[p2p-research] What's different about this economic downturn? -- the severe unemployment

[Kevin Carson]

On 9/7/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is supposedly the way the Italian economy has worked for a generation.
> Precision eyeglass frames are made in basements and sold to Gucci to avoid
> the tax man.
>
> China already does a lot of this.  I was reading about a smaller city in
> China that makes 50% of the world's socks...if you are wearing them now,
> chances are they were made in that town.

Allow a few years of exponential replication for CNC multimachines and
cutting tables, RepRaps, etc., and I expect we'll see the bottom fall
out of even these very low capital requirements, and the expansion of
such low-capital and low-overhead production into nearly every product
line.

The other shoe will drop when the networked producers in the Third
Italy and China decide to disregard the corporate trademarks and
patents altogether, strip price of the brand-name markup, and market
the goods directly to the local population instead of loading them
into container ships nobody can afford fuel for.

-- 
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