I’ve receive permission from the author – Kevin Carson – to serialize a small section of his book on Home Based Businesses. You can read all his work here:
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto Kevin Carson (Amazon link)
Systemic reasons people find starting a business hard or impossible… and why self-employment in the use has dropped by half in just the last 30 years since the “Reagan Revolution”. From the Preface:
The higher the fixed costs of an enterprise, the larger the income stream required to service them. That’s as true for the household microenterprise, and for the “enterprise” of the household itself, as for more conventional businesses. Regulations that impose artificial capitalization and other overhead costs, the purchase of unnecessarily expensive equipment of a sort that requires large batch production to amortize, the use of stand‐alone buildings, etc., increase the size of the minimum revenue stream required to stay in business, and effectively rule out part‐time or intermittent self‐employment. When such restrictions impose artificially high fixed costs on the means of basic subsistence (housing and feeding oneself, etc.), their effect is to make cheap and comfortable subsistence impossible, and to mandate ongoing external sources of income just to survive.
… innovation in the technologies of small‐scale production and of daily living reduce the worker’ need for a continuing income stream. It enables the microenterprise to function intermittently and to enter the market incrementally, with no overhead to be serviced when business is slow. The result is enterprises that are lean and agile, and can survive long periods of slow business, at virtually no cost; likewise, such increased efficiencies, by minimizing the ongoing income stream required for comfortable subsistence, have the same liberating effect on ordinary people that access to land on the common did for their ancestors three hundred years ago.
The more I thought about it, the more central the concept of overhead became to my analysis of the two competing economies. Along with setup time, fixed costs and overhead are central to the difference between agility and its lack. Hence the subtitle of this book: “A Low Overhead Manifesto.”
Two economies are fighting to the death: one of them a highly‐capitalized, high‐overhead, and bureaucratically ossified conventional economy, the subsidized and protected product of one and a half century’ collusion between big government and big business; the other a low capital, low‐overhead, agile and resilient alternative economy, outperforming the state capitalist economy despite being hobbled and driven underground.
Read it all here… (Amazon link)
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