A Resource Based Economy is better than Free Markets

I will disprove the “unrefuted arguments” which Con claims:1."money is an incentive…While it's nice to claim that solving problems is the only incentive people need to be productive, that is simply not true for the majority of the population."Con's example of the X Prize Foundation offering $10 million which incentivized scientists to build a commercial spacecraft is weak. Of course they would be incentivized by money because those scientists still need to pay their bills. I have already addressed this issue that the only reason why people would want money and why it has “implicit value”, as you stated, in the first place is simply because we currently live under a monetary system. If there were no price tag on things, people would naturally have no incentive for money.“to remove a profit-driven system would be to change human nature.” Absolutely false. Money was never inherent in human nature to begin with. This logic is not hard to grasp and I’ll prove again why it’s valid. Con would 100% agree that no human being was born crying for money; babies cry for food, love, and nurture. When kids draw or build Legos, they’re motivated to see their imagination manifest without the incentive of $$. Legos are no different from building real cars, bridges, etc. The fact is that humans didn’t always live under a monetary system; in fact we initially lived in a resource-based system for thousands of years before civilizations existed. Nobody was paying cavemen money, but that didn’t stop them from making/innovating weapons and hunting. Tribes shared/lived together as a family and made the best out of the resources available to them. Yes barter existed, but bartering for other stuff wasn’t the main motivation for hunting, and tribes mostly used things they found and hunted for their own tribe. Even today there are places around the world where people live in a RBE & don’t use money. In the Philippines, my dad used to live in a remote province area where his family planted rice/fruits/raised pigs/fished and the whole community shared each other’s fruits of labor because there was more than enough for everyone. Yes I agree; in history money did help allow the standard of living to progress. Competition & free trade was useful because it was a fair way to distribute goods and services when scarcity still existed; Scarcity, as in a person wants something that someone else has. Money is just another technology invented by humans which served its purpose. Now that we are entering an age of information/technological/energy abundance, money’s purpose will gradually cease. 2. “Why would someone do practical work if arts and sports are more enjoyable?” What you consider enjoyable may not be enjoyable to someone else; it’s subjective. There are many people who find engineering/science enjoyable & do it as a hobby. 3. “a free market would simply become more service based.”Yes jobs will be more service based in a free market, but once we’ve reached the point of tech. abundance, what incentive is there to work for money to buy things if we can just make most of the things we need at home with a 3D printer/nanotechnology? Machines would be doing ALL physical service/labor including mining raw materials, and human service jobs would all be STEM field jobs (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math). Providing service to earn money to buy another service is just inefficient; instead we would be much better off working together & collaborating our brains. Competition is good in other respects such as sports, but as a human race to solve our challenges, our real competition is the force of nature and time, not each other. “United we stand, divided we fall” is commonly used for a country, but why not for the whole world? If an alien civilization tried to invade the Earth, every person and nation would team up & forget about money and use every resource available necessary to defeat them. 4. “The Arts”In a RBE not only would people get basic necessities, but have unlimited access to almost ANYTHING that can be created by technology. Sorry I didn’t state it in the original definition. Yes in a RBE you can still trade if you wish, but it’s not necessary.Access vs. OwnershipLike a public library, everyone will have access to anything they need but without an expiration date. You don’t have to worry about stealing/crime or scarcity because 1. there is more than enough for everyone 2. People don’t want all the same things to use at the same time 3. People woudn’t want 50 BMW cars; they probably just need one at a time. This is a more efficient way of using resources than ownership in a free market. Today how many cars do you see parked in the streets & parking lots? Most cars are just sitting not being used for about 80% of the day, while someone out there without access to transportation could use it. In a RBE, much less cars are needed & would save a lot of resources that can be used for other things, thus better opportunity cost. 5. “an electric car driven 50,000 miles will have higher CO2 emissions than a similar-sized gas car”Electric cars are not what cause higher CO2 emissions. CO2 emitting power plants that provide most of the electricity today are to blame. Ever heard of Tesla, the electric car company? They’re revolutionizing the auto industry and currently placing “supercharger stations” all over the country that use 100% solar energy to fuel their customer’s electric cars.6. “Money incentive extends resource longevity.”Totally false. In a free market, planned obsolescence of products is necessary to profit. Every year people buy new products (iphones, TVs, cars) without any significant improvements in features and design, while landfills pile up with “obsolete products”. In RBE products will be designed with the latest technology available.Conclusion: An RBE efficiently uses energy & resources while a free market doesn’t. Sources:www.thevenusproject.comwww.teslamotors.com