rest of our life, it's going to affect us, even if we get the slap for a perfectly logical reason, even if it gets the economy running. We only pushed that out of attention, because in all the centuries until now market system was the only way things could possibly work reasonably well. Now this is not the only way and even the old way breaks down, due to massive automation of low-class jobs.

I see what you mean. If TVP/TZM has an ideology, then it's denying that ideology. Why aren't their heads buzzing with cognitive dissonance? The truth is, capitalism is where all means of production are today. We have to work with what we have, not what we don't have. Any kind of public activity is an economic activity and today capitalism is THE economy. The current system is doomed no matter what. But if we aren't to be dragged down with it (if only for repeating the mistakes again) we have to use the current system and its resources to prepare a new one. Grow a new tree out of the corpse - without the corpse there would be no tree, because all the nutrients are in it. So it makes sense planting the new seeds into places of the old rottenness, sell the Zeitgeist movies in WalMart and recycle the old system. Recycling is good, isn't it? Yes, it may turn out one day there was a fraud or at least too much capitalism, see that TVP is much more reluctant to capitalism (releasing and selling Fresco's work, that won't happen) than Peter Joseph. But only in the last analysis we will see, if anyone sold his soul. Until then, I don't see any point in blaming very idealistic/busy/elderly people of raking money, because they know very well that soon the money or the current system will not be worth much. Do you know any academics interested in this? There is no RBE to be done on one's own, except of what we all grew up in - a family, that's a RBE we can manage. What we really need is an equivalent of NASA. NASA researches the ways of living in the worst places, like the orbit, Moon or Mars. That is not wise. We need to know more about how to live in a better place - on Earth. We need to use the same methods of researching materials, self-erecting mass-produced city structures with stuff built in and so on. We already did that with all kinds of technologies, we crammed two dozen of various media devices into one small smartphone. We must do the same with industry and housing. When that's done, it will be "you" who builds the TVP cities. It will be a better method of utilizing your current resources and you would lose the life standard if you did not convert your economy to TVP. We know that it's a better method, because our body uses a resource-based economy and it can run for decades without maintenance (opening and re-arranging the contents), just by managing the inputs. It also provides a great leisure to its brain cells, who are not occupied by processes of its internal economy and instead focus on making us human. So I don't know what is there left for the academics to doubt. We need a NASA for Earth (or Silicon Valley for the physical world) and we need it now. I don't say I like that Joseph does, but apparently he had some rules and they violated them. He should have just ask them and negotiate about the rules, but well, he didn't. Apparently he doesn't know the principles of non-violent communication. Again, this sucks, but there is the ugly truth, that even people at the front of social innovation are imperfect and have personal flaws and make mistakes. Why do you think I am here? I see a Stefan's flaw in thinking that I think is really ruining his show and making him enemies left and right (actually, only left). I will start condemning people when I will be as productive and hard-working as them

I'm here mainly because of Stefan and what I see as one Stefan's problem. If I can explain stuff to him, he can explain stuff to you. Most of people here benefit from him greatly, rather than vice versa, so he's the obvious choice. I trust in Stefan, because he is actively broadcasting on large scale and the video is an evidence that he does his best to think for himself and work on his flaws. Obviously, most people don't broadcast, so he's the priority.

Hell, no! Relativism is a modern plague! My docent on philosophy 101 taught me to refute relativism as one of the first things. The relativism would be denying any kind of development, please leave me out of that. I don't know of an absolute truth, but I believe there is an absolute direction towards a still greater truth. I believe in individual and collective development of consciousness. (however I believe that natural darwinistic evolution has probably no direction in itself, it just has to be good enough to get us by, we can improve it in the future through genetics) Yet I believe there are truths to be found almost everywhere, because the development must be rounded out, in many areas, or there will be a great failure. For example, we are highly developed technologically, but very much behind economically (globally said), ethically, socially and so on. We need a holistic understanding of the world to develop in an absolute progressive direction in every area.

