exactly how will an economy get going in a colony?

Well, boys and girls, I'm working on that story and am wondering
something. Consider this period of time: the colony has just begun
to break even. The hungry time is almost over, egg and meat
production in the zero g farming pods are up, wheat production is on
line and that means pizza, folks. Oxygen and co two are balanced and
nobody is dying from the water Etc.

Lets presume that some government or consortium of governments
originally paid for the colony and everybody who got selected to go
WAS getting a pay check on earth. But now what? Will they continue
to get a pay check and be employees of the original governmental
entity (or it could be a private company, either; say Gates shared
all that loot with Virgin Sun)? That kind of presupposes some
private ownership, or where will they spend the pay? If they decide
not, will they go for a Colony Government that will own the whole
sheebang and they will still be employees but get to vote directly
on the allocation of resources? Or will they split up the resources
somehow, like in cooperatives of some kind, or a mixture of coops
and private ownership? In the asteroid mining ventures, for
example: who will own the profits?

In the story, there's an argument in a bar, and I'm plotting that
argument. Which side is the azzhole side (please forgive me,
profanity is going to get me in trouble someday), is what I'm
wondering. The guy who argues, Yeah, we should break from earth and
start our own socialist government, or the guy who argues for a
government of private enterprise and splitting up the resources
somehow--how?--and maybe not even splitting from earth, since that
wouldn't be entirely necessary, it would seem, if private enterprise
were the thing. One doesn't want to split from one's customers, the
great innocence Vinge assumed in Darkess of the Deep, the
commandments of return business saves the day there. (One wouldn't
want to split from potential customers, either, in a socialist
government but in real life all save China, possibly, never got that
and failed, so I don't think that's an authentic-sounding solution
for a fiction writer to use. In other words, if the guy in the bar
argues for a kind of communism or socialism, he's probably going to
want to split from Earth, but the guy on the opposing side might
not. I'd like that. I don't want to split from Earth. It's not just,
their labor and the labor of centuries "paid" for the colony, and
besides, some of my best friends are Earthlings.)

I think there have to be some coops. Like atmosphere maintenance? Is
this because I went to school in San Francisco? All us Catholics are
allowed to think in terms of coops. Blessed Dorothy Day of the
Catholic Worker movement, twentieth century, was a proponent of
agricultural coops, and the Church supports this kind of solution to
poverty (meaning coops in an overall framework of capitalism, of
free enterprise) in spite of Her firm opposition to communism. I
know a Catholic web site that is discussing the Catholic Worker
movement right now, if anyone's interested.

Anyway. Again necessary non-technical issues. What would that
argument in a bar sound like? What would the sides be? Who do you
think is the Bad Guy?

By the way, this is such a beautiful day in Guadalajara, such a high
blue sky, kite flying day, that it's a wonder why anyone would ever
want to leave Mother Earth.

Jan