This perhaps requires some introduction.

Whenever I’ve argued with a Libertarian about the problems with capitalist systems, they’re always quick to point out that it’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s corporatism. If only we totally deregulated everything and allowed businesses to simply compete with each other, we wouldn’t have all these problems, because the market would self-regulate and weed all these things out of itself.

But the reality is that without regulation, corporatism is a natural component of a capitalist system — it’s part of the competition. If lobbying politicians for special favors isn’t outlawed, then that’s a venue that a business can pursue in order to try to facilitate its success (and a fruitful one at that). You can’t have an unregulated capitalist system that does not have corporatism. In order to get rid of corporatism, you have to regulate capitalism and declare such things off-limits.

Lobbying for favors and laws that benefit you is a way to influence the market in your favor without actually having to compete with your product. Disney doesn’t have to compete as much because they can extend copyright indefinitely, preventing the same ability to make derivative works that gave them their success. Part of any successful business model has to include not simply competing but preventing competition. That’s why there’s a bitter knot of lawsuits between Apple and Samsung — instead of that money being poured into R&D so that they can keep trying to outdo each other in the marketplace with products that, while similar, are constantly one-upped over the other guy’s alternative, they’re trying to prevent each other from even competing in that arena.

This is all a much larger conversation for another time, but the reason I bring it up is because lobbying is one way for entities that compete in a loosely-regulated capitalist system like in the United States to do so without actually competing in the marketplace itself. You compete by manipulating, not by actually playing the game. It’s like a cheat code, or like bringing a stun gun to a race.

Piracy operates in a similar way. The crucial difference is that it’s illegal, but I’m going to set that aside for right now, because the law belongs to those who can afford to buy it. The law will always be skewed in favor of the wealthy. If nothing else, contrast the impact of piracy (illegal) and the impact of lobbying (legal) on society and humanity, and figure out which one has more terrible an impact.

But there are benefits to piracy.

For starters, there’s the fact that piracy drives down prices for legitimate consumers by decreasing demand. If not everybody is buying everything they want to have, that decreases demand, which in turn drives down prices. But beyond all that is this, and this is far more important than any of that:

Before you could buy MP3s from digital distributors like Apple and Amazon, they were the primary format for pirating copies of physical media. People were ripping CDs and sending them to each other long before the iPod.

See, here’s the thing: In addition to cost, one must also look at effort as a motivating factor for purchasing. As soon as MP3s became a viable and popular method for distributing content, suddenly going to the store or waiting for a mail order for a physical copy of an album or a movie seemed like a chore. Going to a store might give you something closer to the immediacy of just downloading an MP3, but it still involved getting up and getting in your car and driving to a store and seeing if it was in stock and etc, whereas piracy involved a few clicks of a mouse and maybe half an hour or an hour of waiting, depending on your internet connection. Online ordering was as convenient, with just a few clicks of a mouse, but the wait time was much, much longer. In the end, you could still rip and encode the content and get the MP3s and do what you wanted with them, but it was a lot more work than just pirating it. (This is the same reason I would often download torrents of DVDs I owned for more convenient playback, instead of ripping and encoding them myself.)

And nobody was selling MP3s yet, so there was actually no legal alternative that offered the same benefits of convenience. That’s the one element that seems to be often ignored in all of this: Shows on NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, and a few others are all free if you have an antenna (and as for the “ad model”, we’ve been able to fast forward through commercials since the 1980s), but people will pirate them to watch on their own time because of the convenience. (That’s not to say that cost doesn’t also play a role — it is, after all, preferable to get something for free than to have to pay for it. But there’s more to it than just “free” versus “pay”, which is how the discussion is often characterized. You’re not just buying a product, you’re participating in an entire experience involved with obtaining that product. There are non-monetary costs, and there are benefits that are worth certain risks or feelings of guilt. The equation is more complicated.)

Eventually, MP3s — initially demonized by the RIAA, who tried repeatedly to outlaw them — became available for purchase (along with movies and their respective digital formats), giving rise to the digital distribution models we see today. Along with the iPod, iPhone, smartphones in general, and even the Zune.

