I wanted to give a quick shout-out to blogger Max Socol who has a really interesting op-ed up at the Jerusalem Post.  His take on the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and the Yisrael Beitenu party is quite a lot different than mine, and where I saw only reason for skepticism, Max manages to draw some positive possibilities into the discussion.  I’m still extremely skeptical, but if Lieberman did take Max’s advice it would certainly be beneficial.  Max frames the piece as an open letter to Lieberman:

You believe in building a Palestinian state to preserve a demographically Jewish Israel. That may not be the primary concern of the international community, but two states for two peoples will satisfy their concerns as effectively as yours.

If you are serious about building such a state, as you say you are, you have the opportunity to make history as the leader who finally brought a conclusion to decades of bloody fighting over the Palestinian issue. With a willing partner in the Obama administration, and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, you have the tools to begin the process of building a final-status agreement that will establish a home for Palestinians in the West Bank.

BUT YOU must build a coalition with Kadima. Binyamin Netanyahu was not serious about negotiations with Palestinians in his last tenure as prime minister, and is not serious about them now. His position as leader of the traditional right wing means that he will be required to waste time pandering to pro-settlement parties that will demand the impossible from their government. Netanyahu is far more likely to drag his feet indefinitely, in the vain hope of pleasing all the people all the time, than to take any concrete steps on the road toward building a Palestinian state.

Kadima will have no such burden. Tzipi Livni, following Ehud Olmert, has much more ideological flexibility in pursuing a two-state solution. Her base, not made up of settlers, will not desert her because of perceived weakness on the issue. Livni, entering power at the same time as a more flexible, more involved US administration, has the best chance to make real progress on the issue.

And you can be a part of that historic moment, one that will likely take more than one Knesset term, and one that therefore you yourself will have a chance to see to its conclusion.

[Read more →]

It’s rare that a contemporary band manages to pull off a cover of a classic that is as enjoyable as the original, but I think The Killers do something special with this song. For tomorrow, hope everyone has a fantastic day in their own way…

It seems as though there is a goodly amount of maneuvering going on right now about different political designations and labels. Discussions abound about what it really means to be “conservative” or liberal, as well as Jonah Goldberg’s recent post that has kicked up some dust about the potential future of “liberaltarianism”.

The most complimentary post I think I’ve ever received in regards to my politics came from co-blogger Mark Thompson writing about this site when he said,

Importantly, and just as any ordinary group of friends outside the blogosphere, membership in our group is not based on any adherence to a particular set of political beliefs – Dave and I come at things from a roughly libertarian starting point, Freddie and Kyle from a roughly liberal/Progressive starting point, E.D. from a starting point that I would characterize as more or less Burkean (he may disagree, though), and Scott and Chris from a starting point that I’m not quite sure how to characterize[.]

I take Mark’s comment to be complimentary because my own view of poltics is that if I’m doing them correctly I should be difficult to characterize. Which leads me to question the overall usefulness of political labels. I understand and am willing to acknowledge the general usefulness of having a short hand with which to identify someone’s political persuasion, but my questioning is around the particular accuracy of those labels when the rubber hits the road.

Is anyone ever really “conservative” or “liberal” or “libertarian” all the time, ad infinitum? And the pushing around of definitive dirt that seems to be a subtext of political discourse lately seems to indicate that the definitions for those labels is always up for debate and discussion, at least in some meaningful senses. Universalized political labels bring out my wariness because I think beyond the ideals that we identify and house within such labels there operates the dynamics of a moving world with shifting contexts and circumstances. Human beings themselves are not beyond the influence of that dynamism and so seem to have certain regular shifts in the way they see the world which exerts its own effect on their perceived political orbit.

