an organization called The Zeitgeist Movement as you already know.

I would like to welcome everybody

from far and wide; everybody did come. Thank you very much.

I would like to take this opportunity to especially thank

the teams of The Zeitgeist Movement.

Teams meaning the Linguistic Team, the Web Team, the Technology Team,

the Activism Team and also the Project Team that

coordinated this project.

The whole German chapter did a great job

with establishing this event within a month.

I would like to thank everybody personally.

Good to see you here.

I think Peter Joseph doesn't need any introduction.

I think everybody here knows who he is.

So, short and precise: thank you.

I hand the microphone over to Peter.

[Sustained Applause]

You can turn this mic off since I'm not going to use it.

Ah, so it's the other mic.

How's everybody doing? [Audience in unison] - Good!

I really appreciate you all being here.

I want to thank Franky and the Berlin team

for moving so fast; it's really phenomenal.

Having put on many events myself over the years, it's not an easy task.

I'm always reminded when I travel these days,

that The Zeitgeist Movement is truly a global phenomenon at this stage, right?

No matter where any of us end up on the planet,

you don't have to go very far to find friends who share similar values

in this pursuit of a better world.

The title of this talk is "Economic Calculation

in a Natural Law/Resource-Based Economy (NLRBE)."

For the past five years or so

The Zeitgeist Movement has put out quite a bit of educational media

with respect to its advocation,

and the learning curve has been rather intense.

There's been a tendency to generalize

with respect to how things actually work technically.

This is the contents of this presentation.

In Part I and two I'm going to refine

the inherent flaws of the current market model

regarding why we need to change

along with relaying the vast prospects

we now have to solve vast problems,

improve efficiency, and generate a form of abundance

that could meet all human needs.

The active term which has gained popularity in the last couple years

is called "post-scarcity,"

even though that word is a little misleading semantically as I'll explain.

In Part III, I'll work to show how this new society

generally works in its structure and basic calculation.

I think most people on the planet know that there is something

very wrong with the current socioeconomic tradition.

They just don't know how to think about the solution,

or more accurately, how to arrive at such solutions.

Until that is addressed, we're not going to get very far.

On that note, in a number of months, a rather substantial text

is going to be put into circulation, available for free

and also in print form or download form

at cost (it's a non-profit expression).

This will be finished hopefully by the first of the year

and will be the definitive expression (in the condensed form)

of the Movement, something that's been long overdue.

It's called "The Zeitgeist Movement Defined" and it will serve as both

an orientation and a reference guide.

It will have probably over a thousand footnotes and sources.

Once finished, an educational video series will be put out

in about 20 parts to produce the material along with a workbook

to help people who want to learn how to talk about these ideas because

we basically need more people on an international level

to be able to communicate, as I try to do.

It's a very important thing, and I think the future of the Movement

rests in part on our capacity to create a well-oiled

international educational machine with consistent language

coupled with real design projects and their interworkings.

Part I: Why are we even here?

Is this type of large-scale change-

what the Movement advocates- really needed?

Can't we just work to fix and improve the current

economic model, keeping the general framework of money,

trade, profit, power, property and the like?

The short answer is a definitive "No,"

as I'm going to explain.

If there's any real interest to solve the growing

public health and environmental crises at hand

this system needs to go.

Market capitalism, no matter how you wish to regulate it

or not regulate it, depending on who you speak with,

contains severe structural flaws

which will always, to one degree or another,

perpetuate environmental abuse and destabilization,

and human disregard and caustic inequality.

Put another way, environmental and social imbalance

and a basic lack of sustainability both environmentally and culturally

is inherent to the market economy, and it always has been.

The difference between capitalism today and say, the 16th century

is that our technological ability to rapidly accelerate

and amplify this market process

has brought to the surface consequences which simply couldn't be understood

or even recognized during those early primitive times.

In other words, the basic principles of market economics

have always been intrinsically flawed.

It has taken just this long for the severity of those flaws

to come to fruition. Let me explain a little bit.

From an environmental standpoint,

market perception simply cannot view the Earth

as anything but an inventory for exploitation.

Why? Because the entire existence of the market economy

has to do with keeping money in circulation

at a rate which can keep as many people employed as possible.

In other words, the world economy is powered by constant consumption.

If consumption levels drop, so does labor demand,

and so does the available purchasing power of the general population

and hence, so does demand for goods as money isn't there to buy them.

This cyclical consumption is the lifeblood

of our economic existence.

The very idea of being conservative or truly efficient

with the Earth's finite resources in any way

is structurally counterproductive

to this needed driving force of consuming.

If you don't believe that, ask yourself why

virtually every life support system on this planet is in decline.