I suppose it doesn't. You don't see a point in what I say and I have a problem, because I don't know how to explain it. I don't have an argument other than we already know from Stefan how warfare has an effect on soldiers and veterans or how childhood spanking has an effect on children and later adults. The argument is, Stefan knows that, but he does not realize that there are similar bad effects of market competition and market corrections on all people living and working in the economy today. And I am totally bewildered why he doesn't see that. And I'm not the only one who wonders about Stefan. I used the word "fascism" to describe the way which which people like Stefan place a total trust in market forces and obey them whatever they do, even if that's harmful to people's psychology and social relationships. It really looks like Stefan would believe that market forces have the right to violate the non-aggression principle. Obviously, the effect of market forces or "market corrections" is psychologically unpleasant. Nobody wants to change a production, lose profit, lose job, lose home, seek a new job, count money, make ends meet, sell themselves on market as a some kind of harlot, and so on. Market society is not a very pleasant place to live. There is occasional satisfaction, but more of an exception. Fortunately Stefan snaps out of it every time he changes a topic and otherwise he's a very moral person. Market corrections are necessary in the current system. However, we must realize that they are stressful and destructive on human relationships. If Stefan talks about the evils of child spanking and traumatic experience of war, I am surprised why does he not talk at all about constant stress and occasional trauma of market life style and market corrections! Instead, he praises the market as some kind of privilege. There are more reasons why the market system is unviable and Peter Joseph deals with these.

You did NOT actually answer me. You answered the first paragraph, which was saying what I DON'T want answered. I did NOT want you talking about state. I wanted you talking about something OTHER than state. Going hungry is just one of many examples and it not being a grocer's fault is the ideal case. The grocer has a measure of power over the customers. He is always motivated to abuse this power, unless he is engaged in price war with other grocers. Not abusing the power is the last thing he does, that's why the market competition is deemed necessary. Now, what psychological and social effect does this COMPETITION have on both grocers and customers? Are they happy that someone tries to undercut them or extort money from them? I have read Economics In One Lesson. I understand Economy 101. I am concerned by social and psychological impact of market mechanics on people. This is the basis of structural violence. Some institutions, for example market, are inherently stressful and destructive to relationships. Currently we have no alternative, but the bad violence-like effects are still there and they have an impact. They motivate many socially pathological phenomena, if not all of them. Other kinds of violence (state, crime) are actually not that pervasive. Structural violence is as difficult to imagine for some people as is the effect of child spanking on adults.

So what do you think about free market? We agree, that free market is better than the current non-free market. I just say, free market does not mean a voluntary market. If people had a choice, there would be no market at all, they'd take directly the stuff they want and give away directly the stuff they don't want. And they would not give up money just to show how much do they value a certain product, they would not sacrifice the hours of their day at work, to get the product. This is why there are better, more voluntary arrangements than free market. My favorite is a resource-based economy, such as TVP. And there are even better institutions than ownership, such as strategic access in TVP Can you name other things that limit people's choices, besides the state? For example, nobody makes a choice to get hungry or cold, yet this is what restricts lots of people's choices. A state or a businessman does not need to coerce anyone, he just needs to stand by a little and let people be coerced by the nature itself into striking a deal with him. Is this still voluntary in your book? If so, why do people try to get away from that kind of deal? Why would they prefer food and housing for free, without working in some smelly factory for half a day so they can afford it? That doesn't seem much of a choice to me. Most of all it reminds me of the Christian choice, you either CHOOSE to accept Jesus into your heart, or you burn in hell forever. But it's still a choice, dictionary says! A choice means that it's voluntary. Even if it's just one and it sucks and yet you "choose" it, because the alternative sucks even more.

I don't know what kind of help *I* need yet (though I probably do, or I wouldn't be here). The Venus Project needs help and these engineers, economists and computer scientists would be enormously helpful if they Got Involved on the website. Actually, I they said during one of the Q&A sessions, that several groups (including Google) already develop a system of global resource management.But my work seems to be different, I don't work with technology, but with ideas. TVP is that idea and I would like to know what problems it faces when dealing with people. So far I've focused on one problem, which I call the tunnel vision of Libertarians. If I could show Stefan himself how to have a broader view on market and TVP, he'd be great at explaining this back to the anarcho-capitalist movement and they could join forces with TVP, because they're already so similar in thinking. That's what I was up to, so far. If you want me listening to you, please tell me what do you think, what do you want to suggest. Looks like you have quite a lot to say. I'm sorry, I just didn't want to start the 4 month discussion about Economy 101 all over again, I've been there, done that. Not exactly. I am a "veteran" of discussions about economy, TVP, and many other things. But I should behave like a beginner, so that others will feel more welcome.Most of discussions I've ever had were about educating the other party. But people are not data storage devices, education literally means physically rewiring ourselves. And we already need to be wired in a certain way, to accept information of a certain kind.What do you mean? If anyone ever uses the word "fascist" in any possible context, it will be taken personally by everyone present as an insult. Do you actually care about what the original sentence said?When discussing market, Stefan is prone to go to a tunnel vision mode, where nothing but market exists and market can initiate coercion and it is completely all right, hence he talks in a somewhat fascistic way. I did not mean that anyone here actually behaves like a fascist. Not at all, or I wouldn't be here. But this discrepancy between speech in one and the second moment is really irritating.But this tunnel vision worries me. In lesser degree it's present in about half of all Libertarians I've ever met and it puts people off more than I could. It totally changes rules for discussion. That's the biggest problem I see. You could say this is my argument, main reason why people disagree with TVP. Do you agree with that?

