Hubby made an observation about 3-D printers

[hunter]

55. I think we already do own "the means of production."

We're simply kept in the dark about it so a few oligarchs can reap unfair benefits.

All the software I use is free. I don't need Microsoft or Apple. Art and music I get directly from the artists. I've got no cable or satellite television, I don't watch network television, I haven't seen a television commercial for a long, long, time. Yet still I live.

I can plant a seed in my garden and it grows.

I think good food, safe shelter, appropriate medical care, and education ought to be everyone's right. Beyond that we ought to have multiple competing economic ecologies, not all convertible to the metric of a single currency.

It's a broken system where the people with money dictate the direction of a society.

Ideally I think we would live in a society where the population is voluntarily declining, and we would live in a world of increasing abundance. The scrapyards of a failed economic system would be our mines. No need to plunder the earth further.

There shouldn't be any homeless people in the USA, there are plenty of empty homes. There shouldn't be any hungry people, there is plenty of food. There shouldn't be any illiterate and uneducated people, there are plenty of people who could teach. There shouldn't be anyone without access to appropriate medical care. Nobody should be without meaningful work, there is much meaningful work to share.

That we still have so many problems tells us our present economic system is a dismal failure.

New technologies like 3D printing, or digital music transfers, won't change the broken economic system, but they will further illuminate its shortcomings.