Hi Ernest,

I just heard your show with Sharleen B from The Zeitgeist Movement and I wanted to answer your question about defining freedom.

If you want to have complete freedom, the only way to achieve this is at the expense of the freedom of others. If you have the freedom to rape, beat, murder, steal from, humiliate, and generally abuse other people then they don't have the freedom to not have those things imposed upon them. So assuming that you are not a power-crazed wannabe dictator who wants to do bad stuff to other people, and assuming that you want other people to have just as much freedom as yourself (equal freedom) then before you demand complete freedom you must first put some boundaries on this freedom to restrict it from imposing on the freedom of others.

Already we have compromised what freedom is, but I will assume that you are a decent guy and you realize that you don't want complete freedom, and that you are happy with freedom in so far as it doesn't impinge on the freedom of others.

We can now very easily define freedom: Freedom is the ability for an individual to do whatever they want so long as it is physically/technically possible and it doesn't infringe upon the freedom of others.

The definition is simple, but understanding the consequences is not.  If you wanted all the gold in the world to pave your huge driveway and tile the roof of your massive house, obviously that would impinge on the freedom of someone else who wants the same thing, so you're not free to have all that. Therefore if you want freedom you must willingly accept restrictions on your freedom, paradoxically! The system we have today, that of money, allows inequality, which is really where the root of all restrictions on your freedom comes from. If we prevented inequality by immediately re-distributing money equally between everyone as soon as it was spent, then money would be meaningless and not needed at all.

This is where a Resource-Based Economy comes in. All of the Earth's resources are declared the common heritage of all people, which means everyone owns an equal share in the entire planet - again, this makes the concept of ownership meaningless, so you would own everything and nothing at the same time. However, you may have certain possessions that have sentimental value or are somehow specific to you, and you don't want someone else to take their share of that, so we need to have some right of possession, even though we can do without ownership or property rights as we know them today.

In this type of society, everyone would be as free as they could be - you could do whatever you want as long as it didn't restrict the freedom of others, including using up too much resources such that they are not available for others to use. This allocation would be determined scientifically instead of using money, so it would maintain equal access and equal freedom for everyone.

A Resource-Based Economy is all about freedom, equal freedom for all.

I hope this helps you to understand what The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project are all about in advocating that we (humankind) switch to a Resource-Based Economy. And if you don't want to accept that, and you just want "to be left alone", and not have this Resource-Based Economy which was decided by other people forced upon you - then you are not interested in freedom for everyone, you are only interested in freedom for yourself.