I don't understand. Why would you say that market does not exist? What is your notion of market and of existence?According to Wikipedia,A market is one of the many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. This question is kind of tricky. There are still fewer people in primary or secondary economy. People move on to services and most of these services are not about resources, they are basically paperwork for keeping track of money. On the other side, machines replace people in dealing with resources. And machines start driving people even out of the service sector. And economy can not run on service sector alone. Yes, trading time on market used to be necessary. Nowadays businessmen just install machines that can run all day long and require just a few people to watch over them. Suddenly the workers' time is obsolete and the fair exchange is ended. The most sought after jobs today are engineer and programmer, the jobs that eliminate even more jobs. Productivity is increasing, number of jobs remains roughly the same and unemployment increases. The problem is, when we take people out of equation, money don't get returned into the economy. And when people don't have money, they can't buy back the product they produced - or that the machines produced.Thus money is not an abstraction, it's a real entity, a real gear in a gearbox of economy that turns between two other real entities - people and products. And it presents a problem in itself, a hindrance to true technological production of pure resources and state of the art technologies. Money are also a powerful cultural artifact, comparable in fame, power and impact only to the idea of God, as the sociologist Georg Simmel noticed.

Better than most people's who call Stefan But I am one of these people who call Stefan. Mildly autistic and thus not good at relationships in general. His talks about childhood spanking really opened my eyes, plus I have read the Mazlish books "How to talk so kids/teens will listen & how to listen so they'll talk" Turns out my folks weren't especially good parents or good at communication and problem-solving. Better than average yes, well-meaning and trying, but too much in inertia of general views about parenting, house, life and so on. One of their liberal efforts was to not make me baptized, which I appreciate. But instead there might be less screaming and yelling if they came home from work and the house wasn't cleaned up. And less loud arguments about money. (here comes my leftist habitus) OTOH, my folks were trying hard to be what they thought is decent. Never used a nasty swear word, not even in rage. No hint of domestic violence (except against children, a few times a year at most) Not even when dad turned out to be unfaithful and they got separated. I loved them both, but I liked dad more, because he was more chilled out, if you know what I mean, he didn't sweat the small stuff. Anyway, now I realize, considering they both came from highly violent parents and halfway abusive households/unhappy marriages, they did pretty well. They just never heard of ideas "children are people too and beating them is a form of torture" and "what is more important, a relationship with a child, or a clean house?" Anyway, their separation was just one of a few disasters that got to me in the last few years and I don't think I have many blind spots left. Or emotions, for that matter. I saw through them all and almost got a breakdown every time, so I could be called an expert on blind spots. Warning: unpleasant stuff ahead I know what to look for, what signs do they produce - there are always conflicts with people, conflicts we don't understand, but we tend to rationalize them away. Either other people are jerks, or we think this is normal, either way, we are innocent. The conflicts may increase so much, that we suffer from them too much to bear and we start to think about them, study what is happening. We may feel like we're maybe missing something, something everyone seems to know but we don't, something important. Then months or years of attention and research will reveal the ugliest truth about ourselves and more suffering proceeds, just after the shock and utter bewilderment wears off. Then comes the usual mourning about the death of self-image and also a great shame. During the process we may catch ourselves guilty of slipping back into the old habits and we stop ourselves... But there is nothing to rebuild this gaping hole in the wall of the self, so we may become instead obsessed with the real and turn against all that might be a false pretense in our personality and the personalities of others. We may embrace destruction and self-destruction of all that isn't real. Much damage may be done until we just hit the rock bottom and give up on everything. The truth is, the whole ego or self-image is a false construct. Personality is just a fancy idea we give to a meat sack. It is a predictable mechanism of saving face. But we really need it to get up in the morning and brush our teeth. This is not the whole truth about the process, but it's the bad part. This bad part is often described in literature and this is what Christian mystics turned into guilt porn dogma and what often killed off philosophers and artists or drove them to madness. Only artists were good at expressing this experience, so they drove to madness also many other people. Fortunately, most people either don't have large blind spots or they don't even need to tackle them, they can live well enough as they are. So it could be said I'm done pulling a proverbial plank out of my eye and now I see a proverbial splinter in thy brother's eye. Stefan is special. He's more than good enough, but his blind spot is a serious one and it sits right in the middle of his broadcast service as one of central topics. Thus it could be said he's spreading delusion left and right (or only right ), one that he would be really embarrassed if he saw what I see when he talks about market. Fortunately it doesn't impact his other topics, but the more unaware he is of the problem. What would you like to debate about? If that's about The Venus Project, I should point you towards educational resources, depends what would you like to know. All disagreements I had about TVP so far was with people who did not understand what it is, didn't read a single book about it. (there are freebies, btw) As for economy, I see it from so many points of view, that I don't know where to start. The more specific you start, the better.

