[p2p-research] User Freedom and the Purpose of Profit

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/7/10, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Imagine I own a more expensive roto-tiller.
>
>  I choose to apply the contract to that Physical Source and begin
>  renting it to others for a price that is higher that my real costs of:
>  investment, maintenance (oil, fuel, wear parts), storage,  wages to
>  any workers I had to pay, wages to myself for managing it all, etc.

>  So, even though I think the current owners would probably be making
>  the investments, the more important point is that those original
>  payers of profit become the real property title holders of that new
>  Physical Source.

To me the problem with this whole system is that the owner of
resources seems to get very little out of agreeing to license his
enterprise under such rules, aside from a lot of extra administrative
hoops to jump through.  It's not quite as much rigmarole as Parecon,
but a lot more than most people would like.

By way of parallel, Josiah Warren's time store required him to
painstakingly calculate the amount of total overhead cost, and the
portion of it included in each item he sold, and then to maintain two
parallel accounting systems (amortization of his cash expenses through
a cash price for the good, plus labor notes for his time in serving
the customer).

The beauty of William Greene's mutual banking system was to remove
barriers to free competition in supplying a circulating medium and
credit, and then let the market mechanism itself automatically flush
artificial scarcity rents like interest out of the price system.

In this case, as well, I think it would make more sense to simply
eliminate the legal supports to artificial scarcity and then leave the
market to work automatically.  The owner's prices would be driven down
to production cost through the automatic function of the market,
without a lot of paperwork and administrative complications.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html