John,
You make a very good case for not paying composers, painters,
movie directors and other artists. Which is what has happened in the
U.S.... William Baumol has a paper on the NYU Economics site about
the problem of "spillovers" which means that the person who comes up
with an idea does not get the full financial benefit of his R & D. Of
course you make the case that his discovery is meaningless since
it was all out there to begin with.
Sort of "A cow is of a bovine ilk one end is moo the other milk."
And we all have the right to graze to our heart's content. What is that
cow on the internet's name? You know the one. She grazes for her
ideas and then makes money without compensating the poor fools who
wanted recognition so bad they wrote it all down on the net. She is
their visable partner or is that parasite?
What about "externalities"? Are you suggesting that there is
no such thing as private property? Or is only physical property capable
of being private or capital? What about money? Is it physical property?
Should all "intellectual capital" folks make their living teaching in
Universities
and compose, philosophize, research etc. for fun? Is this the root of all
of that half-hearted, poorly thought out education in the Universities these
days? Of course if you have a really hard-nosed composer like a Wagner
or a Strauss you might find him selling his soul to the local devil just to
be able to compose full time. This happened in 1938 with most of the
musicians and university staff of Germany when they elected to follow full
employment in their professions into the Nazi party.
They were tired of governmental and societal activities that imposed
uncompensated costs upon themselves even thought their work was
being used and forced them to make a living in other than their expertise.
(negative externalities). They were forced to either give up their
professions
or to create benefits for people who didn't pay for those benefits. (positive
externalities) In other words the "free riders" in the society created the
climate
which produced a monster and murdered the most convenient and affluent
group in order to solve a job population problem. The best the local
Georgists or others can seem to come up with is scarcity. Make it scarce
enough and it will grow in value and make compensation happen. Of
course it didn't and doesn't work that way with intellectual capital. Scarcity
just means your consumers grow dumb and don't know the difference between
having it and not. Same problem with software. So find a way to charge
for everything or nothing seems to be the only solution by the intellectually
barren.
In artistic styles you can usually forecast the end of an era by the complexity
and brownian movement required to accomplish formerly simple tasks. I
suspect that we are approaching the "North" in our economics and that something
new is in the works. Something less linear and more able to integrate the idea
of linkage and networking that the Internet is now teaching the formerly linear
business world. As has been said often on this list. It may be the very
nature
of work itself as well as the concept of value. I don't work for money and I
know
few artists who do. But we all must eat, live and propagate or make war.
Artists,
as I noted earlier, make the best propagandists, for Tyrants, in the business.
So
maybe the issue here is a more mature grown-up attitude about work itself.
Perhaps
people should work to accomplish goals within the work itself rather than for
money.
It finally just took too much to keep Copernicus afloat. Are we approaching
that
same situation with the economic theory of markets? They try to claim that
they
are ultimately simple and yet the language and theories are convoluted and
resemble
artistic (art for its own sake) formulas more than practical ways of keeping a
society
afloat. And they lie. Consider the sublime duality that even permeates so
liberal an
institution as this list itself.
On the one hand you have the commons and on the other you have the
individualists. Why must we be hung on the cross of these two alternatives?
The one thing about a cross is that it isn't one unless you have both sides at
once. But a cross is not a circle, except in one dimension, and so only
signifies a tremendous lack of imagination in problem solving that
infects those who can only see two sides. The individual and the commons
are just two pendulum swings on the circle and should be acknowledged
as two vital parts but only two. Can we get beyond the Barron's Business
Review Series for a discussion on these issues crucial for the Future of Work?
Or should we say that there is a bottom line bibliography for serious discussion
of any of these problems?
Regards
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Here is a "reasonable" defense of grazing by the Queen herself.
I post it since grazing on her seems to be what she wants.
http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Esther_Dyson/ip_on_the_net.article
