economics

Consider:

If an author has among his writings a musical composition, the only possible way of “securing” to him the “exclusive right” thereto is by giving him the monopoly of this musical composition, no matter in what form it may be represented; otherwise, he gets only a partial exclusive right thereto. No composer can be truly said to have “the exclusive right” to his musical composition writings secured to him so long as others have the right to publish, and sell them without his consent . . .

Leave off of that quote right there and it could be about digital file-sharing and made last week. However, the last six words are in fact "in the form of perforated music" and the statement was made in 1908 in a landmark Supreme Court case determining that player piano rolls did not fall withing the definition of a "copyrighted work" that was on the books at the time. In 1908, in the case White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, the Supreme Court determined that technology had overtaken the existing law of copyright and the law as written did not cover the new technology.

As the world teeters on the brink of true stupidity, I would just like to take one moment to state once more from my little soap box that seriously folks, the federal budget deficit is not a fucking problem right now.

In 1936 John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist in the history of economics after Adam Smith and Karl Marx, published a book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. The book is highly technical and difficult to follow for a non-specialist. I have read it, but had a very difficult time getting through it. Luckily for those of us who are not economists, there are many very bright people who devote their lives to this stuff and many of them have done a very good job of explaining it to the rest of us. The key insight of the book, despite the book's difficulty, is relatively easy to understand. In it Keynes argues convincingly and at length for the thesis that full employment, meaning the economic state where everyone who wants to work can find work, is not a function of the price of labor, but of the aggregate demand in the economy. Even as I rephrase that I can't help but notice how it's rife with jargon, shibboleths and mathematical concepts that are beyond the high school mathematical education of most American adults.

So think of it this way: suppose the economy consisted of just four people. One of those people is a consumer, one is a capitalist, and two of them are workers. The consumer pays the capitalist for the things the consumer wants and the capitalist sells them to him. The capitalist pays his workers to make the things that he wants to sell to the consumer. The workers do what the capitalist tells them to do. The consumer is independently wealthy. The capitalist makes money from profits that are the difference between what he has to pay the workers and what the consumer pays him for his goods. Got all that? Ok good.