This is beyond ridiculous. The crux of the article is:
> Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.
What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.
And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you.
If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.
> Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.
You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.
I don't want to listen to the same collection of songs every day for the rest of my life, though. If services like Spotify fail and go away completely, the solution wouldn't be that I start buying music all of the sudden: It would be that I listen to less music, much like I did before these services came about.
If one record company pulls a track, so be it. That track will simply be out of my rotation. If I happen to be listening to popular music and I really want to hear the song, it is probably available other places. If I can't find it, so be it: I'll listen to something else and soon forget about that song. No big deal. In the end, I'm still dependent on the record company making it available in some way or another.
And the people (via the government) regulate electricity, so that electricity companies don't gain an inordinate amount of power over society. We just don't have that kind of legislation yet for the sudden influx of service-style companies that have popped up in recent years.
I think you might have a logical hole here. The biggest problem with renting things is precisely that they have a negative effect on your net worth. When you buy a product that is something that you have the right to sell, rent, trade or otherwise enrich yourself with, at least within the confines of intellectual property law.
As an example I enjoy games and my Steam account likely now is 'worth' some thousands of dollars that I should be able to sell at some depreciated rate. Except it's not, and I cannot. As I'm effectively renting access to these products instead of actually 'buying' them, my account is worth exactly $0. I could try to sell it nonetheless, but it would be unlawful. If I was instead able to actually own these games, my little hobby would still have cost me money, but I'd be able to recoup a substantial portion of it at a later date -- or perhaps even work to monetize "my" games in some way, again within the confines of the law.
This is sort of a microcosm of what causes wealth inequality. A more typical example would be a poor individual spending decades paying rent each month that is simply subtracted from his net worth. A wealthier individual might be paying off a mortgage on a property that eventually begin to earn money for him, or at the minimum provide him a residence with no rent due other than that which the government demands. It's interesting to consider this aspect of the migration to cities. People move into these extremely dense areas where they're obligated to rent homes which, due to high demand, consume a very large chunk of their earnings - and then at the end of the days, weeks, years, decades, they have absolutely 0 to show for what will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for most people.
>What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.
I don't think a bank account applies here. If I have a large bank account but no other ties to the community, I have no real skin in the game as it applies to community proceedings. I'll vote however and if I make mistakes I will leave with no losses.
He has become insufferable, especially with broad statements/generalizations like this, and that is why I stopped reading his blog or his articles many years ago (except when posted on sites like HN). And the evidence cites is weak.
'Property and stakes' in the context of American history and feudalism means land, not doodads. It's so many banal platitudes. Tyler is a smart guy but some of the stuff he writes and says is just...bad.
The article mentions houses specifically as something that, with the "smart home," may end up looking more like your iPhone and less like we've traditionally thought of houses.
>If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth
And we should find ourselves completely at ease at the end of our investigation, for in every species success is distributed inequitably. Inequality of net worth is a natural law, and human society is no exception. And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products.
I think this argument would resonate with me if wealth was more meritocratic. My wife is from rural Iowa and I've learned that working hard doesn't guarantee you a living wage (especially if you have medical bills).
I don't really think striving for total equality is necessary, but the number of people I see begging for change every morning suggests to me we've taken this to a pathological extreme.
The connection between hard work and wealth is also rather more attenuated than your simple ideal suggests.
> we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products
I'd love to agree with you and rewarding work is very important, but in our current society outcomes seem mostly determined by starting conditions.
People born into poor household that cannot offer good parenting & education are expected to "work way harder" to achieve a similarly happy life than people who spawned lucky. That's fine to some degree, but should be kept under control. Once enough people feel the system isn't fair and rigged against them will they burn it to the ground.
> And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products.
you're joking with this part, amiright?
don't you think "very hard working people" receive more like the vulture's share, only after the lions have fully fed?
"And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products."
> Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.
What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.
And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you.
If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.