Related: diary
Narya.net "'The Narya Project is intended to create a free-designed hardware community centered around needs for a free future in space, developed by individuals for individuals. The idea is to have a fun place to work on ideas for stuff we're all going to need on the new frontier, with a particular focus on maximizing the amount of equipment that settlers will be able to use, repair, and build on the spot from commodity designs. Having a ready-made body of such design information will greatly reduce risks of settlers associated with manufacturer non-disclosure at costs that don't require a national development program to fund.
...
Looked at from a certain point of view, Narya is designed to provide an enterprise manufacturing support system for people who can't afford one. By making all these normally complicated procedures easy, we hope to greatly accelerate the progress that amateurs and semi-professional developers can make in areas such as our core focus on space colonization/settlement technology.
'"
Ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/p&c.htm
"'
Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy.
Out of print with rights reverted to the author.
This book presents a modern version of the old Labor (or Natural Rights) Theory of Property and of an Inalienable Rights Theory that descends from the Reformation and Enlightenment. Together these theories re-solve the basic problem of distribution in the sense of giving a basis for the just appropriation of property and a basis for answering the question of who is to be the firm, e.g., the suppliers of share capital as in conventional capital, the government as in socialism, or the people who work in the firm as in the system of economic democracy (or labor-managed market economies). While these theories address old questions in economics, they do so in an entirely different manner than conventional economics which renders the questions as being about value or price theory (instead of about property rights and contracts). This book is now out of print and the rights have reverted to the author. A neo-Austrian pre-publication reviewer of the book described the book as follows:
"The book's radical re-interpretation of property and contract is, I think, among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed. It undermines the neoclassical way of thinking about property by articulating a theory of inalienable rights, and constructs out of this perspective a "labor theory of property" which is as different from Marx's labor theory of value as it is from neoclassicism. It traces roots of such ideas in some fascinating and largely forgotten strands of the history of economics. It draws attention to the question of "responsibility" which neoclassicism has utterly lost sight of. It is startlingly fresh in its overall approach, and unusually well written in its presentation.
... It constitutes a better case for its economic democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature."
'"
Aug-20-2008: Beginning of an unsent response to Oekonux list
On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Paul Cockshott wrote:
> Profit does not disappear in competitive industries!
Price approachs Cost as Profit approaches Zero.
Profit disappears when competition is perfect, but competition is usually imperfect.
Profit approaches infinity as monopoly approaches perfection.
Profit approaches zero as competition approaches perfection.
Competition approaches perfection as ownership in the Means of Production is most fully distributed and divisible between the consumers of that product.
Profit occurs during real and artificial scarcity. Profit seeking corporations are incented to scarcify and
Competition can approach perfection within any corporation, cooperative, commune, church, club, cult, clique, etc. that own the Means of Production needed for that which they consume and apply a "Terms of Operation" through a legally binding contract stating all profit be treated as an investment from the consumer who paid it.
The consumer could receive what I envision looking like a coupon describing the exact "Object Consumed" and "Sources Required", along with the quality, quantity and photos of each.
Imagine tourists purchasing a meal under these conditions.
* The restaurant owners may charge these non-owning consumers any amount above Cost that "the market will bear".
* These owners can also safely charge the consumer exactly Cost because there is no pressure to make a Profit. Profit is not
or, since the current owners have invested with the expected return of 'product' , and, because of the "Terms of Operation" by contract do not receive only temporary 'steering' ownership of that investment,
A business is profitable when costs of operation paid by the current owners is less than the price by the consumer.
Imagine a large 'commons' kitchen accessible by 100 families.
Subgroups will buy cases of frozen hamburgers,
When they buy bulk
These consumers collectively own
A consumer owned restaurant is
I envision using this
wnership in this bond is not immediately
Profit is inversely related to competition. Profit is directly related to monopoly.
The MONOPOLY -- to -- PERFECT_COMPETITION
I thought profit approaches zero as competition approaches perfection.
