Imagine you find yourself in one of those underground malls, where they design it such that you never have to go above ground. Now, instead of just the mall, your living and working space is also underground. It is an underground community that is like a small town, except everyone is stuck there, unable to leave the mole utopia. You know, however, that there is a world outside and that people live above ground. It’s a not prison, just a system that is complete, so you have no reason to leave the mole utopia.

In your world, everything works like it does in the world of today. People have jobs, socialize, conduct commerce, and have families, all the stuff we associate with normal human society. The one difference between the mole utopia and this world is their economy is based on jelly beans, the little candies given to kids at Easter. Each color has a different value and people treat them in the same way you would treat coins or bills. When you get paid, it is in jelly beans. When you buy stuff, it is in jelly beans.

No one knows where the beans come from or who is responsible for making sure the supply of beans is correct. There’s some vague notion of a jelly bean consortium and people who spend their days keeping track of all beans in circulation. There are people, who police the bakers to make sure they are not making fake jelly beans. Otherwise, the beans are just the thing that is there, taken for granted by everyone. The jelly beans used in commerce are as much a part of reality as the air people breathe.

Now, there are people in charge and they do control the supply of beans. At first, when they set the system up, they figured the goal was to keep the supply of beans constant, as beans are fragile and people will tend to eat them. The best bean counters in mole utopia were recruited to keep track of the flow of beans in order to determine the overall supply and rate of bean decay. They would order up new beans to be introduced into the supply to keep the supply of beans steady, so there could never be a shortage.

At first they would just have people hand out beans under the guise of charity, but before long the people doing that started cheating. They would keep the beans or only give them to friends and family. The next scheme was to have the government of mole utopia disperse the new beans, by hiring people and buying stuff. This worked pretty well until government started cheating and ordered up beans whenever it needed to buy votes or reward friends of the government. This caused people to lose faith in the jelly beans.

Finally, the bean counters landed on a scheme where they would lend the new beans to banks at extremely low interest. The bean banks, flush with new beans, would then lend beans to people at very low rates. This got the beans into the economy, without anyone stealing them or using the supply to corrupt the system. The one flaw is the bankers got rich from the scheme, but bankers are always rich, so no one really noticed much of a change. It also made the bankers dependent on the bean counters.

The bankers could lend to anyone, including the government. Since rates were so low, the government could borrow vastly more than under the prior arrangements. That meant they could spend vastly more than in the past. The bankers were never worried about the government repaying, because ultimately they controlled the supply of beans, so they could always order more beans. That meant it was the safest type of loan, because the government would always make its payments and make them in full.

The only constraint on the government spending was how fast they could increase spending. Too fast an increase and too many beans would enter the economy of mole utopia, lowering the value of each bean. This could distort markets in unpredictable ways, by increasing demand unexpectedly in some areas, but not in others. This would also raise prices and force lending rates to increase. Therefore, inflation became the only check on spending. As long as inflation remained low, spending was unlimited.

This description of mole utopia may sound simple and ridiculous, but it is how the modern American economy is run by the Federal Reserve. Modern Monetary Theory is the economic argument that government spending is only constrained by inflation, as long as the government has control of the money supply. Here is a short video lecture on the topic from Professor Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University. Here is a much shorter version in the form of a post that appeared on Zero Hedge last week.

The basic argument of the MMT people is that as long as there are resources not being utilized by the private sector, the state has a duty to step in and put those resources to use through government spending. That’s a moral argument, not an economic argument or a factual observation. The economic argument is that spending and debt is meaningless, as long as the state is not crowding out the private sector and the spending is not driving up retail inflation. Otherwise, the government can spend as much as necessary.

To many people, this sounds like a version of the old joke about the stranger who comes to a small town looking for a room. He plops down a few hundred dollars and the inn keeper tells him to wait while his room is prepared. In the meantime, the innkeeper rushes out to pay his vendors, who then rush out to pay their vendors. Eventually, that new money reaches the town’s prostitutes, who use the inn for their clients, renting rooms on credit. They rush in with the new money and pay the innkeeper what they owe.

In that old gag, the stranger changes his mind about a room, takes his money back and leaves town, but everyone that was owed money is now paid. That’s the joke. The lesson, of course, is that as long as everyone is getting paid, especially the prostitutes, the system keeps spinning and everyone is happy. That’s the moral theory of MMT in a nutshell. As long as productive resources are being utilized and everyone is getting paid, the system keeps spinning. Just as important, the society remains stable.

