The Free World Charter: Let's make everything free | Hacker News Reader

The Free World Charter: Let's make everything free

freeworldcharter.org

9 pointsnairboon25 comments

What a crock of garbage. 6.5 minutes of hand having and pie-in-the-sky dreaming, without a scrap of evidence that anything being said has any basis in reality. This is clearly divorced from basic economic principles.

To pick one of many lines that show this guy is utterly clueless, "Technology has completely freed us from hard labour."

Oh, really? The guys building the house across the street from me right now look like they're working pretty hard. Coal doesn't mine itself. I guess pixies and fairies will wish our roads, bridges, and buildings into existence.

And who exactly is going to build these magic machines that poop out the things we all need to survive? Who exactly is going to ration the output to make things "fair."

Money exists for a reason, that reason is human nature, and no amount of commie propaganda is going to change that.

   Money exists for a reason, that reason is 
   human nature, and no amount of commie propaganda 
   is going to change that.

I agree that this idea has some holes, but to throw it out as "commie propaganda" is a little much. It seems anything that isn't capitalism is immediately communism. I believe resource-based economics are completely different, perhaps completely opposite from communism.

I agree with you only because Communism is a well thought out theory. A theory that most (at least in the United States) feel has failed but a well thought out theory none the less. For example, every manifestation of Communism has established a monetary system. That system just happens to be centrally planed.

This proposal doesn't provide any real structure as to how society would work. It proposes abolishing almost everything we've established the world's societies on but provides no adequate replacement for that infrastructure.

Some holes? It's all holes.

But, I agree that I shouldn't have called it communism. That label doesn't quite fit what the video is advocating. It's still propaganda though, of whatever variety.

Someone clearly skipped their economics 101 lesson. Money is a means of exchange, with supply and demand, it regulates our resource use. Why is it needed? Because without prices, sane economic decisions are impossible. With so many choices on what to produce and what to produce it with, and with scarcity in mind, we have to have a way to put resources to efficient use, instead of just guessing. Having prices that come from supply and demand has been historically proven to be the best way of putting resources to efficient use.

Not only does the video fail to acknowledge the importance of a price system, but it comes bundled with a couple of flawed premises, one of them being the Marxist theory of technological improvement leading to unemployment in a capitalist society.

To anyone who thinks that 'Yes! I hate bills! I feel so unfree!', I can sympathize. However, don't assume that the alternative that is proposed is any better.

Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

"only limited by the raw materials needed, not cost"

Why on earth would someone work in a mine to get the raw materials needed if there were no compensation? This whole bizarre thing discounts that human output is a resource, one which you can't use for free.

With enough automation where every physical work is done by robots it might work.

Who builds the robots? Skynet?

People who enjoy building robots. They exist. There would probably be more of them if a lot of the parts of building robots (e.g. welding, machining, etc) were automated.

It's like the old anti-open source argument "who is going to care about bugs in a hobby project?". It turns out a lot of hobbiests for one... not all but a lot do.

Except the "old anti-open source argument" has proven to be largely true. At least 82% (roughly) of Linux development is corporate sponsored (it could be more since not all contributors disclose).

Beyond that people who like building robots as a hobby probably aren't going to work very quickly or enjoy building the same robot over, and over, and over, and over again.

Wait - you think someone is going to build a robot more than once? Why wouldn't a person design a robot to be created via fairly generic methods such as cnc, 3d printing, etc, at which point a large portion of the work can already be automated. Creating an assembler, from presumably fairly generic assembly machines would also probably be a small amount of work, but interesting. At this point it becomes fairly automatic.

In case you aren't aware, most of the stuff I describe above is how people build factories right freaking now -- they take a lot of general purpose assembly machines and string them together in sequence. Some of the machines have special purpose, but only in high volume environments, and are supported by the general purpose ones.

I'm sorry but you're just wrong here. There's a lot robots can do but there are still people on most assembly lines because robots still aren't capable of precision (I know that sounds stupid but it's true). This is why companies like Foxconn still employ people.

Now this might change in the near future (see Foxconn's recent talk about going robotic) but for the moment you still need people for most electronics work.

Honest question: Is it that they aren't capable of precision, or aren't capable of precision cheaply? I mean, look at flexpickers, those are pretty precise, as are the robots that attach trace wires to chips in an IC package. Plenty of other precision tasks are done by robots as well such as screwing things together and various other tasks.

I also am very curious to find out what people do at foxconn that can't be automated rather than can't be automated cheaply.

