Private Rent-seeking

Reading William Paltry's Moral Panic and the Copyright Wars, we get a bracing reminder of an overlooked first priciple: rent-seeking is not just about governments. We often treat it as if it is another government monopoly (cf. link), but that is because people who write about rent-seeking tend to be those who hate government and idealize the private realm. But the private realm can be just as bloated and inefficient as the government ever was, and ignore the blather about how market discipline will keep them in line: maybe in the long run, but revolution will keep bad government disciplined in the long run also and nobody these days has much taste for that.

Paltry is at pains to show that there are two ways to make money: you make something that somebody wants, or you find someway to extract money from people for something they don't want, or from something you never made. The response of the entertainment biz to the new-music revolution is a dandy example of the latter strategy. Faced with a (relative) decline in the popularity of CDs, the suits have spent the last few years running around trying to lock up their mediocre product, rather than come up with a better. A corollary point, although Paltry doesn't dwell on it: the guy who broke this particular stalemate was the guy who has shown such an uncanny knack for figuring out what the customer wants before he knows he wants it (I still wonder about the Ipad, though).

Paltry also offers a devastating account of how in "copyrightable" creative work, nothing is ever really new: the best of it is just a riff on what went before. Hre reminds me that I really ought to go back and read (as I never did before) Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. Bloom, says Ratner "took the position that transformative influence occurs

only with strong poets, major figures, with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize: figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. ...

That's Ratner at 73, quoting Bloom. He did not but might have Herman Melville:

For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Link, and Footnote: I see I previously attributed this to Thoreau. Apologies, Herm.