Look at what is happening in low-income countries now. You see a lot of small one-person/one-family businesses, which are effectively people buying themselves jobs (and being forced to carry equity risk of course). The state of the world in which most people are to be employed at set wages by some company is fairly new, and not at all universal. I don't actually think this is going to happen too much -- this is just a counterpoint to the "barter or crime" statement.