Fasces wrote:The only measure that is relevant is the absolute cost of producing that good, measured by Technocracy Inc. in terms of energy required.
Why are you focusing on energy? Sure - energy is a necessary resource for all production. However, it is never the only resource required. All production requires human effort (labour), land and raw materials. The cost of producing a good will then be the opportunity cost associated with the use of all those resources towards the production of the good that could have alternatively been used towards the production of other goods.
Neither "cost" nor "value" are market-specific terms. Only "price" is.
Not as long as the energy/materials/etc produced by a society is greater than the energy/materials/etc that same society can physically consume.
To prove the impossibility of a post-scarcity society, it is enough to show that goods and services dependent on human effort can easily be physically consumed at levels that are not sustainable by any society. We need to go no further.
Exclusive use cannot exist in a Technocratic society. There is no property. You can only own what you can use and only for as long as you can use it.
Not long-term exclusive, but even momentarily-exclusive. I like, for example, not to have to share my bed with anybody other than my wife. Is that kind of exclusive use going to be available in that society?
Scarcity in services is not relevant to whether abundance can exist.
What possible sense of "abundance" or consequences of abundance make sense while excluding services? For example, scarcity drives a market economy. Even if only services and not physical products are scarce, a market in such services would still exist.
AFAIK wrote:If every citizen had an opportunity to drive a Ferrari after placing their name on a one week waiting list then this would represent a higher standard of living than a capitalist society in which a one day Ferrari rental costs 6 months wages for the average citizen.
You remind me of early 20th-century socialists who speculated about the riches that will be available on socialist societies by virtue of rationalisation of the production process, elimination of profits, marketing and other "capitalist" inefficiencies.
To suggest that a Technate would see innovation and consumer-satisfying production without private ownership of the means of production and profit/loss and price mechanisms is utopian on an entirely different level than merely speculating about a world in which physical goods can be created virtually free.
Investment in capital to produce a good would be done by the central state apparatus based on projections for future demand of a particular good.
Shall we revive the Socialist Calculation Problem to show that such central planning is doomed? How will the central state apparatus identify the best uses of scarce resources (such as human labour)?
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.