The critics will instinctively shoot back that this sort of economics is inherently unstable and the apparent stability is short lived. In the long run, the accumulation of debt becomes untenable and the system collapses. The response to that is no one, especially government, lives in the long run. More important, MMT answers the question as to how government should respond to automation. As robots eliminate jobs, more people become idle. How does the state address the problem of fewer jobs for a growing population?

There’s another way to look at this. The custodial state runs on the same premise as a prison. The first job of the warden is to maintain control of the prison. He does that by making sure the prisoners are always kept busy in ways that work toward his goal of maintaining control of the prison. One mechanism for doing that is controlling the supply of goods and services in circulation in the prison. Prisons have an economy based on items from the commissary and that commissary is controlled by the warden.

What MMT seeks to do is make the sovereign state, by which is meant the issuer of currency, the commissary of the American economy. By controlling the supply of goods and services, via currency manipulation, spending and debt, the state can keep an increasingly useless population busy. It can always reward activities that enhance control of the system and punish activity that creates disorder. Inevitably, the communications companies, banks and technology firms become the prison guards of the system.

The economics of empire are well understood. Persia for example, conquered the surrounding people, because it meant those people paid tribute to Persia. The cost of conquest was covered by the initial booty, at least in theory. Tribute was calculated on the ability to pay and the cost of defending the new land. While Ego certainly played a major role in empire building, economics were also a factor. In agrarian society, land was the store of wealth, so acquiring new lands was how a people got rich.

This is the reason empires preferred to negotiate with potential new vassals, rather than just invade. It made the math predictable. The initial conquests were all about the warrior spirit or maybe old grudges, but as an empire matured, it was about economics. If a city-state on the Aegean, for example, was willing to submit to Persia without a fight, the cost of conquest was easy to calculate. Not only that, but it also lowered the cost of maintaining the relationship, as the new vassal would be cooperative.

This has been the rule of empire since the first empire. The Romans conquered the Italian peninsula because of age old conflicts with the neighboring people. They conquered the Mediterranean because it made them rich. The British Empire was a purely financial empire, as were all the colonial empires. There were rivalries between the European powers, for sure, but their main motivation was economic. Conquering the New World and Africa was all about enriching the conquerors.

There has always been another element to the economics of empire and that is the nature of rule. Empires have always been defined by personal rule. A ruling family or maybe a ruling tribe, sat atop the system. They owned land themselves and treated their conquests as personal property, even if they were not defined so legally. When new lands were acquired, the emperor or king got his cut first. Then the rest was distributed to his lieutenants and supporters down to the soldiers themselves.

Personal rule means personal responsibility. Darius, the Persian emperor, had a personal stake in the welfare of his vassals. To simply loot them would be like a shepherd skinning his flock, rather than shearing them. The economics of empire have always been the same as the economics of monarchy. The people at the top must treat their vassal states as they would treat their own property, which means they have a stake in their prosperity and therefore a motivation to preserve the value of the conquest.

America is the first democratic empire. The British Empire had democratic elements, like a parliament and limited suffrage, but it was a long way from liberal democracy, as we currently define it. By the time liberal democracy swept the West in the first half of the last century, the British Empire was in steep decline. That process was the result of America rising to dominate the West and eventually become the global hegemon. America elected to conquer the world to spread democracy.

Democracy, of course, turns the ruling class of a country into renters. Unlike an owner, a monarch for example, the office holders in a democracy are in it for short term profit. The next election could find them back in the dreaded private sector. To hedge against that eventuality, they must convert as much private property into public property, to distribute it to friends of government. Democracy is just a formalized version of tragedy of the commons, that always ends in it murdering itself.

The question then is how a democratic empire can survive, when the ruling elite of that empire are motivated to loot the empire. In the Cold War, this was not a consideration, because the other side was a similar empire built around communism, which is just the material implementation of democracy. The natural inclination of both systems to loot themselves was checked by the very real threat of nuclear annihilation. The commies invested in territorial integrity, while the West invested in their economies.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire is something that gets little attention, as it is just assumed to have been inevitable. Communism, however, shares something with liberal democracy. The people at the top have no incentive to invest in society. The Soviets did not develop their social and human capital. Instead, it ruthlessly exploited it, along with the natural resources of the territory. The Soviet system was like a renter using the furniture for firewood. When the energy markets collapsed, the Soviets collapsed.

