Quote Originally Posted by RooJ View Post
Sure, if you happen to live in a wealthy country. Theres a slight issue with the distribution of wealth however.
Without money, how did such a country become wealthy, advanced, and industrialized? This isn't simply a case of "well it works in already-wealthy countries." The use of a medium of exchange works everywhere to achieve such goals. Wealth discrepancies are a different matter entirely, and rely not so much on the existence of money, but rather various policies.

I agree to a certain extent, but thats because i have, like many people, a cynical view of humanity and the average persons motives. I think as a species, like most animals, we tend to be self centered and greedy (id love to think it wasn't in our nature as the film suggests).
We're brought up in a competitive world, even in school we're always competing and compared to our peers. We're taught to survive in a money oriented world, I guess its the only system we know and so to a certain extent we're completely indoctrinated.
The first part of zeitgeist 3 (the bit you fell asleep during ), is trying to point out that humans are blank slates when first developing as a fetus. The only way i see a system like the one proposed could even begin to work is if an entire generation of children were brought up from birth to live like that, radical changes in education and social behaviour would be needed.. Sadly i don't ever see humans from across the globe agreeing to a common solution and working together to implement it, it would take a natural or man-made disaster of epic proportions for such a system to be considered.
Maybe such a system could be brought in gradually but im not sure.

If you doubt that a child's mind is malleable enough to be influenced and live successfully in such a world id invite you to take a look at many of the worlds religions and cults. Children obviously learn directly from the environment they're brought up in.
The contention I made about not being able to account gains and losses and even develop and acquire capital without money isn't merely a case of our upbringing or how we're brainwashed or whatever some such psychobabble Peter Joseph had people talk about in the first 45 minutes of the movie. It is a fact of life that people will trade goods they value less for goods they value more. There is no getting around this. As I explained earlier, one of the problems with moneyless (barter) economies is attempting to find a double coincidence of wants. The sort of technology Jacques Fresco and Peter Joseph plan to have laying around would be impossible to develop without money, as developing it is simply impossible in a moneyless economy.

Unless you want to get all Marxist/Rand on me and start advocating some sort of new economic man .

Zeitgeist doesn't propose a barter economy.
Without money, what else would they have?

Drugs have a huge impact on the lives of people suffering from aids:

BBC News | AIDS | Aids drugs factfile
Fair enough.

As for money not getting through, thats very true. That simply shows the effects of greed and how money can be put before the lives of humans though .
But surely this is not justification for getting rid of money.

But it would be a better world if they did.
Maybe, but unrealistic nonetheless. The standard of living among most of the world has risen dramatically under such a system

But on the flip side it can ensure that in many cases the average person gets paid a low wage, jobs get outsourced to sweatshops in india, the cheapest materials are used in manufacturing, farmed animals get treated inhumanely, used materials can be dumped instead of properly disposed of and people don't get the best medical treatment for their conditions. The issue is that in many (if not most) cases the jobs of management are on the line if profit margins arn't met and so people are prepared to cut corners.
I think this is where the line between "free market" and our current system gets blurred. I know Peter Joseph and others call our current system free market, which is absolutely ridiculous on its face (it's even better when he lumps Keynes, Friedman, Hayek, and Mises together as free market evil money-grubbers, when only the latter three were actually free market advocates).

People see all these problems, many of which are trivial and stem from a lack of knowledge of how a market economy works and why (although some are justified), apply them to an allegedly chaotic market system, then claim that the current system is such a market system. And then somehow, by extension, they find a scapegoat, namely money, and seek to abolish it and drag us back to the Stone Age.