I worry that our political short hand becomes an inhibitor in really understanding one another in political discourse because it tends to presuppose certain conclusions that often times go unchallenged, or even unexamined much of the time. The ability to call someone “conservative” or “liberal” or the like means that you know certain things about certain people without having to check in about those things and ostensibly leads to a pervasive tendency of talking past one another. The ensuiung obscurantism means that our politics becomes an increasingly blunt tool, where the challenges around addressing different political, social, and cultural issues seems to call for as fine a tool as we can muster.

The converse conclusion, which I find in many ways equally unsatisfying, is that all politics are necessarily situational. My dissatisfaction with a wholly situational politics arises out of a perceived loss of meaning through the jettisoning of first or core principles. While wary of universalized labels, I’m also not willing to postmodernize our discourse into ideological relativity wherein meaning is pale ephemera of laughable value. Acknowledging the dynamism of our shifting contexts, I still feel some intitution that we are working towards something in all of this talk, that there is a project of clarification that yelds us helpful explanatory outcomes and thus makes the effort engaged worthwhile.

I suppose that my end point winds up being that it is necessary to acknowledge that politics is at least partially situational and that our use of political labels ought to be consciously provisional. The further conclusion that one might draw from such consternation is that if you feel as I do an intuitional tickling about meaning that trasncends the shifting dynamism of our political posturing, then you might want to hold your ideological conclusions and orienting principles in loose relation so as to remain open to nuggets of truth that lay buried far beneath the maps that our limited conceptions of political mapping demarcate.

Robert Stacy McCain has a scathing post that seeks to permanently douse the concept of a left-libertarian coalition ever being a real possibility, which includes this little bit:

As a political impulse, the sort of libertarianism that scoffs at creationism and traditional marriage wields limited influence, because it appeals chiefly to a dissenting sect of the intelligentsia. It’s a sort of free-market heresy of progressivism, with no significant popular following nor any real prospect of gaining one, because most Ordinary Americans who strongly believe in economic freedom are deeply traditionalist. And most anti-traditionalists — the feminists, the gay militants, the “world peace” utopians — are deeply committed to the statist economic vision of the Democratic Party.

Yikes.  Now, of course, McCain is being somewhat hyperbolic in his characterization of the coalition of the political Left.  But in many ways there is a fair amount of truth to McCain’s fundamental point, which is that the response of the political Left to the economic crisis has dramatically undermined the basis for any theoretical coalition of “liberaltarians.”  To be sure, McCain thinks that the entire concept of such an alliance is a “luxury” that never had any chance at success, but the more pertinent issue is the role of the economic crisis in exploiting the divide between liberalism and libertarianism/classical liberalism.  This is a particularly difficult truth for me, as I have repeatedly gone on record predicting that “libertarians,” broadly defined, are likely to continue their recent trend towards the Democratic Party in terms of their voting habits.  Heck, I even put my money (and daughter’s toys) on the line by making a bet to this effect with John Schwenkler.

One of the things that has happened in the early days of the Obama Administration has been some fairly good (but by no means great) steps in the direction of restoring civil liberties and reigning in executive power.   While this is something libertarians such as me have absolutely cheered, the reality is that these issues were a major part of what was pushing libertarianism to the left in recent years.  As victories have been earned on those fronts, the entire basis for that move leftward is getting removed (although history tells us that we’re not about to see a complete restoration of civil liberties and balance of power anytime soon, either). 

To be sure, really good bases remain for a left-libertarian coalition on certain specific issues, especially the War on Drugs.  And I still fully agree with the great FA Hayek, whose opus Road to Serfdom describes many of those we now call liberals as essentially misled classical liberals (that we now call libertarians).  And that says nothing of his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” – still relevant nearly half a century later.

So I still think that, at some point in time, progressives and libertarians will be reunited within a political coalition separate and distinct from conservatives.  But at a minimum the progressive response to the financial crisis, with its finger-pointing for the crisis almost solely at deregulation and its use of the stimulus bill as a means for implementing all sorts of pet projects that have little to do with stimulus even under a Keynesian analysis, has brought the economic divide between liberals and libertarians to the forefront in a way unseen for decades.