Liberal democratic empire, rather than strip mine natural resources from the land, monetizes social capital through cost shifting. For example, business brings in foreign workers to suppress wages but then dumps those workers into the surrounding community. Their cost of support consumes the social capital of that community through corruption of local institutions, increases in crime and social alienation. In other words, the cost of cheap goods is the loss of community and local control.

Another aspect of the exploitative economics of liberal democratic empire is how America strip mines foreign lands of their human capital. Silicon Valley, for example, is majority non-white. The best minds from around the world are recruited to the economic centers of the empire. Spend time around the Imperial Capital and it is not only a foreign country, but also an alien country. It is nothing like the rest of the empire. That is because it is a collection point for foreign elites serving the empire.

What collapsed the Soviet system was the same as with any economic enterprise. The cost of maintaining it exceeded the benefits of maintaining it. The Soviets ran out of cash to pay their bills and went bankrupt. The Soviets had to subsidize the vassal states for the local elites to remain in power. They also had to spend on security forces to keep those local elites from getting any ideas. The cost of doing those things eventually exceeded the proceeds of natural resource extraction.

In the American empire, a different crisis is brewing. The destruction of social capital has reached a point where the middle class is collapsing. Inequality has never been higher, but it promises to soar as the Baby Boom generation ages off and their assets are consumed by the state. The proliferation of private debt to provide the illusion of prosperity and mask the loss of social capital has beggared the young. The next generation is guaranteed to have a lower standard of living than their parents.

The collapse of social capital is surely one cause of the decline in entrepreneurship. To start a business is to take a risk. Having social support not only mitigates the cost of failure, but it also encourages risk taking. As capital, social and human, has been collected into the control of an increasingly narrow elite, entrepreneurship has declined while overall leverage has grown. The rentier system of liberal democracy has turned the ruling elites into renters, using up resources without replacing them.

The Russian implementation of democratic communism in an empire became unstable when the proceeds from energy sales could not cover the cost of empire. Like a business with a negative cash flow, it simply ran out of money and collapsed. It is tempting to think something similar happens in America. After all, government debt at all levels is staggering and is accelerating. That is a mistake, however, as the state is no longer in control of the empire. Control now rests in private hands.

Proof of that is the inability of the empire to control the borders. Across the West, the voters want to sharply reduce legal immigration and end all illegal migration. Yet supposedly sovereign governments are unable to do it. In America, the President is stymied at every turn by a system largely controlled by forces that exist outside the government. The reason there can be no border wall is the managerial elite that benefits from and oversees the empire will never permit it.

The more likely source of instability will come from the cannibalization of social capital that has been the fuel of the “new economy” for decades. The loss of social capital has reduced social trust, which in turn has resulted in a decline in trust of national civic institutions. Why would people put faith in their institutions when their office holders are powerless? That is a lesson rocketing around Europe. It explains the “yellow vest” protests and the rise of right-wing populism.

In America, only a fool believes the ruling class. People are becoming increasingly alarmed by what is happening in the administrative state and its private partners in the technology and financial class. This loss of trust will inevitably lead people to look for alternative sources of legitimacy, authority, and collective security. Identity politics is just a preview. As America becomes majority-minority, politics becomes a winner take all proposition, which will foster a rise of tribal politics.

The traditional empire always stagnated when it stopped expanding. What followed was a long period of decline. In a democratic empire, the economics that naturally flow from democracy hollow out the empire, by converting its social capital into power and status of a detached ruling elite. The global rulers of today see themselves as detached from those over whom they rule. Their subjects are just resources to be utilized and discarded.

The question to be answered is what happens to the American empire when the social capital is gone? Is it possible for a tiny alien elite to maintain control of a continent-wide population entirely dependent on the system for order and stability? Can the culture of the penitentiary scale up in such a way that the inmates still believe they oversee the institution? No one knows, because there has never been a democratic empire, but that is the task facing the ruling class of the American empire.

While I was in Europe, the world celebrated the anniversary of the Lehman collapse, the bank at the center of the mortgage meltdown. Like everyone, the fact that it has been ten years since the world teetered on the edge of the abyss slipped my mind. It is important to think back on the last decade, since many economists and analysts still think it was a near-death experience for the world. Danish television was playing the movie The Big Short, for example.

As to the crisis itself, a few things remain remarkably obscure. One is that the best minds on this stuff still cannot bring themselves to notice the biological element. Blacks and Hispanics were wildly over-represented in the default numbers. The only analysts and commentators, outside of those on this side of the divide, to notice this fact, do so to “debunk” it. These are the folks who run around making sure everyone in the human sciences says “race is a social construct” five times a day while facing Frankfurt.

