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Imagine what will happen when the majority of material goods achieve this same ease of distribution and duplication.

The price of material (such at petroleum) will soar in relation to everything else.

BTW, both the replies to my post were simply different restatements of Marx's material dialectics (not surprising since it is taught in school).

To Marx and the modern academia, people are souless material creatures in dull dreary lives where they mindlessly consume. To Marx, business was nothing more than a Machiavellian power play of dominance and submisstion.

In contrast to Marx, the orginal founders of the US saw people as spiritual creatures. The property rights debate was not simply driven by the desire to produce more stuff to consume. It was driven by the thought that the creation of property was part of the way that spiritual creatures interacted with the world.

If you accept the Free Market view then you would see that economic activity is more than just the speed of gratification (as it is defined by Marx) is it an exercise of our values in the world. The property rights issue is not simply about the friggin' speed of gratification. It is about the way free people interact in the world. Even if we have extremely rapid production cycles, those production cycles can and will be driven by human creativity and insight because the mind is the ultimate force that drives the economy.

I did not say porn was okay. I was actually thinking along these lines. Start with the premise that porn is bad. What then is the best way to counter something that we think is bad. The knee jerk reaction is to throw up obstacles. What most obstacles do is create a reaction to the obstacle. In the case of porn, the reaction is likely to be people spending to find ways around the obstacle. The artificial obstacles would feed more money into pornographer's hands.

If you wanted to undermine porn, you might consider doing the opposite ... that is to let the porn market undermine and destroy itself.

Sociologically, it seems that the worst part of the porn market is that part of the porn market that is flush with cash and uses their economic power to coerce people into the industry. The porn industry seems to be do a lot of using up then casting young women aside. There is a growing number of people who were drawn into porn, but now live on the edge. My thought is that free porn might undermine this distructive part of the market.

Creating artificial obstacles creates a false economy where pornographers make more money. Hence, removing those obstacles would reduce the money made by pornographers.

BTW, the free market is not simply about everyone making more money. The free market really excels at balancing and optimizing things. Letting the market undermine the porn lords would probably be a good thing. The porn lords current fortunes are an imbalance. So, yes, destroying that income stream would be good.

I see what you're trying to say- that labor is the basic value of money, thus things that are harder to create cost more. But that's not so- the stockbroker and the banker are paid the best of any employee in this economy, but they produce no actual goods. Likewise the stockholder and the venture capitalist are extremely well paid for produceing no products at all.

I agree with you and with Marx that the value of money comes from the labor of the people. But in the last 150 years, a small minority of people have been working very hard to change that- by use of cartels, monopolies, and multinational corporations. And they've succeeded- we've lost the war for a free market. The market is called a free market, but it hasn't been for some time now. Thanks to a phrase in your above post, I found this. In fact, I suspect you might be the same person. What most free marketeers fail to see is that we haven't had a free market in the United States since the 1840s. In fact, near as I can tell there hasn't been a free market anywhere in the world since the invention of the Steam Engine allowed what I call "foreign influences" to interfere in local markets. As long as those foreign influences exist- the net result of the free market will be capitalism and communism- not freedom.

Personally, I don't like employee ownership. As we are having a /. discussion about CEOs removing their salaries from the expense column and receiving all of the income in the form of profit, I figured the shareholder concept is worth mentioning.

The biggest problem with employee ownership schemes is that it puts all of the employee's asset in a single basket...a basket that they do not control. Employees should diversify their portfolio. Since they have their greatest asset, their labor, invested in their employer, they probably should invest the assets in something else like their house, mutual funds, etc..

[CEOs] in breach of their fiduciary duties to shareholders.

Communitarians note that income statements are entirely geared toward the perspective on one stakeholder...the proprietor. As you mentioned CEOs have fiduciary duties to shareholders but to none of the other stakeholders affected by the company.

I am not a communitarian, that does not mean I don't find their ideas intriguing. BTW, most institutional investors like insurance companies, banks, mutual funds...they all seem to invest in very sheepish ways. This is a great system for the wolves.

When blogging, you play the roles of subject, writer, editor and publisher. The whistle blowing laws are probably the best recourse for a fired blogger; however, without an established publishing institution behind blogs, I doubt whistle blowing cases will succeed.

IANAL, but it seems to me that the whistle blowing laws pretty much assume a hapless employee blowing the whistle to an authority. Publishing your blog puts you in the compromised situation of being both the hapless whistle blower and the authority.

I think the main issue here is not about freedom of speech... but lack of right to job.

The problem with the current state of employment is that employees really don't build up any solid assets. If we were building assets while we work, we wouldn't be beholden to any particular employer.

One possibility of a bidding for shift structure is that people will bid for more leisure.

I've been reading literature on the nurse shortage. They are saying we have a dire problem developing and maintaining this valuable resource. A direct feedback mechanims between hospitals and staff will hurt unions but it is likely to result in better utilization of a scarce resource. After reading and thinking about bidding for intraoffice work. I am writing this up as a major innovation in employment and resource management.

You are right. I should not have said "sell." I thought I had said "exercise." Generally employees cash in by exercising the option then immediately selling the stock.

The employee options I've had in my life have all been pegged to employment. So I would have the options from the day I joined the company to the day I left. I would have to exercise the option within 90 days of parting company with the company. NOTE, I keep being laid off in recessions so all my precious employee options have proven worthless to date. For that matter, generous option packages for employees makes mass lay off events very tempting for employers. Laying off employees in recessions automatically eliminates all of the options with a strike prices less than the current stock market value.

The really nasty downside to employee options is that, by being pegged to the employee lifecycle, they end up creating a double whamming for those employees laid off in recessions. The employee loses the paycheck and their retirement funds in one cruel stroke.

I used to be in favor of employee ownership, until I realized that employee ownership magnifies the risk of the employee. Employees need to diversify.

BTW, have you noticed how employers were more than willing to inundate new hirees with options at the height of the stock boom, but make a big deal about protecting employees from the risk of options after the market correction...now that options are a good deal again.

I think anything ending with an "ist" or "ism" is a leach on the society. That includes the word "capitalism" (capitalism is not the same as the free market). Capitalism is a system where a small number people gain a disproportionate level of influence through market manipulations. The label "capitalism" was defined by people in the Marxist camp. The US was intended to be a free market.

For the free market to work, people have to have ownership of something. The game of selling your entire life to a company is a single transaction is not leading to optimal results. This game where the majority of people become 100% dependent on a single source of income is a farce. This episode of striking against a bankrupt firm and getting fired by text message can only be described as a comedy.

Personally, I suspect that in a few hundred years, people will look at wage labor with the same horror that we currently look on slavery. Personally, I think the center of the economic world is people pursuing their own values. The free market gives people that chance.

The wage labor market, however, traps the majority of the population into these absolutely horrid 9-5 jobs. To break the tension, we become highly destructive during our vacations and our personal consumption.

Hopefully, some day in the future we will break form the prison of big business and get back to a free market centered on people.

Could there be a more appropriate quote that shows how the DMCA is ultimately an anti-competition and anti-capitalist tool?

It is an anti-competition tool, but is not an anti-capitalist tool. Stop confusing capitalism with the free market. Capitalism is system where capital is used to create more capital. The DMCA defends the capital of the megacorporations...so it is pro capitalism. Owning a political organization or a set of laws is like owning any other capital asset. You invest x amount in elected officials and you receive y amount in return. The DMCA is capitalism at its finest. Corporations invest in a law, then receive a return from that law.

Unfortunately, the debate between communism and capitalism was so loud, that we never really had the debate between capitalism and the free market.