Get a job and provide for your kids for once you welfare queen!

Two of the main assumptions of the free market strategy are:

1. Competition promotes excellence, and;

2. Incentives are an effective (and mandatory) means of motivation.

These assumptions have been the focus of many studies throughout the past few decades. The findings? Competition and incentives are effective, but only when the task is straight forward. Tasks that require critical thinking and creativity are undermined by both, and the studies have bore this out consistently.

In fact, several studies strongly suggest incentives not only to be ineffective for such tasks, but to be responsible for a severe decline in interest of the task required. I will assume I need not even go on about the detrimental effects of a selfish, competitive mentality.

Today we are seeing a shift in occupations. Straight forward occupations are disappearing, and will continue to dwindle as automation displaces the workforce. Pretty soon, virtually every occupation will be of the type that requires some form of critical thinking or creativity (the many fields of science, engineering, computer programming etc.), occupations undermined by incentive systems and competition.

Resources:

You are correct in your observation that resources are limited. However, the linear production, senseless consumption and wasteful disposal model encouraged by modern day capitalism for sake of profit is certainly less sustainable than the cyclical model TVP advocates.

Rather than rant on and on about the endless list of negative effects of capitalism on resource depletion, resultant pollution and waste etc., I'll cut right to the chase...

1. We have the technical means to produce an abundance of food. (hydroponics, aquaponics, aeroponics, vertical farming etc., etc.)

2. We have the technical means to produce an abundance of clothing and housing materials.

3. We have the technical capability to recycle virtually everything produced, to minimize and eventually come close to a virtual end to the extraction phase. (plastic sorting bots like the following would be of great use: http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/2010/03/plastic-sorting-bots-to-save-...)

4. Future development of nano-technology from already existing, forward thinking companies such as the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (http://www.imm.org/) will help put an end to resource scarcity.

Negative Effects of Money:

The "Merva-Fowles" Study, done at the University of Utah using data from 1976-1990 for 30 major metropolitan areas in the United States, with a combined population in 1990 of nearly 80 million people, found powerful connections between unemployment and crime:

Their findings found that a 1% rise in unemployment resulted in:

a 6.7% increase in homicides;
a 3.4 % increase in violent crimes;
a 2.4 % increase in property crime.

Based on the 1990-1992 data this translated to:

1,459 additional homicides;
62,607 additional violent crimes (including burglary,
aggravated assault, and murder); and,
223,550 additional property crimes (including robbery,
larceny, and motor vehicle theft).

Their findings found that a 1% rise in unemployment also resulted in:

a 5.6% increase in death from heart attacks
a 3.1% increase in death from strokes

Based on the 1990-1992 unemployment rate, this resulted in 35,307 more heart attack deaths and 2771 more stroke deaths. They also found that those unemployed had a much higher likelihood of high stress, alcoholism, cigarette smoking, depression and the consumption of less healthy diets

In other words, monetary deprivation is one of the most prominent root causes of most crime and is detrimental to physical and mental well-being.

As long as you have money you will always have a wealth gap, those who have and those who have not. You will always have corruption in many forms, companies large and small cutting corners to make or save more money (whether it be via pollution, displacement, planned obsolescence, cheap products, etc). You will always have scams, theft, etc. And on...

Technological Unemployment:

This may have been easy to shrug off several years ago, but it's becoming hard to ignore now -- despite the virtual silence in the mainstream media. The occupations created by the displacement of the workforce by automation will continually net less and less job opportunities than the ones they displaced. A global unemployment crisis is right around the corner, at the point at which automation becomes cheaper than outsourcing.

Some sources to explore at your own leisure on the future prospects of automation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs -- A clip from a lecture by automation expert Marshall Brain, founder of the popular technical website HowStuffWorks.com

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm -- Part one of a 3-part series of articles by Marshall Brain. A more in-depth justification for his position on the prospect of technological unemployment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ST1TO6fQv8 Part 1 of a 9 part series of assorted video demonstrations of automation prototypes.

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The above constitutes a very short summary of just a few of the reasons I see TVP as a more reasonable long-term solution.

I highly recommend reading Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and the State, which overviews economics, begingin with fundamentals of human action and expanding into exchange, production, competition, money, and more. You can read it online at my site.