[p2p-research] Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING

[Patrick Anderson]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 6:02 AM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> people cannot consume what we can make

That is because ownership is being used for profit instead of product.

We will use ownership to gain the control we need.

And we will use profit to help latecomers gain the ownership they need.


Funding can come from consumer groups pre-paying for a product in that
the money or work is invested on their behalf in the material Means of
Production that they then have real ownership in.

Those investing consumers will then own their own portion of Physical
Sources, and by consequence would also own the product of those means.

Pre-paying for things such as cell-phone service is already
commonplace, but the consumer never gains real property ownership in
the portion of the network he helped fund as he paid "price above
cost", but is instead kept always away from the sources of production
because of the prohibitive costs of singular ownership on the one
hand, and because of the complexity of co-ownership on the other -
especially when combined with our ignorance as to the origin and
'proper' destination of profit.


> It is, I believe, why we have invented the super-rich again.  Their
> capacity to consume and waste is simply necessary for capital to work.

When you say 'capital' I assume you mean Capitalism.

Capitalism requires scarcity because profit is being misunderstood and
causes us to not realize the fatal requirements of traditional
investors who demand price never reach cost.

Of course we need 'capital' in that we need the material Means of
Production.  But the form of our organization and the demands of our
investors (whether "at cost" product is sufficient) will determine
whether we seek abundance.

Treating profit as a reward for current owner incents scarcity and destruction.

Treating profit as a payer's investment causes growth to be
automatically decentralized and even self-leveling.  It is a governor
in the same way as a centrifugal steam valve [
http://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor ].  It creates a
negative-feedback loop [ http://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
].


Patrick