[p2p-research] "Pennsylvania pie fight," etc.

[Kevin Carson]

What you described in your article is just one example of a much
broader phenomenon.  The main function of zoning, licensing, local
"health" regulations, etc., is to protect conventional, high-overhead
businesses against competition from the informal and household sector.

Informal and household production is potentially revolutionary,
because it follows a low-overhead business model of producing with
"spare cycles" of ordinary capital goods most people already own
anyway.  If I operate a microbakery out of my home using my ordinary
kitchen oven, or an unlicensed cab service using just my car and cell
phone, or a home microbrewery or the like, the required capital
outlays are almost nonexistent.  So the minimum amount of business I
need to carry overhead expenses is likewise almost nonexistent.  I can
afford to shift incrementally from wage labor to self-employment, and
ride out periods of slow business in my home microbusiness, with
virtually no risk at all.

All the regulations passed for the "public safety" have the primary
effect of criminalizing this business model.  They impose mandatory
minimum levels of overhead, so that the only way to service the
overhead is to engage in large-batch production.  If I have to buy an
industrial-sized oven, dishwasher, and fridge to sell pies, and get an
expensive state license, then I can't afford to enter the market
unless I can do it on a large scale, and do so in confidence of
finding enough business to employ me on a large scale.

Another good example is the effect of CPSIA on small apparel
manufacturers.  The normal business model of a small manufacturer is
this:  come up with a couple dozen or so designs, see which ones sell,
and switch from one design to another in response to orders on a
just-in-time basis.  The CPSIA, by requiring expensive tests that cost
hundreds of dollars for each separate product, criminalizes such
small-batch production.  The only way to stay in business is to
produce in long enough runs to amortize the cost of the testing for
each product.  Again, either start out big or don't even try.

Ditto attempts by licensed retailers to sic the state on food-buying
clubs run out of people's homes, etc.

On a national level, "intellectual property" [sic] law has the same
effect.  In publishing, music, and software, until the late 20th
century the main structural basis for the large corporation's
existence was the enormous capital outlay (hundreds of thousands of
dollars or more) required to enter the market.  The desktop revolution
has reduced the basic item of capital equipment needed to engage in
production in these industries to a few hundred or thousand $$; and
the network revolution made possible by the Internet not enables peer
networks to organize production on an efficiency rivaling that of the
big corporate producers, but reduces the marginal cost of reproduction
to zero.  So with the cost of physical capital required to enter the
market approaching zero, artificial property rights are the main
structural bulwark supporting the old corporate dinosaurs.

We live in what Paul Goodman called the "kingdom of cost-plus":  a
society in which the vast majority of commodity prices consists of
subsidized waste, mandated unnecessary overhead, and embedded rents on
artificial property rights.

Best,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html