...and who maintains the robots?

There are enough enthusiasts out there who would love to play all day and nights with all sorts of robots.

Free only works if everyone participates equally. If just one person is lazy, the system crumbles from resentment.

Money does not create inequality, it simply is the scorecard to show the inequality of those people involved in the system. In a system not corrupted by greed and theft, those with money are simply people that work harder, and/or smarter than those who have less money.

Your final statement only holds if (a) all environments in which people live are equally rich in opportunity/resources or (b) there are sufficient environments with adequate opportunity/resources to which people can move cheaply. That is not the world we currently occupy.

This is very dangerous video and execution of those ideas could lead to suffering.

This is not about the money but about communist-style of equality. If the ultimate goal of removing money should lead to removing inequality, you may take it to the extreem and every man should get: the same free basked of food (as pictured), the same free cloths, the same free computer, the same free education, the same free land, the same free house, the same free woman, the same amount of free love, he must also get the same free DNA, be born at the same place exactly at the same point in time... to be really equal.

If you are not able to satisfy those conditions, there will be always inequality between people, with or without money, no mater how you will denominate the perceived values.

I personally believe in competition and diversification which is how nature always worked in the history and that is why we have better life today. Existence of money has a little to do with it.

This is kind of a strawman. Perhaps the equality talked about is not the boring clone of existence kind, but the kind where people get equal choice to do with themselves as they wish?

There is no denying that currently there are a large number of people in the world with extremely limited choice in what they do, and that choice is in many cases not actually a choice (work hard doing X or work hard doing Y but never get to do anything but hard work with little reward).

Secondly, I would like to point out that your personal belief statement is also based on a fallacy. The just because something always worked in the past and it got us here does not mean 1) it will get us to the future, 2) it was just or moral, 3) here is better for everyone.

> "the kind where people get equal choice to do with themselves as they wish?"

But where you draw the line of "equal choices"? And WHO will be drawing that line?

I'm perfectly aware that there are people living in miserable situation on this planet. But you cannot artificially fix it by making all people instantly "equal". Until we all live "boring cloned existences" each one of us has slightly different priorities and values different things differently. You can maybe improve material life of hard-working child in coal mines but how would you fix a life of a blind person? Those are extremes again, but there is continuum of subtle cases in-between. You simply have to draw the line somewhere and some people will think it is unequal, because according to their values you helped more others which will lead to inequality in their eyes. Is is better to give everybody house or cure for cancer?

So are you suggesting that because we can't draw a perfect line on your continuum that we should not try to find a better line to draw? Or perhaps that because it can't be perfect, we should abolish it completely? Perhaps we can't fix every single thing, but perhaps we should try. The blind man you mention may or may not be fixable, but we should give him the options we can within the constraints of what is possible. (again back to your continuum -- we can't fix some forms of blindness, so we shouldn't fix the sweatshops either). You are arguing a strawman still.

As for different priorities and values, why do you think I talk of the option to make a choice for yourself? That allows each person to actually follow their priorities and values.

As for choosing house over cancer cure, this is again a fallacy, this time the false dilemma. Not everyone needs a cure for cancer -- those who don't have cancer. Not everyone needs a house: those who have houses. Some need both, some need neither.

Please note: I'm not actually for abdicating money per se, just for some sort of change to the system -- where perhaps random chance plays less of a factor (don't idiot up this statement with your absolutism... less not none) in a person's well being. Where perhaps the energy channeled into greed could in fact be channeled into something far more productive to everyone's existence.

from the video: "The only thing money creates is inequality. A scoring system for humanity that decides who gets what."

And without money, who decides who get what instead? Wesley Mouch?

I may be biased by just recently having read Atlas Shrugged, and not quite having digested it completely yet, but I do feel that money is the best tool we have to solve the huge problem of optimally distributing resources. The only true resources are every persons time, ability and effort; everything else is given to us for free by the universe and governed by the laws of physics/nature. Freedom means we each get to decide what it means to apply our own resources optimally.

Now if we can use technology to create a better communication/collaboration tool than money to pool and distribute our resources I'm all for it.

LOL, who could think of something so stupid...

I live in a tiny country, Poland (that's eastern Europe). We've seen these ideas before, right before 89', Berlin Wall, right before getting out independence back from Soviet Union.

But it seems I can go West and hear it again, cool.

How is this vision the same with what you encountered 89'?

But you guys, UNDERWATER CITIES!

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