Vision? Nary!

“I guess we all need to open a shirt store. One store for every person. It will thrive.”

Will Shetterly:

Now, if you’ve figured out a way to “dynamically create” wealth without workers and consumers, I’d happily agree that creators of dynamic wealth deserve all they can keep. And then I’d be glad to sell you a perpetual motion machine. Just don’t look inside the black box. It dynamically creates energy, don’t you know?

“Or we will all get hot dog stands and get rich selling each other hot dogs. Yeah.”
—
Labor Theory of Value; or, “Man, *I* could sure use a widget right now!”

Anarchist David Grenier explains how the economy works:

There’s a fatal flaw built into our economic system that cannot be reformed away with a few tax cuts or regulations.

Profits - the “private tax” companies put on their workers - need to come from somewhere.

If you own a widget factory (if I may sound like a dull business professor) and the factory can produce 1,000 widgets a day, and you can sell each widget for $10, that means your workers produce $10,000 worth of widgets every day. However, you have some overhead. Even if you own the building and don’t have to pay taxes or utilities, and it costs you nothing to market and distribute your widgets, you still need to pay the workers that made the widgets. If 10 workers made that $10,000 for you, are you going to pay each of them a thousand dollars? No, because then you would have no profit. You need to pay them less than the value of what they are producing. Say you pay them $200 a day - which means they are paying you $800 to boss them around. That means your workforce has a sum total of $2,000 at the end of the day to spend, and you have $10,000 worth of product to sell.

See the problem?

Who is going to buy all of those widgets?

Of course, the obvious answer would seem to be, “people other than the widget makers.” The problem is that pretty much every company in our society is structured this way, so the sum total of the output of every factory in the country far exceeds the wages being paid out. Since workers buy things with their wages, there will always be less money to buy stuff than there is stuff to buy. Eventually the unsold stuff piles up and you don’t need any more workers to produce things because you’re still trying to sell off all the widgets or cars or VCRs or sneakers filling your warehouse. But when you lay off the workers, you further reduce the amount of money out there to buy your stuff.

This is why Capitalist economies continually go through cycles of boom and bust, and why you can expect to go through a recession and possibly lose your job every few years.

There is no way around this basic problem.

And that is why we will buy all our widgets on credit this year.