The other mystery is that the so-called experts still have not explained how the sub-prime mortgage happened. Even a decade on, it is hard to get reliable numbers on the quantity of mortgages that constituted the bad paper. The only thing that the experts agree upon is that the lowering of lending standards created a speculative bubble. The result was a wave of over-lending and over-building, that led to the great mortgage bubble which burst a decade ago.

Currently, the druids from the grand economic council claim that eight million people lost their jobs because of the recession that followed the collapse. That seems small, given that the labor force is roughly 160 million. That means unemployment would have gone from about four percent to just under ten percent. That is the official line from the druids in the academy, but it certainly does not fit with the narrative about this being a near-death experience for the economy. Those numbers suggest a common recession.

Another part of the official narrative is that super-smart druids from the academy rushed in and saved the world from ruin. That is an interesting aspect of this story. Economists all believe that the Great Depression could have been thwarted, and as a result the events that followed could have been avoided, if central banks had expanded the money supply in response to the crash of ’29. Therefore, the reason this crash did not result in world war and the rise of you-know-who was the central banks expanded the money supply.

Another number that was presented at the end of the film was that the collapse resulted in six million foreclosures. This number is hard to judge, other than the presence of the mystical number six. There is no question that lots of people lost their homes. It’s also true that lots of connected people cashed in on this by quietly investing in house flipping operations that preyed on the vulnerable. I recall being in Las Vegas sometime after the crash and thinking that the only guy getting rich was the guy selling “For Sale” signs.

Of course, the inability to figure out the details of what was billed as the greatest economic event in world history since the crash of 1929, may have something to do with who was responsible. In a world run by bankers of a certain sort, it is probably a bad idea to point out that the bankers were responsible for destroying the economy. The economists start from the assumption that the failure was not systemic and not deliberate. They seem to view it as a weird accident like leaving the coffee pot on before leaving for work.

It’s like the bias toward normal distributions that Nicholas Taleb discusses in his book, The Black Swan. This blind spot for various aspects of the crash is not the result of some complex conspiracy. Economists are not sitting around plotting to obscure the facts from the public. They simply start from a set of assumptions that rule out things like a cultural bias that manifests as a systemic bias. They can only think systemically within the accepted parameters of the system itself. That means ignoring lots of possible answers.

Like the Great Depression, the mortgage collapse of 2008 has created a specialty of study within the field of economics. PhDs in economics will be based in this event for generations, assuming we make it that long. Each book and paper will fill in a bit of the official narrative until the only people questioning it will be cranks and oddballs. This is how religions evolve. If the disaster is not repeated in the near term, the ambitious will be happy to go along with the conventional wisdom.

Another part of the official narrative is what is assiduously excluded from the official narrative. For example, the fact that no one was held accountable for the disaster. Take, for example, Franklin Raines, the head of Fannie Mae. He walked away with millions, never having to answer for his crimes. Angelo Mozilo, the guy in charge of Countrywide Financial, was allowed to avoid acknowledgment of wrongdoing and criminal charges, by paying a relatively small fine to the SEC. He retired a gazillionaire.

Just as important, as Steve Sailer likes to point out, no one even mentions that the Bush Crime Family was largely responsible for the sub-prime loan disaster. It was the Bush administration that pushed banks to drop their lending standards as a part of the “ownership society” campaign and the desire to buy votes from migrants. In fact, the political class emerged unscathed from the disaster. If anything, the catastrophe that was the Bush administration strengthened the managerial state’s stranglehold on society.

Here is where you see the race obscurantism warp official reality. To focus on the wrongdoings of the Bush people, would require acknowledging some unpleasant realities about diversity. For example, default rates for blacks and Hispanics were three and four times the rate for whites. Similarly, the people targeting these groups with bogus loans were doing so because they knew they were not savvy enough to understand what was happening to them. That opens doors that must remain bolted closed in this age.

My own view on this, to wrap up the post, is that the financial system is built on the biases of the people who control it. A system designed by people who keep a bug-out bag next to their desk, and leave their car running in the parking lot, is never going to incorporate long term risk. Ours is a parasitic system that is designed to drain the blood from the American middle-class. The patches and remedies to keep it going are just that, quick fixes to keep the blood flowing. Eventually, the host will die, and the bankers will move on.