Well, that would take time and it's so frustrating, to see one so brilliant caught in a blind spot. I just found this guy. He sums up my feelings so well, yet I have just found him this moment, he seems one of many people who share exactly the same frustrations. He also reminded me of one typical problem, so maybe it answers you, if you remember it. Stefan used a TWISTED example of the lemonade stand, one of many such. At one point in the long discussion, Stefan described a simple hypothetical lemonade stand of his daughter to describe how the market works. (the usual superfluous Economy 101 rants) If he was honest about the market, he would have to throw his daughter out of the house if her lemonade stand did not make enough money so she can pay the rent. That is how market works every day and that is how it should work in his example. Either his daughter would get thrown out of house, or he shouldn't use her in the market example at all, because we don't throw our children out of house, because we're good parents, especially Stefan. Actually, we provide a resource-based economy to children and give them lots of socialistic subsidies, that's how family economy works. So the example is wrong on many levels.But he describes the market as a happy la la land where everyone always earns enough money on rent or food, does not mind the boredom of working hours and never has to leave home and move away to work in a foreign country and never worries about feeding the family and finding a new job when getting thrown out of one job by a "market correction". So these people never think of restricting competition, crime, espionage, voting for socialists, or joining unions or cartels, nobody joins business cabal of local Christian fellowship to throw the local atheists out of work and drive them out of town. But if they do, it never lasts long and nobody gets stressed out and their children do not get traumatized. Not in la la land. If someone gets hurt by the economy, Stefan usually says this would never happen if there was "free market", which is a no true Scotsman fallacy. Free market is Stefan's la la land and maybe he is so dependent on it, maybe this is the only way he has to interpret the world, and so he would be terribly afraid of doubting it, even if he could consciously contemplate such a thing. Maybe I should first show him there are other ways to see the economy and the world, before I try to take his only one away! This guy calls it tunnel vision. I call it a blind spot, narrow view, or market fever, you call it what you want. But so many people noticed it, you still don't believe there is a problem? Can you give me some examples of coercive pressures? I can imagine those that come from people, for example mugging or tax execution. But what other coercive pressures do you recognize? Do you recognize between living people and non-living circumstances or environment? Do you recognize a low-intensity coercion or even a subversive influence of cultural notions or neuro-marketing advertisement? Would you classify losing a job or the chance, threat or "choice" of losing a job as a coercive pressure, even if it's nobody's fault, just circumstances? Do you recognize the concept that Peter Joseph calls "structural violence"?

Do these systems work with money or with other resources? Because unlike wheat, iron and steel, money have a powerful eroding effect on human morality, comparable only to oil, alcohol or heroin Special precautions are necessary, such as moral rules, law protectors, business ethics, corrective institutions and other oxymorons But if a computer system should move around mere industrial resources, in great quantities and complexity, then it would be useless to any single person (resources are generally not edible) and by sheer magnitude of Earth data it would be impossible to control.

I'll listen to the philosophy video (probably again). But I don't think I've begun a debate yet. I pointed out a problem that apparently made the debate impossible. When market was the topic, Stefan went into a market fever and started using definitions that had no relation to reality (or morality and free will) and thus were wrong by default, even if they were internally coherent. You know what Hitchens said, arguments that explain everything, explain nothing. I want to make sure I know how to deal with the market fever. Right now the thing to do is to go over the very basic definitions (like "voluntary" ) and cross-check them. This is long, slow, boring and maybe a waste of time. I might also try to introduce TVP from a new, fresh angle, correct some myths about it, and so on. What if these decisions aren't voluntary? Depends on what is your definition of "voluntary choice". Can you give me an example of a "voluntary choice" that is right on the border of being an "involuntary choice"? Do you see any difference between "voluntary choice" and a "voluntary action" and simply "human action"?

