Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [203]
Conventional wisdom states that wealth flows from a concentration of capital: that is, the factory in town generates the wealth that supports the residents. While large-scale enterprises should certainly be welcomed (manufacturing, biotech, research and development, etc.) as long as control of resources remains in the hands of the community, it is misleading to discount small enterprise as an engine of diffused income and wealth. To assert that a community without a large-scale enterprise is doomed to poverty is to blindly put one's faith in the "factory model" of wealth production.
As noted in previous chapters, the Scalability Trap quickly reduces the workforce of any scalable manufacturing to low levels. Thus the communities which pin all their hopes on a factory coming to town find that the factory closes a few years later and the global capital moves elsewhere to exploit some new windfall.
The wealth of the community flows from low-cost opportunities for enterprise and the widely distributed ownership of the means of production.
Rather than counting on the absurdly hopeless prospect of mythical entrepreneurs renting empty storefronts for thousands of dollars a month, cities and towns should acquire abandoned/tax delinquent commercial properties, open up a few walls and rent out small stalls within larger spaces for a nominal fee such as $10 a month, just enough to pay the utilities.
Once the opportunity cost is low enough, people will take a chance on starting enterprises. If all it costs is $120 a year to rent a space, then the "owner" won't have to make much to turn a profit.
If energy is the ultimate source of wealth, as I assert, then local communities might decide to raise capital incrementally and build a community-owned source of electricity. Using the "kumiai" model discussed above, a community could buy a drilling rig as community property and hire local crews to drill and install geo-exchange systems to provide heating/cooling. Those who put up capital could then have a system installed on their property for a deep discount.
Community and enterprise are not mutually exclusive; they are different aspects of the same system of local, distributed ownership of resources and the means of production and the encouragement of enterprise.
The more FEW resources and enterprises which are locally owned and controlled, the more wealth and income remains in the community.
Communities would be well served by organizing a non-monetary structure of purposeful work and enterprise.
The system of formal salaried/permanent paying job will, for all the reasons stated earlier, decline. As noted earlier, people need meaningful work not just to create value and surplus capital (be it money, tradable hours of labor, energy credits, or any other store of value) but to have the meaningful life which is part of full-spectrum prosperity.
Everyone has something to contribute; even a person who is no longer mobile can be "eyes on the street." What is fading is not work that needs to be done but the notion tat someone somewhere will pay large sums of money for that work to be performed.
Given the realities outlined in previous chapters, it seems future work is very likely to be flexible in nature: that is, a person might perform a mix of paid and unpaid/bartered labor in a variety of fields rather than one "career" which is supposed to be their "life's work." Some may choose this but few will be paid formally to do the same work for 30 or 40 years.
Thus the entire formal "factory" model of production and wealth creation and paid labor is shrinking (the Scalability Trap mentioned earlier) and a new much more flexible, less autocratic structure of work and enterprise must be constructed. Such concepts can also applied in large-scale enterprises; see Maverick: The Success Story Behind