Category Archives: Writing

Late last week, two Republican representatives — Rep. Ric Keller, of Florida, and Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, of California — introduced their own proposal intended to combat music and movie piracy on campus computer networks. The measure is very similar to the Senate proposal, made in July by Sen. Harry M. Reid, a Nevada Democrat and Senate majority leader, as an amendment to the renewal of the Higher Education Act.

Like Mr. Reid’s amendment, the House proposal calls on the U.S. secretary of education to identify the 25 institutions that received the most notices identifying cases of copyright infringement of both music and movies. The colleges appearing on those lists would then be required to devise “a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent” to illegal file swapping.

Brock Read, Posted on Monday October 8, 2007, Chronicle of Higher Education

Property, to use the traditional critical term, is reified. That is, we tend to think of it as fixed and self-evident and as natural as sunshine. In fact, our particular notions of property are the product of a long history of debate and struggle and even violence.

Roughly speaking, as Marx emphasized, this process began its modern phase with the fights over the commonsin Great Britain more than four hundred years ago. We seem to witnessing a similar shift in our understanding of property due largely to the Internet.

There’s the fight over music sharing, on the one hand, and the attempt by some bands, including Prince, Radio Head, and Nine Inch Nails, to develop new forms of distribution and income outside of the traditional corporate realm. This will surely poor more solvent on those older models of property and copy right.

Those who benefited most from the traditional forms of property– including some rock bands– tend to be most adamant about trying to reestablish its prominence. Thus the law described above, more than 25,000 law suites, and the fate of Jamie Thomas, a single-mom fined more than $200,000 for file sharing.

Bit-torrent has rendered all of this silly, of course, more of a last ditch bit of theater than a successful reinforcement of property rights. In academia the emerging forms of property have already created havoc in traditional models of citation, which were rooted in bourgeois notions of authorship and individualism.

A book has an author or perhaps multiple authors, but what about a corporate web site? They’ve made heroic efforts to adapt, but I don’t think any of the major academic formats (APA, MLA) have fully come to terms with what has happened.

Along side all of this is an even more profound battle over traditional notions of ownership and property in science and academic knowledge. In academia, MIT bucked the proprietary trend by creating an open library of its courses, for example, called Open Course Ware.

Other schools, including Carnegie Melon, quickly followed their lead. Arguably, the Open Course Ware movement takes it cue from another challenge to traditional forms of property, the Open Source Movement.

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Ultimately, Barack Obama wants to cut spending and re-invest it back into America. That idea is exactly what I am looking for in a presidential candidate. However, you must be aware that his definition of investing in America involves a lot of government programs, and government programs have a historical track-record of being fabulously inefficient.

Obama’s ideas on trimming the fat on pork-barrel politics are visionary. I find myself agreeing with him on a good majority of issues, and as far as the democratic candidates go he understands the principles of our free market economy as well or better than any of them. But there are always trade-offs. The financially savvy voter would want to see any cut in spending come with a corresponding decrease in taxes so that you could have more control over your financial future. And when you are voting for Barack Obama, you are voting for political and social change at the expense of your personal ability to accumulate wealth.

from Richer Than Your Dad, October 1

I was fascinated to hear Bush (and his Republican machine) claim that the recent attempt to expand health care for children was an attempt to “Federalize” the Health Care system. I was surprised only because usually they argue against ‘socialized’ medicine. Here, though, I suspect they were using one of those Southern right wing code words to suggest that the Democrats are attempting to take away so-called Sates rights.

It was particularly interesting that he did thus in a period that included the Jenna demonstrations and the anniversary of the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. Is it possible that somewhere back there in the shadows lies Bush’s Brain, dreaming that National Health Care can be defeated by associating it with the over-reaching, intrusive Federal government that forced the South to end Jim Crow.

It sounds more far-fetched than it is. I found the above assessment of Barak Obama, right leaning but more or less fair-minded, laced with myths about the market and the government. It seems almost shocking to hear someone claim that the market has done a good job with Health Care. Still, the market, as many have argued, is at bottom a kind of religious belief.

If you have faith in god and you believe god is good, then nothing can every convince you otherwise. Similarly, if you have faith in the market and you believe that the market is efficient, then nothing can ever convince you otherwise, even the holy mess that is our system of financing health care. The idea that the government is always less efficient is an equally strong and perennial myth.

In fact, studies have shown again and again that government health care systems spend less on administrative costs– think of those giant CEO salaries, as a start– than the private sector. A study summarized in the New England Journal of Medicine a few years ago, for example, noted that “administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada.”

There are dozens of good reasons why a single-payer plan would, to use the langauge of Richer Than Your Dad, help all of us in our pursuit of happiness and prosperity. One reason that wages are depressed, for example, may be that workers are afraid of taking a chance on a new job because it means loosing health care. We need a federalized, socialized system, like Canada.