Thanks! I honed my skills for last 4 months in a debate against a local Libertarian website manager. The debate has more than 1000 posts. I tried to explain him the basics of history, sociology, law, philosophy and all the other "soft subjects" that one needs to understand a holistic socio-economic system that was developed by a genius inventor for 75 years. He didn't have to know anything, yet I had to know it all and be able to explain it to him (simply), or I lost the argument by default. So I think I might have a chance to get a point or two across to Stefan, if it wasn't for his peculiar blind spot. There are times when Stefan seems to have a blind spot without being aware of it, he sees nothing but market forces regardless of impact on human beings and society. Once the market topic is off the table, he is as acute as ever at pointing out social injustices and connections between them. He even talks about society. While he's in a market fever, he typically refuses to acknowledge there is such a thing as society, only a sum of individuals. That gives me a little worry. I think Stefan has equated capitalism with economy and has suppressed all possible other ways of thinking about economy. Which is logical, because all the so-called alternatives ended as failures or disasters, but it's not useful when we need a whole new economic system. I might make a point by showing him, that there are working non-monetary and non-violent economies all around us for most of human history. What we need to do is to use modern technology to re-create similar conditions on a greater scale.

That's what I was about to do! I am driven to supply the missing element, whatever it happens to be. If that's rightist forum, then leftism. If atheistic forum, spirituality. If Christian forum, then atheism. If sociological forum, then technological game-changers. If I meet socialists, I tell them of the Austrian school and Roger Douglas reforms. If I meet Libertarians, I tell them of The Venus Project. And I've got a fair education for each of these. Nobody has the whole truth, we must synthesize or stagnate. The history is full of intelligent people with ideologies who apply them way too broadly. My habitus is leftist, but my mind is universal. I see everything from so many points of view, that people don't believe me I understand them, because they can't follow me. That's because I don't follow a single truth, I follow them all. And back to the topic. I am convinced that The Venus Project is not leftist or rightist, it's a holistic socio-economic system. If you're into Philosophy 101, science is a practical application of noetics and noetics is provable, thus science is provable and can not be classified as ideology, or ism. TVP is merely a practical application of science on socio-economic problems and so it's not an ism either. It of course has a collective aspect, because science is a collective effort and its results tend to be universally functional across all collectives. When we have a scientifically proven best way to do something, there's no reason to be all right-wing individualistic and each different just to prove how much freedom we have. That's either stupidity or a scientific experiment, depends if you're keeping notes. Contrary to the popular belief, it's not a centralized economy. It's an industrial network much like the current price system, only more coordinated and structured. Fresco speaks of central processing of information (correlation center), but that's just a glorified phone exchange and can probably be run in a distributed way on computers worldwide as a P2P computing, like Bitcoin client or research processing clients. TVP is not centralized, it's standardized. Lego block is standardized, so is English and C#. Standardization opens way to creativity and global combination of ideas. A standard must be wisely, centrally scientifically decided, but after that, it's a great help for all individualists. Users don't care what language was used to write their GUI or what mm gauge does their plumbing have. But TVP and Earth cares and people should too, standardization opens way to mass production and mass production means whittling down the costs so much that for all practical purposes the product is "free", as far as average citizen is concerned, or within renewal/recycling rate of resources. Standardized technology is not uniform, machines like 3D printers and Wikipedia of design model database should satisfy even the fashion freaks. Anyone interested in a product will learn how is it made and may thus make products of his own, or even whole industrial projects, if based on survey of popular demand and empirical evidence of efficiency. I have long thought of what TVP might be in terms of isms, capital-ism, social-ism, commun-ism, nope... I believe TVP is an organism. Nothing else fits. Organism is a system that combines input, output, a few kinds of circuits and networks, hierarchy and subsidiarity in some sense, and somewhat of a fractal structure (repetition in combination on various levels). Organism has curious properties of circulation, homeostasis, regrowth, modularity, and a whole unit reproduction. Organs and cells in organism do not compete with each other, they cooperate and share resources freely on demand, without market or trade. Smaller cells can and do destroy or sacrifice themselves, but the structure is always maintained. An organism has a privileged self-aware symbiotic class of lives (brain cells, as humans) served by obedient mindless cells and organs (automated industry). Also, an organism has a tiny, non-sentient and automated "government" controlling heart rate and bowel movements, in our body it's cerebellum, that's our equivalent of Corcen. This is why TVP is a project of "organism" in broadest sense of systems theory. It is not centralized, competitive, collectivist nor homogeneous economy. TVP uses a "Wikipedia economy" and weapons of mass creation. Coming to think of it like that, it really is quite self-evident and based on common sense, as leftists would say . But it took me a long time to see it. Now I can say, it's not much different from how people manage their household, from inner company economy, not different from how our body works and it even resembles some aspects of military logistics. I'd call it an educating anarchy of the educated. An educated anarchist obeys nothing but the empirical necessity that has not yet been defeated through technology.

Generally yes, but making assumptions means missing the most thoughtful people, who try their best to rise above all isms. You have some very interesting people in your signature and they come closer to my real identity than mere leftism.