An interesting contribution by Nathan Cravens, which appeared in the Open Manufacturing mailing list:

“Labor overall has lost scarce value, unable to earn enough to purchase enough scarce goods to continue increases in scarcity generation as expressed by state centralized currency. Yet, because without viable network facilitators to help write adequate instructions to produce, locate, and retrieve freely available resources, scarcity conditions will persist until these areas are better addressed by members of communities that care to develop them.

So a question, a major pitfall that’s occupied that attention-span, and one I believe has a compelling answer while writing this message is:

“How are abundant goods traded to attain scarce goods?”

One answer is pretty obvious: “abundant goods cannot be traded for scarce goods–HOWEVER!–abundant goods produced in a region can be transferred in exchange (or not) for another region’s abundantly produced goods. Without these links both items would otherwise remain scarce goods. This solution creates “a distributed network of abundance” that make otherwise scarce conditions in each, abundant.” (!!!!) This answer extends the economic theory of ‘comparative advantage’ for a post-scarcity context, where its more efficient for one region to produce one type of good than another, while the other region produces a different good to make the exchange between these two areas of more common value than if both goods were produced in the same area.

What anyone in the world has yet to explain very well is how scarcity fails or why the scarce economy (known to most as “the economy”) has collapsed. Richard Wolff’s attractively simple ‘Capitalism Hits the Fan’ thesis is probably the closest I’ve read to explaining the failure of the economic system itself. I’ve determined there is no single point that determines the problem, but rather a variety of factors that contributed to that present downturn. I look forward to getting with those of you that like to address these matters by placing each notable link failure into a package called the “Tragedy of the Scarcity Commons.”

I’m making an as yet uncommonly held assumption here: that value was developing in a non-monetizable commons for sometime, whether marked by lower wages in foreign countries to produce or open source methods that however funded required less money on average. A few accelerations during the 1970s in the U.S. (and other countries with the same model?) are most visually identified in the history of financial debt. I suspect the acceleration of debt is also followed by the rate of outsourcing to peripheral saturated labor markets? This debt growth will continue and remain enforced for as long as scarcity based exchanges are unable to maintain scarce conditions more or less equally among participants. The most glaring forthcoming issue with maintaining a ‘scarce-exchange’ model is when observing the increases in aging populations in Industrial countries rapidly unable to participate in the already saturated labor markets. Japan is the hottest target.

From what I understand, the majority of members on this list believe the growth of scarcity generally is over. When this is accepted, a new general problem arises: the issue of resource management when conditions are not both mostly scarce or mostly abundant, beginning in areas that matter most. The answer to the “semi-scarce problem” as expressed of having abundantly produced goods in one area but not others is solved by transferring abundant goods to other parts of the world in exchange (or not) for other abundantly produced goods.

We need to rapidly manage affairs within the local or global community level or risk fatally violent measures taken by the state and its scarcity driven supporters. We all take a risk if we do not persist in establishing our open cafes, hackerspaces, or a place for community space generally to create or strengthen local and global community ties essential to our well being. If the state and its corporate sponsors are able to affectively influence the harm of others for ‘scarce-dependent’ gain, violence will persist without an observably practiced alternative.

Its the members of communities that form and develop hackerspaces and other community efforts and the work groups that continue to develop programs like Google Wave (more than “lion’s share of the code,” please!) and Wolfram Alpha (I insist an open source!) as vital tools to form an aggregated communications media to come that filters out and embodies the best of our applied intelligence where it really matters. We all must more than hope and insist by making while the existing scarcity model crumbles by placing an abundant link (based on your interest area) before the scarce link fails. If an abundance link is not bridged before the scarcity link fails, difficulty increases to produce that needed abundant link.”