By extension, you have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and other “rental”-type services, all of which provide even greater convenience than piracy, and now the studios are actually making money. Perhaps not as much as they would if everyone bought every movie they saw or every song they listened to, but it’s better than the zero dollars they were making from all the customers who turned to piracy as an alternative. Even Apple’s new “Match” service, while implicitly endorsing piracy, at least provides some amount of profit to the record industry. So now, everybody is benefiting, all thanks to the fact that pirates created digital formats and high-quality encoding methods and refused to stop illegally distributing those resulting digital copies of music and videos. Piracy spurred progress. (Not to mention things like how torrenting as a method of distribution is an ingenious technology in itself.)

Ultimately, a large part of Apple’s and Amazon’s respective successes over the last decade can be largely attributed to the effects of piracy on the marketplace. It’s hard to say whether digital distribution would have come about without piracy, but given that it’s far more profitable to lock people into being forced to purchase irreproducible physical pieces of media, there was little impetus for studios to invent it on their own. Ideally, for them, people would still be buying CDs and DVDs that they were unable to rip or copy. (Actually, the ideal situation for that business model is a world in which information cannot ever be copied in any form.)

Perhaps Apple might have invented it in order to sell the iPod. Again, this is all speculation, and it’s hard to say whether the iPod would have been thought up even without the earlier existence of digitized songs as data files. But when you look at the way the RIAA and MPAA have behaved in the face of all of this, it’s easy to conclude that if Apple invented the ability to rip CDs and attempted to sell it as a product, they’d have been sued out of business.

We owe a lot to piracy, and the innovations that have resulted from the myriad attempts to stifle it. Which is why I’m not really worried about all the ever-threatening laws and regulations and things that try to stop it. Instead, I’m excited by what amazing advancements to digital media and the internet will come as a result of this ongoing information arms race.

This image has been circulating all the usual social media outlets over the last few days:

It’s depressing, but there’s a lesson here for us to learn from, and possibly not the one you might think.

There exists a large contingent of Americans who think that everything is only ever improved by privatization, that competition and self-interest drive progress and result in the greatest possible end result. They believe that as many facets of public services as possible (for some people, the ideal is “all of them”) should be privatized.

The inverse of this philosophy is essentially communism — the idea that everything private should be made public in order to spread the wealth of business to the general population.

Both of these philosophies, while noble in their intentions, are wrong. The problem is that we only seem to have acknowledged that this is true of communism. Advocates of ideological privatization are still given enormous amounts of airtime (in part because you don’t see many communists owning large corporations and media conglomerates). The people we see on television — or rather are allowed to see on television — have a bias that favors the interests of the people bringing us that information. After all, why would they allow propagation of a message that undermines their entrenchment? (Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have their leashes, but that’s a different discussion for another time.)

The United States has on the whole spent the last century demonizing communism — often not over any of the actual tenets of the philosophy, but for political reasons and out of fear. Mostly, it was conflated with Stalin’s totalitarian government, despite the fact that communism is an economic philosophy and not a system of government. At this point it’s just a blanket buzzword used to describe anyone who questions capitalism, used much the same way as socialism. As Inigo Montoya put it, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

That’s not to say that there aren’t reasons to demonize communism. It just plain doesn’t work, because despite all our beliefs and desires that things were otherwise, humans aren’t all equal. They should be regarded equally, yes, but you’ll run into conflicts with reality if you try to limit them all equally. Humans do need incentives and largely do operate based on self-interest, and if all tasks yield equal reward, it makes people less willing to opt for more challenging activities. Sure, not all motivation is monetary, but leveling everything and completely removing individual benefit from individual effort causes major problems. We end up squelching the brightest flames by telling them they can only burn so much.

But that doesn’t matter, because communism is already not taken very seriously in this country. At least, not nearly as seriously as its converse, the “privatize everything” crowd, which is equally wrong. Just as an example (aside from the image above), a for-profit fire department would let your home burn to the ground if you didn’t pay for their services. (As has already happened.) And privatized prisons are an all-around nightmare, which is what happens when you create financial incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible, and keep them there for as long as possible. If you’re trying to maximize profits for this one particular business model, then it’s a tremendous success. But it’s also a success if you’re trying to become a fascist. Or if you’re looking to dehumanize people and ruin their lives. Or if you’re trying to eradicate forgiveness. Or if you’re some kind of sadist who loves punishment but hates rehabilitation. So it depends on what our goals are.