To be sure, I think conservatives - especially conservative politicians – have played a role in the whole situation, both by saddling us with massive debt in the name of the War on Terror and by repeatedly (and falsely) campaigning on the idea of Obama as a socialist (and thereby turning an unwinnable election into a de facto referendum on socialism).   But the fact is that the political Left, led by Congress, is now using this opportunity to implement wide-reaching policies that are anathema to libertarianism. 

Simply put, it appears that liberals and Progressives, at least the influential ones, have once again taken up the mantle that regulation is always (or almost always) good, and so is just about any form of non-military government spending.   As Virginia Postrel notes discussing the refusal of influential progressives to concern themselves with the effects of the abysmal, horrible, no good Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act:

Unfortunately, once you are ideologically committed to the idea of regulation, you can’t say that a given regulation is bad–or, worse, that maybe doing nothing new would have been the best course.

And this is the problem the rebirth of dogmatic support for regulation has created for any liberaltarian coalition.  Rather than consider ways of achieving liberal ends (which are usually shared by liberals and libertarians alike) that may have incorporated libertarian thinking or were at the very least highly targeted, progressive politicians have been choosing extraordinarily broad and intrusive means of achieving those ends.  This is not to say that those politicians ever really cared what libertarians thought; only that this route of action has undermined any possibility of a significant percentage of libertarians (again broadly defined as fiscally conservative and socially liberal) becoming intermediate-to-long-term members of the Dem coaltion.  [Read more →]

There is a point at which the pursuit of the American Dream can be wholly boiled down to a capitalist pursuit, which is always tragic; taken a step further, that capitalist pursuit can be defined as merely opportunistic; and finally, when opportunism has truly run its course, it evlolves into just one thing: kitsch.

God save us.

Okay, so I can’t quite follow this.

I’m sure Peter’s right about the merits of The International; I haven’t seen it and don’t plan to. But I have a hard time following the logical threads to see exactly how it’s supposed to be a socialist tract. Because it is critical of capitalism? Even if that were the case, being critical of capitalism isn’t sufficient to make a person, movement or movie socialist. I know we’re trapped in binaries in this culture, but come on. I mean, saying “the movie doesn’t put much stock in bankers, banking, or anything related to the financial system” is pretty far from proof positive that it endorses a socialist system. Anarchists, for example, aren’t fond of banks, but are farther from socialism than they are from capitalism. (Even if the movie is saying not just “this bank is bad” but “all banks are bad,” couldn’t that mean the point is “let’s abolish banks as systems of illegitimate control” rather than “let’s bring the banks under the control and ownership of the people”?)

Peter says

Perhaps it’s not capitalism, just capitalism’s excesses—the rapacious bankers who abuse their money and power—which are at fault? Maybe, but when the person delivering the lecture is revealed to be a former Communist stalwart, one whose fall into the banking-world cesspool requires redemption, it’s hard to interpret it any other way.

First, I don’t know that you can fairly call illegal actions in the service of capitalist enterprise capitalism’s excesses. Surely being opposed to crime, whatever the motivation, doesn’t make one opposed to capitalism. I hardly think Peter alone is guilty of seeing socialist critique where there is none. It’s a pretty constant American hobby. There’s a couple things wrong here that you see often. The first is assuming that an attack on capitalism amounts to support for socialism. Socialism means something, and while I don’t blame Peter for taking a rather liberal use of the term, I do think that we in America have rendered the term near meaningless through overuse and misuse. The other problem I have, and I think people do this all the time, is to assume that support for capitalism means support for all of the consequences of capitalism. So saying “capitalism puts too much power in the hands of corporate interests” becomes an anti-capitalist statement. I think that’s not a productive way of looking at things.