From time to time, the claim is made that we need to import indentured servants from Asia, because the STEM fields are short of labor. This is a variation of the old line about crops rotting in the fields for the lack of stoop labor. The fact that no human living in America has ever experienced a food shortage due to crops rotting in the fields underscores the fact that these claims are nonsense. Indentured servants from Asia are cheap and more important, the threat of them depresses wages for American workers in the STEM jobs.

That is the cost of cheap labor that is easy to see. There are other costs that are not so obvious. In the case of the tech fields, indentured servants from Asia have had the perverse effect of discouraging young Americans from going into these fields. When tech firms started filling entry level jobs with foreign labor, they made the field unattractive to young people, who correctly saw that jobs were scarce and the ones available paid low wages. Young Americans were advised to not go into technology, as a result.

Put another way, cheap foreign labor drove out domestic labor from these entry level jobs, thus institutionalizing the use of indentured servants in the low-level tech jobs. Slavery had the same effect where it was practiced. In the case of tech, there is a social element involved. You go to college in order to get a good job. That is a social definition that goes beyond earnings. If your field requires you to work with smelly South Asians for five years until you can be the supervisor of smelly South Asians, that is viewed as a low-status field.

There has been another consequence of the use of indentured servants. People think of tech as coding shops in Silicon Valley, but the vast majority of American business relies on small local firms that bring a combination of technical and business skills to their role as technology consultants. The usual pattern is someone works as a programmer for a developer and then goes out on his own as a consultant, supporting clients that use the software that he worked on as a developer. He becomes their part-time CTO.

The result of flooding the entry level jobs with  Asians on H1-B visas has been a shortage of people in these higher end consulting and development jobs. In many parts of the country, the shortage of people with a mix of business and technology skills that can be used to solve real world problems is acute. You can find plenty of pajeets, who can write code but are useless at solving problems. Locating someone with business and programming skills that can solve real problems is becoming close to impossible.

At the other end of the labor market, the hidden cost of cheap labor has created another problem. The landscaper hiring Mam-speaking tribesman from Guatemala is no longer hiring teenagers on summer break. Retail operators in vacation areas game the system and import Eastern Europeans for service jobs. The availability of cheap foreign labor has made the summer job a thing of the past. It used to be a part of growing up in America, but now it is a rarity. Instead, foreigners do seasonal work.

In general, the part-time job and summer job was when a young person started to learn how to be an adult. They had to show up on time and learn how to get along with strangers. They had to learn how to put up with a crappy boss and perform tasks that seemed stupid and pointless, in order to get paid. They also learned the value of money and its connection to labor. That first check, less taxes, was the great eye opener for every young American. Today, they do not experience that until adulthood.

There is another aspect to this. The summer job for boys was often manual labor, like operating a rake or lawnmower for a landscaper. Maybe it was as a laborer on a job site for a roofer or painter. It was there that a young man got his first taste of being a man, because he was around adult males in their natural habitat. A young man learned that men are not as forgiving as mom and that you had to be earn respect. Young males today do not experience this. Instead, they live like girls.

This is probably why millennials have such a terrible reputation. The girls are spoiled brats, making crazy demands, while the boys are hysterical sissies. One of the things employers will tell you on the side is that they are careful about hiring millennials. They would prefer to overpay for a semi-retired boomer than hire a petulant man-child from the millennial generation. When a millennial takes over a family business from a retiring parent, it is a good bet the company will go through a rough transition.

Public policy is about trade-offs. The cost of cheap labor is not limited to the direct cost to labor markets. There are hidden, long-term social costs. The generations of young people warped by the consequences of not working will show up in the culture long after Sanjay is back in Bombay. What foreign labor does is monetize future social capital and pull it forward. It is a form of debt creation, not a lot different than eating the seed corn. Future social harmony is consumed today, with no way to replace it.

Something I noticed when I started posting podcasts to YouTube, is that copyright strikes come up automatically. Put in just a few seconds of any song, no matter how obscure, and YouTube will say the copyright owner made a claim. This is nonsense, of course, as no one could be policing this stuff and filing claims. The software scans the uploads for patterns matching something in their database. If the pattern is close enough to anything, then YouTube issues a copyright strike and puts the onus on you to dispute it.

I tested this by using some music I found on an old CD. It was from a cover band a million years ago. I took some clips and uploaded them with some talking by me. Sure enough, the clip got flagged for a copyright claim. The ridiculous part was the alleged claimant was another cover band. I tried a few more clips and no hits, but then a few more were flagged, with different claimants. The last batch of hits were completely wrong. It appears close enough is enough for them to make you go through the hassle of disputing it.