We have an ongoing loss of topsoil, ever-depleting fresh water,

atmospheric and climate destabilization,

a loss of oxygen-producing plankton in the ocean

(which is critical to marine and atmosphere ecology),

the ongoing depletion of fish populations,

the reduction of rain forests, and so forth.

In other words, an overall general loss of critical biodiversity

is occurring and increasing.

For those not familiar with the critical relevance of biodiversity,

billions of years of evolution

has created a vastly interdependent biosphere of planetary systems.

Disturbing one system always has an effect on many others.

This, of course, is no new observation.

In 2002, 192 countries in association with the United Nations

got together around something called "The Convention on Biological Diversity."

They made a public commitment to significantly reduce this loss by 2010.

And what changed eight years later? Nothing.

In their official 2010 publication, they state:

"None of the 21 sub-targets accompanying the overall target

of significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010

can be said definitively to have been achieved globally."

"Actions to promote biodiversity receive a tiny fraction of funding

compared to infrastructure and industrial developments."

(Hmm, I wonder why?)

"Moreover, biodiversity considerations are often ignored

when such developments are designed.

Most future scenarios project continuing high levels of extinctions

and loss of habitats throughout this century."

In a 2011 study published which was in part

a response to an general call to isolate and protect certain regions

to insure some security of this biodiversity,

found that, even with millions of square kilometers of land and ocean

currently under legal protection, it has done very little

to slow the trend of decline.

They also made the following highly troubling conclusion

combining this trend with the state of our resource consumption:

"The excess use of the Earth's resources or overshoot is possible

because resources can be harvested faster than they can be replaced.

The cumulative overshoot from the mid-1980's to 2002

resulted in an 'ecological debt'

that would require 2.5 planet Earths to pay.

In a business-as-usual scenario, our demands on planet Earth

could mount to the productivity of 27 planets by 2050."

And there's no shortage of other corroborating studies that confirm,

to one degree or another, we are indeed greatly overshooting

the annual production capacity of the Earth,

coupled with pollution and collateral destruction

caused by industrial and consumer patterns.

Again, this kind of research has been published for many decades now.

Why is it that with all this mounting data

we can't seem to curb life support depletion

and our overshooting consumption trends?

Is it because there are too many people on the planet?

Is it because we're just utterly incompetent

and have no conscious control over our actions?

No. The problem is that we have a global economic tradition still in place

rooted in 16th century pre-industrial handicraft-oriented thought

that places the act of consuming,

buying and selling as the core driver of all social unfolding.

The best analogy I can think of is to consider the gas pedal on a car:

the more consumption of fuel, the faster it goes,

and buying things in our world is the fuel.

If you slow down consumption, economic growth slows,

people lose jobs, purchasing power declines

and things become destabilized and so forth.

So I hope it is clear that the system simply does not reward or even support

environmental sustainability in the form of conservation.

In fact, it doesn't even reward sustainability in the form

of any kind of earthly or physical efficiency

as I will talk more at length of in a moment.

Instead, it rewards servicing, turnover and waste:

the more problems and inefficiencies we have,

not to mention the more insecure, materialistic

and needy the population becomes, the better it is for industry,

the better it is for GDP, the better it is for employment,

regardless of the fact that we may literally

be killing ourselves in the process.

My friend John McMurtry, a philosopher in Canada, refers to this state

as the "Cancer Stage of Capitalism,"

a system which is now destroying its host, us and the Earth,

almost unknowingly because very few today really understand

how unsustainable the core driving principles of the market really are.

The second structurally inherent consequence I want to mention

is the fact that market capitalism is indeed

empirically socially destabilizing.

It creates unnecessary and inhumane inequality,

along with resulting unnecessary human conflict.

In fact, I would say capitalism's most natural state

is conflict and imbalance.

I would categorize two forms of conflict in the world:

national and class.

I'm not going to spend much time on the causes of national warfare

as it should be fairly obvious to most of us at his point.

Sovereign nations which are in part protectionist institutions

for the most powerful forces of business have often engaged

in the most primal act of competition- systematic mass murder-

in order to preserve the economic integrity of their national economies

and select business interests which invariably comprise

the political constituency of any given country.

All wars in history, while often conveniently masked by various excuses,

have predominately been about land, natural resources,

or geoeconomic strategy on one level or another.

The state institution has always been driven

by commercial and property interests, existing as both a regulator

of the basic day-to-day internal economic operations

in the form of legislation and as a tool for power consolidation

and competitive advantage by the most dominant industries

of the national or even, in fact more importantly, global economy.

There are many people in the world that still look at this causality in reverse.

In some economic views, state government is deemed the central problem,

as opposed to the self-interest and competitive, advantage-seeking ethos