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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I try to be the Devil's advocate.

The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production.

This is similar to there are millions of houses but only a few in the most scenic places. Want one of them, pay more. It could be the same for the most popular songs and movies. The time of their creators is more valuable than mine. When writing software probably the other way around.

Of course they don't sell songs and movies like that and creators sometimes only get peanuts. I'm not a very good Devil's advocate.

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> The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production.

That's not really valid, though. Time is not the thing being exchanged -- it's impossible to do that -- so isn't a resource, scarce or otherwise, in the sense we mean. On top of that, the previous commenter made an error -- property rights aren't a solution to disputes over scarce resources, they're a solution to disputes over rival resources, regardless of how scarce they are. Since time is not transferable, it's not rival.

More to your point, though, the consumption of time engaged in a productive activity is a capital expenditure, with the risk borne by those expending it, as with any other capital expenditure -- your investment lets you bring a product to market, but no one is obligated to do business with you, and whether people compensate you enough to generate a sufficient return is up to them.

Time can in fact be exchanged. For example, jail -- some action is traded for a timeout from society. Also, learning is a time-based process to replace entropy with reason, increasing resources from scarcity.

Time is a consumable. It is not infinite, and it is unique to each individual.

We do not "trade" time in jail between society and an individual. We deny certain freedoms for a period of time. There is no economic equivalent when it comes to time.

Learning is a process that consumes time now for improved capability or efficiency in the future.

Oops, I indeed got that important detail wrong! Thanks for expanding my dictionary!

You are right, time is more like capital and even great artists sometimes release some unsuccessful art. However time can be exchanged. There are time banks and time based currencies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency

Yeah reality is weird. I often find myself thinking copyright and DRM should obviously be advantageous to the authors only to subsequently recall that before the printing press predictably made copyright a thing there was a much greater demand for new manuscripts as they would quickly lose their value once in circulation [1].

[1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and... (it also talks about NFTs but that part is not relevant for this discussion)

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