What I would like to ask Peter is whether or not he really finds the story of a powerful corporation breaking the law to serve its interests unbelievable, or if he just thinks that the degree to which it happens in this movie is unrealistic. For sure, it probably is unrealistic, being an action thriller. But if the suggestion is that fidelity to capitalism means balking at the portrayal of some large corporations as being unconcerned with law or morality, then fidelity to capitalism requires having a false vision of the world. One of the things that worries me about contemporary conservatism is how disarmed conservatives have become when it comes to recognizing the plain facts of human power politics. These are true things: there are the moneyed and the powerful; there are the poor and powerless; and the first group often uses that power and money to make sure they stay in power and the second group stays out of it; and they often break our rules in doing so. That seems to me to be a simple fact not of capitalism but of human society, as much as I believe progress can and must be made. But conservatives, so sensitive to communism sneaking in the back door, now seem entirely too quick to dismiss any notion of the rich preying on the poor. Look, money carries with it power, and often that power is used unfairly or immorally. That’s just life. If saying so is anti-capitalist then capitalism has evolved into a fantasists ideology.

As to the charge of a thriller being boring, however, there is no defense.

“And just as I often fret that my hopes for a right-of-center majority lie somewhere back in the wreckage of the Bush years, I think the liberaltarians ought to worry, just a little, that their moment actually arrived in the Clinton years, and that it’s already behind them – somewhere back in the vast obscurity of the political past, where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.”

~Ross Douthat

A symptom of the conservative movement mentality–something I’d say is bound inextricably to the very concept of a movement, which requires cliquishness and membership requirements and all that jazz just to be a part of–is that there’s always somebody who is more conservative than somebody else.  There is always some litmus test or loyalty oath by which to determine who is actually conservative, and who is not.  There are various taboos which conservatives simply can’t possibly break if they are to remain, in the movement’s eyes, true conservatives.

Case in point, both Robert Stacy McCain and Helen Rittlemeyer have posts up on “token” conservatives and young conservative journalists and writers, who are either faux-conservatives for their incorporation of progressive social policies, or only support such liberal machinations as same-sex marriage as a token to the larger media establishment and mainstream culture, since same sex marriage is such a definitively anti-conservative issue that no self-respecting or honest conservative could possibly support it.  Or something to that effect.

Writes McCain:

Now, if you talk to these bright young fellows — and I find excuses to talk to them as often as possible — one of the things you learn is how many of them are either (a) in favor of gay marriage as a matter of social justice, or (b) defeatist in conceding that the legal recognition of gay marriage is a political inevitability, even though they personally oppose it…

Yet the Young Turks generally view the gay-marriage debate as following in the historic path of Social Progress, an irresistible floodtide, so that such opposition as there is must speak in tones carefully measured, lest offense be given to the eventual winners of the debate.

Rittlemeyer goes one step further:

And I would add my suspicion that support for same-sex marriage has become a mark, not only of defeatism, but of self-conscious tokenism among young conservatives.  Being publicly pro-SSM is the quickest way for a young journalist to signal that he’s one of the right-wingers it’s okay to like. Haven’t they heard that it’s better to be feared than loved? Or, to put it less glibly, the real respectability of a solid argument is preferable to the worthless respectability one gets by being on the Harmless Right.

Somehow all of this is tied into the notion that, as Helen puts it, “young conservatives ain’t intellectual, and the young intellectuals ain’t conservative.”  In other words, any intellectual conservative would be well-versed enough in their Burke and Kirk to resist the mainstream acceptance of same-sex marriage (the acceptance of which is little more than a plea for popularity) and oppose it on solidly conservative grounds.  And any young conservative who does not do so must either be a liar or a fake or a closet liberal:  You’re not conservative, I’m conservative. [Read more →]

If Freddie’s post is a perfect example of “declinist, doom and gloomism” mine will be an example of me at my most optimistic.  You see, to answer the question posed in the title of this post, I would have to say “of course not!”  Digital media and the ease with which it can be copied need only be met with creative solutions.  This is where the industries involved – music, film, television, and gaming – have all come up short.  They’ve worried about the same thing Freddie’s worrying about: illegal, and free, downloads, and what this will mean to their bottom line.

