What is a Resource-Based Economy?
New Ideas and Solutions For Real Change
People are always talking about what’s wrong with our society. Many, feeling helpless and overwhelmed by the scope of it all ignore what’s wrong preferring to stick their heads in the sand claiming that they are just trying to stay positive. Either way, there is very little talk about solutions and ideas to enact real change. They do exist however, and we’d like to introduce one of them with our readers.
The Venus Project suggests an alternative to today’s financial system with all its problems and shortcomings in the form of a resource-based economy. In this way it offers the possibility of solving a large part of the problems in society today.
In a resource based economy, products and services are available to people without a price tag using access centers modeled after the public library system. People can access the centers to borrow whatever they want, use, and return. Skeptics? At first people did not like the idea of libraries either, they said it would not work, that people would not return the books, but they were wrong about that.
Imagine this, you want to use a musical instrument or a camera; the access center has a library of the best instruments and equipment. You can check out anything you want, the best, use it as much as you want and return when you’re done. An incentive for returning borrowed items? The access center will maintain everything in optimal condition.
There will be no need to own your own bicycle. You can have access to a bike anytime you want. The work of maintenance or worries of theft will be obsolete. For work or leisure you can have one ready to go for whenever and wherever you need to travel.
The same goes for cars. You won’t have the hassles of owning, storing, cleaning, and maintaining your own vehicle. You can have it there when you need it, without waiting in line. You’re a sailor? You want to take a sailboat out for a cruise, without the headaches and cost of storing, paying insurance, maintenance, etc. and what do you do when you reach a new port? A car or bike will be available to use so you won’t have anything to worry about except the weather.
When you go to the golf course, there will be an access center with the best golf clubs available for you to use and leave when you’re done. No carrying back and forth or filling up your closet with extra stuff. 
Of course you may ask, “What if people break the products or just keep them?” Firstly, our current financial system is set up on the basis that if products break down they can sell even more, generating higher profits for the companies (and creating a lot of waste.) For this reason alone nothing lasts past it’s warranty (if that long) and it’s usually more expensive to fix something than to just toss and replace it new. However, we do have the ability to create products that can last a lifetime especially, when well maintained and serviced.
Secondly, if you make things available to people it’s the end of most of the crime. 95% of the crimes committed are about money directly or indirectly. For those who ask, “How will these access centers be paid for?” consider this: In the United States it costs around 50 thousand dollars to keep a child in prison per year. 75 thousand dollars for adults, and these people don’t come out any better, by the way, quite the contrary. It’s cheaper to give people access to resources instead of putting them in prison for stealing.
Most crime is created by this inequality of access to resources. There will be no prisons in the Venus project; they will not be necessary because people will have access to what they need. If people are still hurting others, they will be helped not sent to prison.
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