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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Or did content socialism (mandatory licensing and government-set streaming royalty rates) devalue the music industry?

Government sets minimums, which was absolutely necessary given companies like Spotify couldn't be bothered to pay me (an artist) what I'm worth.

Almost everywhere else in business, if the buyer is not bothered to pay what the seller believes the product is worth, the result is quite simply that the deal is not made and parties go their own ways. Nobody calls for the government to set minimums just because the sellers don’t like what they are offered. Why would your situation be any different?

Minimum wage is a pretty glaring hole in this assertion.

Socialism isn’t when the government does stuff.

Correct, Socialism is when the government does something I don't like.

In this case rayiner seems to use Socialism as a word contrast to headlines use of Capitalism.

I agree with that. But the government forcing property owners to let other people use their property at prices set by the government is pretty socialist: https://completemusicupdate.com/article/us-copyright-royalty.... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Royalty_Board

Imagine if we had a government board deciding what prices people could charge for App Store/Google Play Store apps. (It's not like we're talking about radioactive waste or something involving externalities, where government regulation might be justified.)

True - though copyright is a government granted monopoly, so there is a tradeoff. It's not real property. Copyright holders get special privileges granted by the government to control what others do with the copyrighted material, so it only makes sense that it comes with strings attached.

All property is a government granted monopoly. The government threatens violence to keep people from copying music. The government also threatens violence to keep people from copying apps, from farming in your back yard, from copying all the JS assets from your website, etc. All business models are built on the government preventing people from doing what they could naturally do.

Well, if there were no government, people's first instinct is still to defend their property. They might lose or decide it's a losing battle, of course.

> Well, if there were no government, people's first instinct is still to defend their property.

No, it's to fight for what they want (or perhaps think they are entitled to) to control.

“Property” is simply what the government says you are entitled to control.

Eh, by that logic "murder" is simply who the government says you're not allowed to kill. In the absence of all other criteria, that would be true, but theories of rights still exist in the absence of laws.

Natural law is the same thing as natural products. Impossible to define at best. Law needs enforcement to be law, otherwise it’s just words.

So if the government collapses, is murder still murder, or do we have to use different words? I posit that something need not be objectively defined to be meaningful. We have the intersubjective for that.

> theories of rights still exist in the absence of laws.

Sure, everyone had their own theory of rights. And if by people acting to defend their property you mean “people will fight to secure access to those things to which their own personal theory of rights holds them to be entitled”, well, you’ll notice that's exactly what I described, but not at all what people mean when discussing “property” normally.

Sure. But there is such a thing as a group of people with similar theories of right, or negotiated theories of rights. An example might be a not-entirely-tyrannical tribe. Our current systen descends from such things.

If there is no government, only the strong will have any property. We'll go back straight to cavemen times, especially if you have some kind of social disadvantage such as minorities, women, etc.

Looking at how wealth and opportunities to create it are distributed around the world and among different people, I'd say we are on the right track for a reality with all the disadvantages of no government paired with all disadvantages of too much government.

The main problem I see is the change in ideology that the rich have been able to implement. After WWII, government was supposed to promote the growth of the whole country. But in recent decades the elite convinced everyone that looking for the rich is all that matters. Being against this is now considered to be a "radical" or "communist". The rich have dismantled much of the democratic systems build since the French Revolution.

Yes, and sadly the issue would be really easy to explain to anyone: we live in a world with limited resources, but population is increasing while the few rich are becoming more richer at the expense of the many poor. All it needs is connecting dots by reasoning in 4 dimensions. This will lead to an era of disasters where most countries armies will turn themselves into private police protecting the 1% rich against the 99% poor. Capitalism and consumerism (these capitalism and consumerism) did work only when there were still free resources available, and pretty much stopped being viable when the last uncharted land was explored, mapped and exploited. Today taking control of a resource always means it is being taken from somebody else, that is, we can't make someone rich anymore without also creating like a thousand poors in the process. It doesn't work anymore, and simply painting critics as communists is so 1950-ish and so blatantly wrong.

Mostly right, but I disagree that there was ever in America a time when you could take "free" resources. All resources in America were stolen from the original people inhabiting the land. Instead of coming to help improve the land, Europeans came to steal the resources for themselves.

The poor have gotten richer in the past 10 years at a faster rate than ever occurred in history. The economy is not a zero sum game - raw resources are important, but that is not where the value comes from.

In the united states, the biggest things affecting the poor are healthcare and housing costs and remarkably those aren't what most people consider to be the 'rich'. They're systemically broken with corruption and waste.

Your argument is seriously flawed - there is a fundamental difference between 'intellectual property' and property -- I hope you can acknowledge that.

And as for all business models are based on government, well that's absolutely wrong. For example the existence of black markets -- those in violation of the government seem to show that they they don't rely on the government. Let alone any type of service business.

If you want to argue that government is necessary for property rights to exist, that's a resource saving measure - people protect their property all the time when governments fail them.

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