What have they done to prevent this wave of techno-piracy?  Well, a numuber of things actually.  At first the industries decided to go after the perps themselves.  They went after downloaders, internet businesses that somehow thought they could get away with distributing music for free without paying royalties (Napster, Youtube), and filed lawsuit after lawsuit.  This didn’t work so well.  For one, there were too many people with too many means of downloading and sharing music, videos, etc.

So then the industries tried to put copy-protections on their products.  DRM, various encryptions, etc. all of which were hacked within hours.  Freddie uses the example of the marker on the disc, which about sums up the ease with which pirates can get around all this fancy technology.

So then a few companies started embracing this new method of distribution.  Some record companies saw Youtube as a great way to market their music, and gave Youtube users free license to use their music in their videos.  Viacom was upset with the use of their tv clips on Youtube and set up their own online media instead.  You can watch basically any Comedy Central program for free now online at their official sites.  Some artists, like NIN and Radiohead, have adopted digitial distribution models, either giving their music away for free or simply selling it online.  Some have forgone record labels, others have signed contracts with concert promoters.

So let’s look at each industry individually. [Read more →]

Being a finance geek, I can’t help myself from making a few comments…

E.D. Kain writes…

Here we see another rather conservative approach to Government involvement in home ownership.  Rather than subsidize home owners, the Canadian Government is approaching home ownership as a responsibility that the individual needs to bear, rather than the state.  And, as Havers says above, if a mortgage goes belly up in Canada, it’s the mortgage-owners responsibility, not the bank’s.  This changes the central risk involved in home-buying and forces Canadians to be more prudent in their purchases.  This and the lack of tax breaks has lead to far fewer bad mortgages changing hands in Canada than in the United States.

Although I may agree that the deductability of mortgage interest has distorted the incentives of homeownership, I am not completely satisfied with this explanation.  Banks have been making residential mortgage loans on a non-recourse basis for decades.  Setting aside the insanity that was the subprime mortgage market and what happened with lending standards over the past five years in certain sectors, banks require a substantial down payment (20% of the cost) and certain other things from the borrower.  Borrower imprudence was minimized (at least in theory) based on the willingness of the banks to take risk, and as balance sheet lenders tend to be conservative, not a lot of that took place.  Furthermore, both parties had risk.   While the bank had principal at risk, the borrower had a sizable downpayment that he/she would lose in the event of a default.   Like with any financial arrangment, be it between borrower and lender or between two equity partners via a joint venture agreement, a goal of these arrangement is to have the interests of all parties aligned as best as possible. 

My opinion on the financial crisis is that one of the causes was a complete misalignment of interests between just about all parties involved in the originate-to-securitize lending process that drove subprime and Alt-A loan volume to record levels (and much of the housing boom).   In a sense, it was a kind of Hayekian knowledge problem in that the investors that ultimately bore the risk in the underlying mortgages (hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, other institutional investors) had no knowledge of how much risk they were really taking on.  Making matters much worse was that any of the internal controls that were supposed to accurately assess risk, from loan officers verifying the ability of borrowers to repay to appraisers who were writing up “made as instructed” appraisals to the due diligence firms hired by Wall Street to evaluate the quality of the loan pools they were purchasing to the gross negligence of ratings agencies that, at the behest of their clients (the investment banks) used woefully inaccurate models and slapped AAA ratings on anything it possibly could (by law, many institutional investors are forbidden to purchase bonds with less than a AAA rating).   As the risk was shifted from one party to the next, the true nature of it was obscured.  It was in this environment where the worst-of-the-worst lending practices were taking place.  

While the commercial real estate lending environment was nothing like what we saw in residential mortgages, one can at least observe this difference in action.  Those who were able to shift the risk to investors via mortgage-backed securities were lending far more aggressively than those lenders who were keeping that risk on their balance sheets (i.e. life companies and commercial banks).  Balance sheet lenders were not competitive on pricing or on the amount of proceeds they were willing to lend.  Not surprisingly, they are the only lenders left standing in this environment.

