[p2p-research] Income inequality at an all-time high...

[Kevin Carson]

On 8/14/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

>  Wait till we start seeing *serious* layoffs from increasing automation, and
> a race to the bottom on wages, and a flow to the top of the value created by
> automation. We have seen only the tiniest part of that so far.

OTOH, wait till we see a catastrophic implosion of profits based on
proprietary information, and even of proprietary physical
manufacturing as it tries to compete with smaller, open-source
alternatives (especially open design communities simply reverse
engineering proprietary designs and ignoring patents).  And I have a
hard time thinking of any secure investment the plutes could shift
their money into that wouldn't be vulnerable to a similar collapse of
value.

Of course, even if "abundance" were to grow enough to offset paid
employment losses, it would show up as a catastrophic loss of jobs and
wage income in the official stats.

We may well be headed to what Charles Hugh Smith discusses at Of Two
Minds, and what Doctorow's writing about in Makers:  the implosion of
both monetary income and monetary wealth as tax bases--in which case
California may be the canary in the mineshaft for all the other hollow
states.

The funny part is, increasingly hollowed out states may be forced by
necessity to fund Keynesian demand management and welfare by simply
creating the money themselves, which which could quite plausibly take
the form of simply depositing interest-free money in citizen bank
accounts out of thin air every month--without the pols having ever
heard of Maj. Douglas.  But such measures, intended to prevent the
collapse of capitalism, would undermine its basic logic.

-- 
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