The Venus Project: mistakes that advocates make

In response to a recent YouTube exchange between Stefan Molyneux ('Stefbot') and Peter Joseph.

'Lessons For the Young Economist' (PDF)

'Humans Don't have Needs'

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@MiracleWitness"2. Needs are necessities of life - such as medical or psychological."

Suppose I want to end my life tomorrow, does it make sense to say that I personally need a year worth of food? I would say that I certainly don't need it.

Second hypothetical: imagine that I'm very old and tired of life. At a cost of millions of dollars a machine could be constructed that would keep me alive for one day longer. This machine undeniably extends my life. But do I need this machine? I say that I clearly don't. 

These hypotheticals undercut your claim. But they can be made sense of easily if we admit that needs are in fact just wants that we feel particularly strongly about.

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"The decision not to allocate resources to his treatment."

No one allocated resources to his treatment, so this was not one decision. To the extent that his treatment was important to people, this cost would be met by charity.

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"Who decides what you want or need?"
I've explained why there's no qualitative difference between the two.

"You can only want what is available"
Nonsense.

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"How would they be valued differently?"

Access to housing of quality X is valued more highly by person A than by person B. This is because people are all different, they have different subjective desires and goals (and the value placed on objects is imputed from the serviceability of these objects in satisfying desires/achieving goals).

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"we just ignore money and just do it."

WIthout prices we have no way of knowing if any given choice about the deployment of resources is wasteful (wrt satisfying peoples desires, including the 'basic' desires).

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"I just want to see you concede the aforementioned possibility"

Oh I thought I already conceded it. If not: then yes, it's possible that a majority are mistaken about what is in their best interets (ie. what they would want if they were better informed). And I still think there's no better alternative than to allow complete freedom of association (out of which money, and a price system will always emerge).

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"On another note, do you really think decisions about resource allocation toward something like healthcare should be left up to price?"

Absolutely. The price system is the the only resource allocation system we know of that effectively harnesses the vastly distributed and implicit knowledge in society--and results in the flow of resources towards those areas in which they're the most highly valued.

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@R2BCH2 "Only maximising efficiency can prevent shortages."

I agree. This is exactly what capitalism, the ultimate RBE, does.

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"The points that you make are far from what TVP advocates even for a person that invests a week into researching TVP"

This was a response to comments by people who considered themselves TVP advocates. If you believe they're a misrepresentation of the VP 'position', feel free to point out where the differences are.

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"do you really think a decision like this should be based on faith?"

As I explained, the two options on the table so far are central planning, vs personal liberty. While personal liberty will still mean that people make mistakes, central planning guarantees mistakes of gigantic proportions--and is immoral too. If you have something else in mind please spell it out.

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"Why trade when you can just make a dynamic production?"

Person A desires a back-rub administered by a human, person B, their neighbour desires a human baby-sitter. They trade.

"Change your thinking a little bit."
Being patronising isn't going to help you persuade people.

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"the person a/b is not relevant in a RBE.Because nobody own nothing! "

I think you didn't understand the example i gave: Person A desires a back-rub administered by a human, person B, their neighbor desires a human baby-sitter. They trade. This is not about manufactured products, but services that can only be delivered by humans. Trade is with us to stay, whether or not anything like the VP's RBE is achieved.

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"1. what do you mean by unfulfilled desires?"
Desires the are unfulfilled. eg. I desire a sauna but i don't have access to one right now.

"The Venus Project advocates that scarcity causes corrupt behavior. "
Scarcity, in the economic sense, is an immutable fact of human existence.

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"that description assumes that every person knows what it is they actually want;"

No it doesn't. It merely assumes that a person is far more likely to know what he himself values than a distant, self-serving bureaucrat is.

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"this is not true if the values of the society are false values"

Value is subjective, so there's is no such thing as 'false values'. Just values that other people hold that you might not share.

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"Scarcity is impossible if the goods created don't have planned obsolescence implemented."

No. Economic scarcity obtains whenever human desires exist in excess of the things necessary to fulfill those desires. For instance, as long as humans are dying before they want to, there's scarcity.

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"Companies put a lot of fat on them to make it more profitable right? How's that not considered evil?"

Many people like the taste of fat. Consider a choice: Enjoyment of fatty food vs long term health, neither option is right or wrong. Valuation is subjective. The company creating a fatty food is helping people by giving them one more option--which they can take or leave.

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"scarcity is a state of mind"
No, but close. Scarcity is the state of affairs in which the available resources are insufficient to fulfil subjective desires (you could say that these desires are a 'state of mind').

"and humans want air in a different way than they need cell phones."
It's a (dramatic) quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.

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"You mean for as long as there are jobs, right?"
No. Because people who trade find a common medium of exchange useful, money will exist as long as humans find it useful to trade. Which I believe will be as long as humans exist (trade would certainly happen under a VP-like scenario, assuming such a scenario was possible).

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"It doesn't matter if person X values housing more than person A"

Quantifying these differing valuations is necessary if a) you care about enhancing welbeing and b) you are about to make a decision about how to deploy scarce resources in the absence of market prices.

THe reason it's necessary is that without being able to do this, you don't know if building a particular school in a particular way (for example) is actually making us all _worse off_ or _better off_.