Therefore, I respectfully disagree.  It is not an issue of banks taking the risk as much as it is whoever ends up taking the risk understanding what risks are being taken.  This is where the breakdown occurred.

* I highly recommend Roger Lowenstein’s Triple A Failure.

** Generally, when Wall St. firms bought packaged loans from originators, there were provisions that forced loan originators to buy back bad loans that triggered some default or non-payment provision within the first 90 days or so (the term could have been longer).

Call me crazy, but if Andrew Sullivan is right and the GOP has in fact “declared war on Obama” I can’t help but see that playing into Obama’s favour. Granted that in these uncertain times there is going to be a certain segment of the electorate that will be swayed by the escapism of shrill partisaning, but it seems fairly clear that the country is looking for someone who exudes an unflappable calm and commanding confidence in the face of overwhelming challenges. Hence Obama’s victory.

Besides, haven’t we seen this tactic fail before? Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain/Sarah Palin tried going nuclear on Obama at different points in the presidential race and both wound up looking like that kid who falls ass over tea kettle trying to look cool so he/she doesn’t get picked last for the intramural soccre team again. Wether you like his politics or not, you have to admit that Obama is a tough guy to goad, he’s much more inclined to let you play out your antics and then speak to the populace (or least the proportion that is inclined to listen to him) and ask “What the hell that was?” like a stage actor having an aside with the audience. It’s just hard to make a guy that smart look dumb, you generally make yourself look dumb in the process.

Now, governing as President is a lot different than running for the office, but the politicking that happens in the two instances isn’t so very different, especialy when it comes to attack strategies/tactics. Besides, does the GOP really have anyone who comes close to the unbridled ferocity of Hillary and Bill Clinton on the war path (now backing Barry)? And John McCain is a competitor, but he seems to have lost too much credibility in the race to really be a factor in at least the short term. Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Seasoned politicians to be sure, but they ain’t no Newt Gingrich and don’t look to have the requisite chutzpah to really take the world’s beloved new President down. Attempts at a partisan coup instead of sincerely playing the perfectly respectable and extremely vital opposition to Obama’s majority will only further weaken their party and deprive the country of its much needed balance.

Time will tell, but I think the GOP looks to have chosen the road too often traveled — and that will make all the difference.

I’m not normally a declinist, gloom and doom-ism being the kissing cousin of the absurd optimistic teleology that has also been, strangely, permanently en vogue. But one place where I’m afraid I’m almost entirely pessimistic is the survival of media and art in the digital age.

I come to talk to you about this by way of Peter’s post at the American Scene that wonders aloud whether Trent Reznor’s distribution model is the future of music. Really, though, this is an almost constant point of worry for me. I simply don’t know if movies, music, video games and now ebooks– or, rather, the industries that produce these commodities– can survive, in a world in which anyone with basic computer literacy and the desire to do so can download them.

Peter asks the right questions, though he is more sanguine than I am, I think. As he says, “despite Masnick’s claim that smaller artists can make use of the CwF formula too, they’re unlikely to come close to NIN’s returns without pre-existing access to a Reznor-sized fanbase.” First of all, what should be said is that Reznor himself is unlikely to come close to NIN’s returns, or at least the returns of their heyday. Part of that of course is the fact that Reznor appears past his popular prime as a musician; part of it is the fact that music is becoming increasingly divided into more and more idiosyncratic niches; you just aren’t going to have everybody listening to the same record anymore, or at least, as big of a percentage as once listened to the Downward Spiral. But another reason for this decline is certainly that anybody with a broadband connection can get his music for free while contributing nothing to him, and we should factor that in as well.

