Atrus wrote:
It makes sense as more people want/need/will use a bar of soap then a machine that makes soap.
It is economically dangerous to allow users access to the Source of that which you intend to sell. It is true that many users will not or cannot setup, operate and maintain the Sources of Production. But when those unskilled users gain full access to those Sources (and ownership is the ultimate access), they can then hire anyone that happens to have those skills, causing competition between workers to approach maximum and wages to approach zero. Profit disappear in a puff of greasy smoke, since, though the unskilled users must pay all the costs of production, including wages to any workers, they cannot pay Profit because they do not buy the Product, but own it already as a side-effect of their owning the Sources. Manufacturing will be far closer to 'Open' when we begin helping users gain co-owership in the Sources of all the things they need. The Sources of food are self-replicating, solar-powered, manufacturing plants that we do not yet know how to co-own for our own, mutual, use-value benefit. The keys to operating in this GNU way are: 1. Organize users to pre-pay for the products they need. 2. Those investors become the co-owners of Physical Sources. 3. Skilled users can commit Work toward that production. 4. Unskilled users can commit Land or Capital. 5. The return for those investments is the product itself. 6. The product is not sold because it is already allocated to the persons who intend to *use* it. 7. In the special case of surplus, the product can be sold to 'outsiders' (users with insufficient ownership), and Profit should be charged against those latecomers, but some percentage of that Profit must be treated as though it were an investment from the user who paid it. 8. Treating profit as user investment causes those payers to slowly gain co-ownership in the Sources of Production as they become the proprietors of the growth they caused when they paid more than cost.