Video: A Resource-Based Economy

This 18 minute video is a recording of the TEDx [Portugal] Talk by Peter Joseph. Its focus is a resource based economy which describes a post-scarcity world economy. A resource based economy supports the removal of monetary exchange and is advocated by groups like The Venus Project.

The Venus Project was started by Jacque Fresco with the aim of improving society with a design that he calls a “resource-based economy”. The system aims to incorporate sustainable cities and values, energy efficiency, collective farms, natural resource management and advanced automation.

Fresco suggests that in a resource-based economy, resources would be allocated into the goods and services in consumer demand, based on factors of availability, sustainability and technological advancement. The role of money would be phased out; instead, central computers would serve a lineup of goods and services, which citizens could order upon demand. Central computers would serve a variety of goods based on sustainability and the latest technological advances; obsolete, unwanted, or unused goods would be recycled, reduced and/or reused. Resource waste is a burden which the system must eliminate to function efficiently.

A resource-based economy aims to supplant the market economy as the entity to which people turn for goods and services. It aims essentially to take the market out of the market economy, replacing it with automation based on the assumption that machines do not profit and do not maintain an environment of scarcity to gain indebtedness and servitude from the population. Machines would act as the mediator to deliver goods and service to people in-place of the market and the government.

The advance of technology, if it were carried on independently of its profitability, would make more resources available to more people by producing an abundance of products and materials. This new-found abundance of resources would reduce the human tendency toward individualism, corruption, and greed, and instead rely on people helping each other.

A resource-based economy uses existing resources, rather than money, to provide an equitable method of distribution in the most humane and efficient manner. It is a system in which all goods and services are available to everyone without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of debt or servitude. And human error will not be left to chance, but compensated by cybernated structures, these will manage the risk to minimize or eliminate the opportunities that allow damage to the functioning of society. Offenders will not be killed, instead they will be re-educated, provided with the pieces of information for them to be altruistic, the integrity of a peaceful sustainable society will hold priority.