For whatever reason, instead of shooting their ideology down the same way we do with communism, we still give credence to the notion that we should always move government in the direction of greater privatization, as if privatization was somehow intrinsically a good thing.

It’s not intrinsically a bad thing, either, though. It’s just that operating for profit changes the models and motivations. The goals always transform from whatever they are (e.g. more humane and more rehabilitative strategies for criminals, or objective and comprehensive free education, or the greatest preventative healthcare system and longest average life expectancy) into “becoming the most profitable”, and that works to drive a lot of systems, but not a lot of others. Profit as a goal is fundamentally incompatible with other goals. So it depends on what we’re trying to accomplish. We need to differentiate between for-profit models working to make a profit and for-profit models working to actually accomplish the things we want. A father can be a successful father without charging for it.

In other words, we need to separate the success of financial gain from the success of actually achieving what we set out to do. They’re different things, and “profit” is a fundamentally incompatible goal with a number of other things. Perhaps not with “building the fastest computer” or “making the most comfortable clothes”, but certainly with “a logical, rehabilitative criminal justice system” or “affordable healthcare for everyone who needs it”.

The underlying problem is that we still try to work from ideology outward, instead of from reality inward. Instead of looking at what works and doesn’t work using a scientific lens, and finding the right tools for the job, we keep trying our damnedest to shoehorn the world into the boxes we think it should fit in. No matter how hard you try, you will never, ever get for-profit prisons to work. And you can keep trying, but you’ll be ruining lives in the process.

Until we acknowledge that both the public and the private sectors are necessary and have a place in our civilization, and that we shouldn’t move in either direction out of pure principle but rather figure out which solution works based on observable evidence, we’re going to continue to get things wrong. Insisting that every screw is philips-head just because you think that’s the best configuration doesn’t make it so, no matter how hard you try. You have to acknowledge that there are other screws in the world and carry a toolbox with the right tools for the job.

A couple months ago, my cat Enoch had some inflammation in his eye. We were worried it might be the sign of an infection, so to get ahead of it, we bought some ointment that we swabbed onto his eyeball with a Q-Tip. After a few days, it cleared up, and everything went back to normal.

Animals operate entirely on self-interest. They seek reward and avoid unpleasantness. But they have no ability to understand when short-term unpleasantness is necessary for long-term reward (or survival, even). It’s sad.

That’s the core concept that many conservatives champion as the ideal financial system: animalistic self-interest. The premise is that our base instincts will ensure we’ll be properly motivated, the idea being that we’re simply mammalian creatures who can do nothing but seek reward. But animals are incapable of recognizing when what they think is in their best interest is actually not. My cat struggled because he believed it in his best interest to writhe and struggle free of my grip before the unpleasant goo-stick touched his eye. People put off going to the dentist because they’re afraid of drills, and then end up having to have entire teeth extracted instead of cavities filled.

We have the capacity to see beyond our immediate fears and desires, though. It’s grossly underutilized because our financial system is structured to reinforce focus on responding to short-term interests, but the ability exists if we try.

Perhaps instead of embracing greed and self-interest, we should turn around and confront our evolution, look it in the face, and say “no.” Instead of continuing to reward the attributes that benefited our primitive ancestors — aggression, greed, pursuit of self-interest — we should reward the attributes that will best benefit our descendants — intelligence, compassion, introspectiveness, foresight — anchoring us to the future instead of the past.

We’re better than our primitive heritage. If we’re just going to give up and structure all our infrastructures and systems around the primitive beasts we used to be, we may as well climb back up into the trees.

I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, specifically the Keweenaw Peninsula. The area is sometimes referred to as the “copper country”, because there’s so much of the stuff up there.


Anyway, as with most mines of the time, miners who worked for Calumet and Hecla Mining Company were required to buy all their own tools before they worked, often from the company store, which would allow them to buy on credit that they’d have to pay back later out of their subsequent paychecks. The result of this situation was that miners were already in debt before they even started work.


