Miles Fidelman wrote:
Somebody has to actually do the work of getting organized, and to effect any economies of scale that involves raising and investing serious amounts of money BEFORE there's any return. Either:
a. Taking money out of current income (take the money I'm using to buy groceries, to help set up a new store, or farm, or buy chickens, or whatever) - not a viable option for most, or,
It is true that many people live paycheck to paycheck, and cannot afford to invest money, though some are out of work, and so could invest their time. But some have a bit of extra money and are actually looking for somewhere to invest. I would love to pre-pay for raw milk if I could then get that Product at Cost. Mutual Funds are one way people already invest without knowing how to accomplish that production. Think of this as Mutual Funds, but for Use-Value returns.
And then there's the whole aspect of getting organized, which involves either spending large amounts of time, or hiring folks and paying them, or both.
Yes, consumers don't know how to do that, but they could invest 'blindly' as they already do, but with at-cost Product as the return. So what I am talking about might be thought of as Use-Value Crowd Funding - where the investors are not skilled in those areas, but are simply adding money for the purpose of receiving at-cost Product as a side-effect of their co-ownership in the Means of that Production.
By and large, one has to operate at a pretty large scale to get costs down to the level of a supermarket, or Walmart. The question remains, who's going to bother?
True, but people continue to try opening such stores. For example, http://Wasatch.coop will attempt to open as a consumer owned grocery store, supposedly co-owned by the consumer-investors. I say 'supposedly' because these co-owners do not pre-pay for Products and then receive them at Cost, but instead pre-pay and then *buy* the Products back from their collective selves - paying Profit and Taxes during that final, unnecessary transaction.
Verizon collected $1.38 Billion from us last quarter. But when we, the consumers co-own a network, we only pay the costs, so for a network the size of Verizon, we would pay $1.38 Billion *less* every 3 months.
Verizon also has a huge organization, 100s of thousands of miles of copper and fiber installed on poles and under streets, and a huge amount of experience - not to mention tremendous monthly cash flow.
Lots of luck replicating that from scratch. Guaranteed it will cost more than what Verizon charges now.
Yes, the ramp-up is difficult, and so what you say is true at first, but once we have some critical-mass, we will be operating at Cost (except for any needed growth funded by latecomers paying Profit), and so will undercut all Capitalist endeavors - eventually attracting all possible consumers to join us as co-owners of the backbone of a distributed internet. Patrick Anderson http://ImputedProduction.BlogSpot.com