There are a few people who make me think – and I like that. Seth Godin is the King of Think but Chris Brogan just might be Heir Apparent to the throne. This post is in response to his post on the use of 99Designs.

I thought about this a lot last summer when Anderson’s “FREE” came out. Interestingly enough, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture” came out the same month. My thoughts are still cloudy – not distilled – but it seems to me that we are going to go through a stretch of time when what most people offer to others in exchange for that roof and food is going to be pretty much worthless.

In business we talk about how there’s always someone else willing to go broke faster. Now everyone who wants to make a living in most fields that are not licensed, fields with no bar to entry, has to deal with the vast majority of the bytes, words, or columns of information they’d like to charge for, being offered by someone else for free. The way one competes, it seems, is to offer better and better stuff for free – out-free your competition. The hope is that doing so builds the “know, like, trust, try, buy” stream to end with a few dollars in your pocket. What I’m seeing, however, is that instead of buying, potential customers, driven by their own lack of income, and ever growing amounts of time spent on the web, simply more on to other sources of “free” information and services. The effect really is similar to the traditional downward pull of the underground economy.

99designs works because thousands of people are willing to treat their jobs as if they were taking a trip to the casino. They’ll throw hours of their most precious resource, their existence, onto the craps table of life, in hopes they will be chosen. If one extrapolates that backwards, one sees that they have nothing to do with their time that is more valuable, i.e. not working on a design for someone who can afford to pay $20,000 for a logo.

So, we will have a few people at the top of the design field, just like there are a few people at the top of the blog field, who have worked their way up, who make the big bucks. In the meantime the vast majority of humanity is fighting over scraps in the bottom. I’m not sure what the ultimate outcome will be but I do know that it’s just getting started and I have a feeling it’s going to get quite ugly. I don’t see it as good, or bad, it just is. We are, at our base level, not much different than the animals on the Savannah when the water starts drying up. This little issue you brought up is a tiny microcosm of a global issue that has yet to settle.

I was pondering the other night, to take this to a very dark place, exactly how much does stand between life, as we know it, and another “dark age.” I know I’ve taken this topic way beyond anything necessary or called for when you asked for comments but since I started pondering the concept of infinity as a pre-schooler, it’s hard for me to do less. It does seem that great periods of darkness punctuate great periods of light and advancement in our history. The ruins tell us so. Human nature and financial constraints drive people to services like 99designs and I appreciate that. However, I can’t help but wonder exactly how it fits into the greater scheme of things.

As the owner of multiple micro businesses, and a business consultant in my niche, my concern goes far deeper than how payments for health insurance should be structured.  I see the size of the mass of people who contribute minimally to society to be expanding rapidly.  The lifestyle choices of these non-producers is a huge contributor to the health care cost problem.  The further we get from “you reap what you sow” and “if you don’t work, you don’t eat,” the more people sit rather than sow and eat when they should be working.

Deciding that something is a “right” means that it’s another excuse to remove money from the pockets of those who work and transferring it to the pockets of those who don’t. Too many people either don’t bother to work at all, or prefer to use their money to buy drugs and alcohol, then expect the rest of us to pay their medical bills for them.

I think we need a point scale to back up all of these “rights”.  If someone is working full time – or working several jobs – isn’t an alcoholic, doesn’t gamble away all his/her money, use illegal drugs, and breeds responsibly, they earn points that entitles them to a great many things our society has to offer.  People who haven’t “earned” the right by contributing to society don’t get it.  That’s far more important in minimizing the cost and maximizing the working base that’s ultimately paying for it.

Of course at some point we’d have to be willing to step over the dead bodies of those who choose a non-contributory life style.  Do we have the stomach for that?

Added 3/17/10:  After reading Seth Godin’s Linchpin, I realize there really is another option and it starts with adding “success thinking” to our educational curriculum in preschool.  Our educational system has to be totally revamped.  It no longer serves the needs of our society.  I’ll write another post on that later this spring or in the summer.  It’s on the To-Do List.