Theoretical perfect competition occurs when ownership distribution is perfect.
Aug-20-2008: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a792758255~db=all~order=page >>open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor through the exchange of effort rather than of products
Contribute vs Exchange
Commons vs Property
Give vs Trade
Lend vs Rent
Borrow vs Hire
Share vs Sell
Cooperation vs Command
The lesson I draw from the experience of eastern Europe was that it was
a mistake in countries like Poland not to let consumer goods prices
follow values. Attempts to subsidise consumer goods led to shortages and
suppressed inflation. So I think you need a consumer goods market of the
sort advocated in the 1930s by Lange and Dickinson, where goods are sold
at market clearing prices.
Stock control data from this process, along with the ratio between the
selling price and the labour content of goods would then be used by a
cybernetic system to adjust output levels of goods.
Since, however, the production would be communal, the units of
production would not depend on selling commodities for their survival in
the capitalist sense. The unit of production would not own the goods it
produced, they would be commonly owned and the individual consumer would
purchase them from the community by the performance of an equivalent
amount of labour to that contained in the goods, with some system of
electronic accounting keeping track of the labour each person performs
and indirectly consumes.
The consumer would have the right to purchase consumer goods from
community shops. The units of production would not be subjects of right
like capitalist firms. They would not sell the products, just as the
coke works in a steel mill today does not sell the coke to the blast
furnace division, it simply delivers it as part of an integrated
process.
Aug-12-2008: Posted to list-en@Oekonux.org
> I do not think there will ever be more successful market players
> but capitalist corporations.
Capitalism happens to be winning now, but we know it is very inefficient.
>But since the 18
> years I am on that track, I have not found one corporation that did more
> than lip service to this market model
If we ever determined the mechanical 'error' in Capitalism that causes problems we see, couldn't we start a corporation for ourselves that has some sort of "Terms of Operation" - a contract that constrains trade in a manner similar maybe to the GNU GPL?
The pattern of the GNU GPL is:
. Owners choose to apply some constraints to the trade of their OWN property.
. One constraint requires any seller (or giver) must insure the new consumer (user) gains "at cost" access the capital (sources) of that production.
The consumer can slowly gain "at cost" access (ownership) to the Capital required for physical production if "price above cost" (profit) is treated as an investment from the consumer who paid it.
I may be right or wrong about the shape of the contract, but either way couldn't a contract we choose to apply to a corporation we begin ourselves hold those ideals in place?
Whatever constraint we find to be appropriate, let's write a contract that can be applied to the physical aspects of all things (all things are simply design applied to mass) so that we can begin a corporation under those Terms of Operation and finally begin to outcooperate the inefficient Capitalists.
Patrick
Aug-12-2008: Posted to http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-role-of-the-market-in-a-peer-to-peer-society/2008/08/10 and Oekonux.org
Stefan,
I do not agree with the assertion that every player (every human on earth?) must follow the destructive goal of "making more money from invested money".
There are many micro-economies (such as in families or maybe in some small communes) where action is taken (work) for the sole purpose of PRODUCT, not for PROFIT.
But if you think none of us can ever escape such a fate, then why even try to promote the http://Oekonux.org ideals? If we are destined to lose, then why try?
I don't understand. If no player (human) can ever possibly do anything beyond being a Capitalist pawn, then shouldn't we just give up now?
Sincerely,
Patrick
Aug-10-2008:
Aug-09-2008: CESJ.org >>Welcome to the Web site of the Center for Economic and Social Justice. CESJ is a non-profit, non-partisan educational organization and think tank, with a religiously and spiritually pluralistic membership. We are dedicated to a free enterprise approach to economic and social justice for all, through capital ownership opportunities for every person.
Aug-02-2008: CreativeCapitalism.TypePad.com >>Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book -- a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.
Aug-01-2008: Consumers can fund the production they need. Investing consumers, consuming investors.
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