Technocratic views of the Price system

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This article is about the Technocracy movement's usage of the term Price system. For the Economic definition, see Price system.

The term Price system is used by Technocracy Incorporated to describe any Economic system whatsoever that effects its distribution of goods and services by means of a system of trade or commerce based on commodity valuation and employing any form of debt tokens, or money and which attempts to balance supply and demand of scarce resources. Except for possible remote and primitive communities, all modern societies use price systems to allocate resources. However, the price system is not used for all resource allocation decisions today. Allocation of resources within governments, or corporations and households is sometimes commonly undertaken without reliance on a price system.

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[edit] Overview

A Price system may be either a controlled market where prices are set by a government or it may be a Free market where prices are left to float freely as determined by unregulated supply and demand. Or it may be a combination of both or some other alternative scarcity system. From the point of view of Technocrats, the current system is only able to survive by implementing a process of Artificial scarcity, though most economists view this idea with scepticism.

Technocrats are opposed to the Price system which exists today, believing it to be an obsolete system made for distributing a scarcity. Technocrats believe that today we have enough high technology to eliminate scarcity altogether and thus they seek to replace the price system with an economy of abundance.

[edit] History

Fundamentally, price systems have been around for as long as there has been an intermediary device used in trade, such as money. From its beginnings as an extension of the barter system, the price system has evolved into the system of global capitalism that is present in the early 21st century. The Soviet Union and other Communist nations were price systems also, as they employed a scarcity based monetary system. Thorstein Veblen, who was a member of the Technical Alliance (the precursor to Technocracy Incorporated), wrote The Engineers and the Price System in 1921, in which he put forth some of his views on the Price System. That book was later used as a reference in the Technocracy Study Course.

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