Comment Re:Vice Provost of Caltech from 1994 said it best (Score 1) 253
Stop trying to rehabilitate a bloody, failed ideology. The economics of abundance (sharing on the net where copying costs are virtually zero) are not the same as socialism because, like capitalism, socialism is an attempt to manage the economics of scarcity, a task at which it fails miserably. Capitalism does much better at managing the economics of scarcity and has a few interesting things to say about the economics of abundance but we really are in poorly charted waters. Abundance is simply not that common a condition so there's a lot of work that needs to be done to extend what we know about economics to this heretofore uncommon state (take a look at ESR's discussion of potlatch societies in the Pacific NW for an old style abundance society).
It's much more productive to take Adam Smith's concepts of benevolence, generosity, and charity (see his Theory of Moral Sentiments) as a starting point for abundance economics, not least because it lets you create a wider view of functional economics both on the scarcity and abundance sides.