By Jessica Geary
After 2 years or more of hearing about The Venus Project I’ve finally decided to address it, mostly because many people I know love this idea and don’t see it for what it is, technocracy, the rule of experts, to the nth degree. I don’t understand how people who talk about freedom embrace this idea as a way of liberating humanity, it is a blueprint for a totally centrally planned life for every human on earth. Marx would have never dared to dream of taking over this much control from the individuals on the planet, but here is a man, Jacque Fresco, who seeks to redesign and re-engineer all of human culture. Interestingly enough, he thinks he has a right to do this.
Here is their opening welcome statement:
“The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. There are many people today who are concerned with the serious problems that face our modern society: unemployment, violent crime, replacement of humans by technology, over-population and a decline in the Earth’s ecosystems.
As you will see, The Venus Project is dedicated to confronting all of these problems by actively engaging in the research, development, and application of workable solutions. Through the use of innovative approaches to social awareness, educational incentives, and the consistent application of the best that science and technology can offer directly to the social system, The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.”
What I would like to know is who gave him the authority to “redesign” my, or anyone’s, life? I know I haven’t been asked if I want him to, nor have I given him my consent to. It seems that he sees himself as a modern-day Plato, a philosopher king who needs to create a kingdom so that he can rule it properly.
“The term and meaning of a Resource-Based Economy was originated by Jacque Fresco. It is a system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resource; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival.”
ALL ECONOMIES ARE RESOURCE BASED! This is economics one-oh-one, one person has access to one raw material another person has access to something different, the two people then can 1) pool resources, 2)trade with one another, or 3) keep their resources for their own use. Scarcity is what drives the market and it is not artificial. You don’t find roses in the Mojave and you don’t find Alaskan King Crab in the waters off the coast of Florida. Money, just like all other things people trade, is a resource, something desired by one or more parties. That is why it became used throughout the world, even in “primitive” cultures. Had it not been found to be useful we wouldn’t use it.
“Consider the following examples: At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.”
This is just historically false. Actually, we got ourselves into a HUGE amount of debt with the central bank during the war. FDR manipulated gold prices and confiscated gold from the American people in an effort to pay the bills. Most of FDR’s policies were disastrous, lengthening and deepening The Depression. His administration also manged to mismanage our resources so badly that they all but depleted one of the largest iron ore deposits in this country, a resource that should have lasted for at least another 100 years, in the short time he was president.
“With automated inventory on a global scale, we can maintain a balance between production and distribution. Only nutritious and healthy food would be available and planned obsolescence would be unnecessary and non-existent in a resource-based economy.
As we outgrow the need for professions based on the monetary system, for instance lawyers, bankers, insurance agents, marketing and advertising personnel, salespersons, and stockbrokers, a considerable amount of waste will be eliminated.”
In other words: they will decide what you will use, what you will eat and how you will live. Not that the idea of getting rid of lawyers doesn’t appeal to me, however why does he get to decide what people should or shouldn’t do with their own lives? Why aren’t composers or artists or carpenters or doctors on his list? Why exemptions when all trade and service are done for profit? He has decided who is useful and who isn’t, who will stay and who will go and why. Yet I have to wonder why he thinks he’s qualified to make such decisions.
F. A. Hayek said that socialism was the fatal conceit, and this is why: No one human being, nor even a group of human beings, have all the knowledge necessary to plan for the rest of us. They cannot foresee every eventuality and many of the best laid plans become nightmares. In other words, people are imperfect ergo all human systems will be imperfect, no matter how noble they claim to be. The Venus Project is just another blind stab at creating an Utopia, a technologically advanced form of Marxism, and I shudder to think what the results would actually be. To me the ideas here, and I only quoted off 2 of the many pages of their website, are as totalitarian as anything that I’ve ever heard. The fact that it’s packaged in a humanitarian idealism doesn’t make it any less so. I see it as one mans plan to dominate the world, an idea I find morally reprehensible. If you buy into this you are not for freedom, you are an unhappy slave seeking a new master.