The game that YouTube is playing is both defensive and underhanded. By defaulting some copyright claim on everything, even vaguely similar to what they have in their database, they avoid being sued by legitimate copyright holders. That makes sense, given the nature of copyright laws. Of course, they are also using this as an excuse to avoid paying creators for their work. YouTube loses money, so anything they can do to avoid paying creators drops right to their bottom line. They know most people will not dispute the claims.

That came to mind when I saw this on Drudge the other day.

Ed Sheeran is on the receiving end of a monster $100 million lawsuit by a company claiming the singer ripped off a Marvin Gaye classic.

A company called Structured Asset Sales filed the lawsuit, claiming Ed’s song, “Thinking Out Loud,” is a carbon copy of Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On.”

According to the lawsuit, Sheeran’s song has the same melody, rhythms, harmonies, drums, bassline, backing chorus, tempo, syncopation and looping as “Let’s Get it On.”

Gaye’s song was written by a guy named Edward Townsend and Gaye in 1973. Townsend died in 2003, and Structured Asset Sales bought one third of the copyright. So, take that in … the claim is that just 1/3 of the song is worth $100 MIL!.

Sheeran’s song was a huge hit … nominated for a Grammy for Best Record, Best Performance and Song of the Year in 2016.

And, according to the docs, Ed’s single and the album it’s on — “X” — sold more than 15 million copies and the song has been played on YouTube more than a billion times.

Sheeran has already been sued by Townsend’s heirs. He called BS on that suit. No word if the Gaye family might also sue.

Now, I clicked on the story, because I was puzzled by why the estate of a long dead singer would be suing some goofy looking white kid. It turns out that the goofy looking white kid is a pop star of some note, and he is accused of ripping off Marvin Gaye. It is another reminder that I am now completely disconnected from modern pop culture. Not in a million years would I have guessed that guy was a pop star. He looks like a dork you would see working in a cubicle. I did not find his music enjoyable, but what do I know?

Of course, the idea of making a copyright claim on something you give away, by posting on the internet, is a mockery of the law. It is perfectly reasonable for a performer to complain about people ripping off their music and posting it on-line, but when the performer gives the content away, they should have no complaint. Not only that, a quick search of YouTube finds every Marvin Gaye song ever recorded, is posted multiple times. There’s even live stuff from the old days. Exactly no one is paying for Marvin Gaye music.

Listen to the songs in question and it is hard to see the similarities, at least not enough to support the claim. That is not going to be an issue, because if it goes to court, both sides will have digital experts claiming the songs are digitally the same or different, according to each side. There are only so many possible song ditties, so by now every conceivable riff has been used in a song. Using software to compare songs, it is possible to claim everything is derivative, if not a straight copy, of something else.

None of that matters. A battle of experts in front of a jury means a coin toss, so the case will be settled. It does not cost a lot to file the initial claim, but it does cost money to litigate these claims. Plus, the goofy white guy has his reputation being tarnished, so both sides have an incentive to settle. The estate of Marvin Gaye just wants money, so they will be happy to take a quiet payoff off, without the goofy white guy admitting to anything. That is the whole point of these lawsuits. The whole thing is a form of greenmail.

Copyright abuse is becoming a racket. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was intended to protect owners of digital content, but grifters have figured out how to game the system for all sorts of reasons. Video game companies will file DCMA notices against YouTubers, who post bad reviews. Hosting platforms slip language into their terms of service, to claim ownership of your content. Restaurants are suing reviewers for bad reviews. Of course, everyone can claim ownership of just about any digital content.

It is a good example of another negative outcome from the technological revolution. The ability to copy and distribute content digitally means it is easy to steal. That means people steal it. The normal way an owner protects his property is by locking it up, but in the case of digital content, which is not possible, so the state has tried to create a magical solution, which just encourages grifters and racketeers. My guess is the legal fees for copyright issues are one of the biggest cost of producing pop songs now.

The unexpected result of the technological revolution is that large swaths of intellectual property have been inadvertently swept into the public domain. In an effort to return the profits to the private owners of the content, laws have been passed, but the result is all of the costs have been swept into the public domain. The definition of the technological revolution is the socializing of costs, with the privatization of profit. Technology makes it possible to shift costs a million small ways, onto an unsuspecting public.