It’s amazing to me the amount of knowledge that was left out of my education. As a victim of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I have many times commented that I would like my money back—or at the very least, my parents should receive a tax refund. I’m not saying that I should have walked out of high school knowing everything about everything, but considering the amount of time spent there and the amount of false or misleading information that I did get, it was at best a horrible misuse of my time. I think about this whenever I come across new or interesting information that is relevant to life, or just plain interesting.
An example is the book His Excellency: George Washington, which I loved. One of the concepts from the book that stood out for me was debt. There were a multitude of reasons for the American Revolution, and each one could take up its own book; but debt is one that is especially interesting to think about considering what’s going on today. Pre-revolution, many Americans were suffering from substantial debt, and many landowners were going broke off the system created by the English.
Washington was one of the few that realized this and tried to prevent it. He had, like many, gotten into trouble buying overpriced goods from England. He decided to live more frugally. Even then, it was hard to just get by, let alone prosper, while being forced to buy seeds and equipment from England. A lot of colonists ended up so far in debt that they lost everything, and there were really no other options. The British were content to sell second-rate goods at twice the price while passing laws and taxes to ensure their monopoly. The revolution for many was just a very complex form of bankruptcy.
When you think about it, relief from debt to banks was just as important as relief from a tyrant king. Debt is essentially a marker against your production. Your debt can only be worked off by producing. If people were to actually look at it that way, we’d have less debt. If someone went in to buy a flat screen TV and was told it would take ten months of his life to pay for it, he might reconsider. When you get to the point where you are talking about years or more of your life it gets even more depressing. People don’t think of it that way, though, which is why we are paying so much for shitty products these days.
If enough people decide to say fuck that, then businesses can’t get away with insane markups on products. The business will have to lower its prices. That’s where we would be, if it were not for government. Using government officials to create favorable conditions for companies is nothing new. It’s been going on since the railroads backdoored corporate person-hood into law, and it continues to this day. If you want an example, look at the recording and entertainment industries and their repeated attempts, with some success, to use litigation to force people to buy into their monopoly. CDs and DVDs were cheaper to make than their predecessors, yet both were sold at substantial price increases, which have not gone down even though production cost has.
The MPAA and RIAA offer great examples of how we are not and haven’t been using free markets. For example, the MPAA is using its stooges in congress to introduce backdoor net neutrality-killing legislation into the stimulus package. These industries rely on people not having other options, and the people have responded. If you think I’m condoning pirating, I’m not. Neither do I condemn it. The best reasoning, and the main point companies don’t get, was explained to me by a guy I knew that pirated excessively. He told me that he was completely willing to pay for content, but found the prices to be unreasonable. It can be a pain to pirate content: you have to find it, download it, make sure it’s a good copy, hope it’s not infected with a virus, find a crack, etc. To him this was more reasonable then paying $50-100 for a game or program that cost the producer a couple of bucks to make.
If prices went down then debt would go down, and people would have more of their own production to use in whatever way they see fit. Right now, this doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. People aren’t going out and buying overpriced useless crap as much, so businesses are panicking. They too have been living off debt, borrowing against projected profits— so they are screaming at the banks to give them money, and the banks are screaming at congress. They can no longer get people to willingly give up their production to them, so they go to congress to tax the production from people and give it to them. Even though people aren’t buying shit, they are still paying for it.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Heh. "You'll be stone debt in a moment!"
I don't buy the pirate argument, simply because music is a luxury. A free market works on the basis of a cost that is agreeable to both the buyer and the seller. What that argument basically implies is that the buyer has an exclusive right to set a price… and should the seller fail to agree, the buyer may simple take what he wants without compensation.
One an argue that music / movies / games / software is overpriced all one wants, but people are buying the product. A fair price is a price one is willing to pay, yes?
I'm not saying the buyer should take what they want without compensation. The problem is the monopolies the RIAA and MPAA have on the industries. The internet and new systems to distribute content should have been the natural way for the market to break those monopolies but they went to congress and changed the law in their favor. That didn't work so now they are trying to change the law again by making ISP's filter content. The buyer obviously wants a different business model but the RIAA and MPAA refuse to change.
They don't have a monopoly, though. They may control a good portion of the industry, but they don't control all of it. And regardless of the law, if people were absolutely unwilling to pay for their product, they would not be making money.
I'm not a fan of the current IP structure by far, but I'm not a fan of the excuses pirates make either. The option to not buy music always exists.
Filtering content, in my mind, is a separate issue. Considering the amount of money we spent (via tax) to establish the backbone of the internet, I cannot see giving a private entity jurisdiction over what people share. The legality / illegality is irrelevant to that discussion… it's a bit like banning trucks from the road because people use trucks to transport stolen electronics.