The sort of geoist/mutualist municipal socialism that I recommend would be structured in a way that doesn't allow for anyone to accumulate very much more than anyone else....there's redistribution mechanisms built into the structure of my Anarchist Social Democracy. There would be no private property over land or industry, so the money from land value and industrial/commercial profits would be collectivized and divided up in an egalitarian fashion and redistributed back out to all the people as a citizens' dividend or universal basic income. Also, banking and monetary institutions would be collectivized, so the wealth would be redistributed in an egalitarian fashion. Profits would never accumulate into the hands of private individuals. And, there would be a system of voluntaryist progressive taxation built in, as well as a differential tax on the transfer of real estate, so excessive accumulation would be penalized and wealth would constantly be being redistributed downwards so that the society always remained egalitarian. Nobody would be “enslaved to those who have more” because nobody would have much more than anyone else. (This all makes more sense if you read my writings on “Anarchist Social Democracy.” Those writings can be found on AnarchistSocialDemocracy.com)
The "good inventory control" idea doesn't seem like a good enough answer to me. For one thing, how do you know how many shoes need to be made? How do you know how many should be kept in supply? But you could always just choose an arbitrary number and things would work well enough. The real problem is knowing how to best allocate resources.
Suppose we want more billiard tables in Blaville but they want more foosball tables in Yadatown. And suppose that the same materials are needed to produce both products, and that the materials are too scarce to supply us with as many of both as we would like. Then we must choose how to allocate resources. Under communistic arrangements, you have to do a lot of research, discussion, and deliberation to determine how those resources should be allocated. The appropriate way to allocate scarce resources is difficult to determine along communistic lines. If there is a scarcity of necessary resources, then it should go to democratic deliberation. But there is no scarcity of necessary resources in our society, so there's no need for full communism as long as we ensure that everyone has enough money to buy the things they need. Billiard tables and foosball tables are both luxury items. No one will die or suffer much because of a lack of either one. Consequently, there’s no real ethical crisis that demands communism in this situation. The easiest way to figure out how to allocate the resources is to let the people in Blaville and Yadatown each bid against each other. The demand for these items is reflected in prices, so the price signal signifies how resources could best be allocated. Not much research is needed. Then, since productive industry and commercial industry are collectivized under Anarchist Social Democracy, the profits from the sales are simply redistributed back out to all people in an egalitarian fashion. No one is accumulating excess wealth from sales, but the market is still functioning as an easy way to allocate resources without any effort.
Also, you suggested that “When enough inventory is on hand, workers move over to something else” and “When there is not enough supply, bring in more workers.” But this ignores specialization. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to just move workers from one industry to another willy-nilly like that. I would like my dentists to be dentists, my doctors to be doctors, my carpenters to be carpenters. Some degree of overlap is okay, but shifting workers around too much would be inefficient, as they’d always have to be trained on their new jobs and it would take a while to learn to be proficient at the new job, and then they might be moved to something else. Specialization of knowledge has its benefits. I don’t want my surgeon to forget how to do heart transplants correctly because he spends too much time working in other fields.
Furthermore, I think that we should strive to automate everything so that there are no more jobs at all. I want a fully-automated society where everyone gets paid simply for existing but where no one is able to accumulate excessive amounts of land, money, or anything else. Labor should be abolished and replaced by leisure. When people work, it ought to be because they found a hobby or something they enjoy doing, not because of economic necessity. So I look forward to a post-scarcity and fully-automated society, which I think would be possible in the near future. I also fall into the anarcho-transhumanist camp and think we should be striving to develop science and technology in order to extend human life, eliminate illnesses, achieve biological immortality, reach the singularity, and overcome all human limitations.
I guess I just have a tendency to read a lot of different schools of thought and see the strong points in each. I can't force myself to embrace any single ideology or school of thought or model of reality. I can only embrace the unique synthesis that I come up with by taking the good ideas from all the stuff I read and throwing out the bad ideas.