More to the point, and more distressingly to those who think digital distribution means the end for the record industry and the beginning of the age of the artist, I think Peter doesn’t say it forcefully enough: of course, an already established artist can have more success offering his music directly to the masses. A large part of the necessity of signing a record deal has always been the marketing and distribution muscle necessary to introduce a band to the public. That’s still the case, even in the era of blogs and MySpace. This is why, incidentally, record companies have generally insisted on signing acts to multiple album contracts; the label’s bargaining advantage is always at its greatest before an artist becomes really well know. There are still some large logistical advantages to being contracted to a label now, and as music is spun off into different delivery systems– think cellphone ring tones– the need for the label actually increases, to have the kind of legal and procedural structures in place in order to ensure the flow of royalties from such revenue streams.

Look, the bottom line here is… the bottom line. Some bands I’m sure can sell a lot of downloads with this model. Whether or not they are doing so in a way that is actually fiscally solvent is a larger question. Are these bands recouping a profit in this model? Is the profit enough to earn them at least a decent living? And is this model upwardly scalable? I think those are important questions. Also, they fail to address the larger problem of downloading illegally. Whether music is being distributed digitally on CDs to stores, or on a computer through (legitimate) downloading, that digital file is out there, and it only takes the one person to upload it to the scene, where it can be downloaded again and again. You only have to look at the PC games industry to see a business that has been laid waste by downloading of digital content. PC games and music are inherently disadvantaged, PC games because the kinds of people who play PC games are the kinds of people who have the skills and desire to illegally download them, and music because the file sizes are so small, and so many people have digital music players. But movie downloading grows by leaps and bounds, and ebooks are very small files as well, so as more and more people purchase ebook readers, I think the publishing industry will face similar peril. (Console video games of almost every system are also capable of being downloaded, although I believe that the technical hurdles to doing so will prevent that industry from ever being significantly threatened.)

Nor do I think a technical solution is coming down the pike. Again and again, the PC games and music companies try new technology to prevent illegal distribution; again and again, the dedicated thieves in the downloading scene thwart them. People being paid to work nine to fives and develop “digital rights management” just can’t compete with an army of dedicated and competitive amateurs. Maybe the funniest (or most depressing, if you’re a music exec) attempt at preventing music piracy was a highly-touted CD-ripping prevention feature that I believe was first applied on an Eminem album. After hundreds of hours of development and surely thousands and thousands of dollars, the system was beaten within a matter of hours, when someone realized that covering a certain portion of the disc with a magic marker bypassed the DRM system.

I hope I’m wrong about the digital future. I want to be. I certainly am not one of those who thinks that music will one day be an entirely amateur enterprise. I think that there would be a lot of negative consequences to such a change. Even gifted amateurs could never have produced Revolver, and while your average editing software for a computer can put what George Martin had to work with to shame, there is simply a level of craftmanship and purpose that I don’t think can be duplicated in an amateur capacity. So like I said, I hope there are alternatives. But I find far too much utopianism concerning the issue. I was once much more amenable, philosophically, to illegal downloading, though I’ve never been much of a downloader myself. I bought a lot of the arguments that you heard: people will discover new bands and songs they like by DLing them for free, then they’ll buy. People will want to support bands they respect so they’ll buy the CD for that reason. People only download if they are gonna get a single song, and it’s not fair for someone to pay fifteen bucks for one song. People like having the feeling of ownership and having the packaging, so they’ll buy after they download. Once people can download for pay, at a reasonable rate, illegal downloading will die off except for some tiny amount.

None of that was true, and of course it wasn’t. What in the end is more powerful in this equation than “free”? Here’s what people really like, when push comes to shove: they really like getting stuff for free that they once had to pay for. They like it more than owning the physical CD and packaging. They like it more than “the sense of legitimate ownership”. They like it more than supporting really cool bands on their way up, they like it more than supporting independent cinema, they like it more than the feeling of satisfaction you get by donating money for an artist you really like. People want to get stuff free, and they can, and as long as that’s the case I see ahead only armaggedon for the music industry, and very troubling times for other forms of digital media.