I won’t drag out all the details, but there are parallels to be drawn with the ever-ballooning student loans we’re seeing today. Before workers even start their jobs, they’re required to buy the tools necessary for them to work, and are in debt right out of the gate. Only, instead of fifty cents for a hardhat and a dollar for a shovel, it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars for a certification, often for jobs that never used to require specialized education.


This is especially unsettling when you look at how increasing numbers of graduates are drawn to jobs in finance because the pay is higher and will allow them to pay off their enormous loans more rapidly. Meaning, students take on debt from banks, then go to work for the same banks that give out student loans, so that they can pay off those loans, and in the process figure out clever new ways to manipulate finances to benefit those who are already wealthy and penalize those who are not. (Even more disturbing is that they’re being drawn to these kinds of profit-maximization jobs instead of fields involving science and research, which offer a considerably greater benefit to human progress, prosperity, and civilization.)


In the end, it’s all about control — by forcing students into debt right out of the gate and making them more desperate for jobs, you’re making them more complacent and less willing to complain or demand fairness. (You can amplify this by refusing to hire more employees, even if you’ve made record profits and you have more workload than your current “human capital” (a rather disgusting term) can tackle in forty hours a week — it’s cheaper to manipulate them into working longer hours, especially if they’re salaried without overtime, than it is to hire more workers, and ensuring a shortage of jobs means you can leverage the growing pool of unemployed against your workers as a threat. And by keeping insurance inexplicably married to employment, you’re making people even less willing to stand up for themselves.)


It would seem the “competition” that conservatives keep championing is a race to the bottom, where recent graduates compete over who can put up with the most abuse, the lowest pay and benefits, the longest hours, and the worst lives. We can do better than this. The America that I believe in, the America I know we can be, is better than this.

For some reason, conservatives have been insisting on referring to rich people as “job creators”, but let’s take a quick second to logically break down some of the basics:

As Businesses

One of the most frequent arguments you hear is that you can’t tax rich people because they’ll be less inclined to start businesses or hire people to existing businesses. Yet, businesses have been making record profits, and executive salaries have gone, over the last half a century, from 10 or 50 times that of the average employee to around 500 times that of the average employee. In other words, they’re making more money than they did in the past, when they were taxed at higher rates and jobs were still fine and plentiful.

But for some reason, we have to tax them less, let them make even more money, allow them to pay us even less with poorer work conditions (think Chinese factory conditions and pay, often touted by certain conservatives as the “ideal”), and let the non-wealthy in the country shoulder the burden of all the sacrifices that need to be made, because somehow the wealthy today are incapable of doing as much with more resources than the wealthy forty years ago.

Either they’re spectacularly incompetent or they’re spectacularly greedy.

As Individuals

There’s all this talk about the “Trickle-Down Effect”, but the fact of the matter is that the wealthiest in this country don’t spend nearly as much as they take in every year. Perhaps if they spent almost as much or exactly as much as they took in, that money would constantly fluctuate throughout the market, but they don’t. They hoard it. Which means that the wealthiest 1% of the country have effectively factored over half the wealth out of our economy. That money might as well be on Mars for all the good it does anyone.

In reality, the (sadly diminishing) middle class is the driving force behind job creation, because we buy things, and there are a lot of us. The wealthiest 1% is only so many people. There’s no reason for them to buy ten times the amount of food they’d need, or even ten times the amount of luxury goods. There’s no incentive for them to spend more. And even if they bought extremely expensive things in order to unload a lot of money, those expensive things won’t necessarily create more jobs, as it’s unlikely that creation of one extremely expensive car, for instance, generates more jobs than the non-luxury equivalent. The wealthy minority doesn’t increase jobs through increasing demand, at least not in a way that’s significant. Car manufacturers make more money from non-luxury vehicles than from their luxury equivalents, because more people can afford to buy the cheaper models.

This is why a more balanced distribution of wealth is NECESSARY for a healthy economy. It’s the MIDDLE CLASS who are the job creators, not the wealthiest. Regardless of the myths about “Job Creators” that you hear coming from politicians, there’s absolutely no reason at all to allow the rich unmitigated wealth at the expense of the rest of us. In fact, that only makes everything worse. (And for you libertarians out there, a fraction of the population being able to afford to buy more than just the basics does not a free market make.)