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

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/25/10, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Traditional investors are paid the difference between what the end-user
> pays, and the real costs of that production.
>
>  Treating profit in this way incents the extremely dangerous behavior we see
> corporations exhibit as they try to destroy all competitors and even limit
> the functionality of their own devices to increase scarcity - for profit
> *requires* scarcity, and cannot withstand abundance.

Sure it can, so long as the scarcity is natural, and the profit is a
temporary entrepreneurial first-mover rent.  Entrepreneurial profit is
entirely healthy, because it's a strong motivator to be first to
market with useful innovations; but it's entirely healthy, because
there are no artificial property rights or other artificial sources of
scarcity to prevent the free diffusion of the innovation or to prevent
the market from driving price down to cost as fast as competitors
adopt the innovation.

-- 
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