InOrderofImportance

Have you spend years of your life, staying in, losing sleep, facing constant rejection? Have you alienated friends and loved ones in service to a vague but powerful drive you barely understand?  Have you gotten to the end of a process you’ve poured your life into only to discover that it is total crap?  Have you woken up the next morning to start something new? Have you handed over your life’s work to a professional editor so it can be torn to shreds for 6 months only to rebuild those shreds into something far greater than the original? Have you gone on a book tour reading to crowds of less than ten in cities you’ve never been to, staying in the cheapest hotels because no one can afford better all to give your book a slightly better chance of reaching the readers it was meant for?  Have you done all this while maintaining a day job of some kind because no matter what you write or how well it sells it is never, ever going to provide enough income for you to only do the one thing you truly want to do?  No?

If you have never written a book, you are not allowed to pay $9.99 or less for new books at Amazon.  You’re just not.  I know ebooks at Amazon are really cheap, but sleepless nights are not. Constant rejection is not.  Publishing a book is not.  If you’ve only got a Kindle to do you digital reading on, then buy the book in hardcover (or paperback) as well and give the print copy to a friend or family member.

Simon & Schuster just settled in the Department of Justice’s case against Apple and five major publisher’s accusing them of colluding to raise ebook prices, further paving the way for Amazon to return to the predator pricing that secured them 80% of the ebooks market. If the government will not protect our book culture from the Wallmart of the internet, only consumers can.  Save good books.  Shop indie.

There are a lot of good reasons to vote for Barack Obama this fall (much more on that later) but here is an extremely cynical one.

The Republican strategy over the last four years to regain the White House was simple; obstruct in anyway possible, any legislation or policy proposed by the Democrats and the President. Despite having the most popular platform in my political lifetime in 2008, Republicans in the Senate, with the occasional help from moderate Democrats, filibustered everything that got out of committee and used anonymous holds on nominations and everything else.

The scary thing is that this worked in 2010. Despite inheriting the worst economy since The Great Depression AND two wars from George W. Bush, Republicans somehow made the state of the nation Obama’s fault and a whole raft of reactionaries were elected to the House.

If Romney wins in November, the Republican technique of obstruction will be validated and it would politically senseless for the Democrats to do anything else but replicate.

There are a lot of good reasons to vote for Obama in November, but if you need a cynical reason here it is; a vote for Romney is a vote for tactical legislative obstruction.

I saw this last night and it is perfect.  Alas I can’t find a video of it on the interwebs yet.  In brief:

One of Progressive’s characters “The Messenger” wheels a popcorn stand into a movie theater lobby.  He asks someone what they are charging for popcorn at the concession stand and, when told they are charging $4 for popcorn, starts selling popcorn out of his cart for $1.

Of course, he can sell popcorn for $1 because he’s just a guy with a cart and does not carry the massive overhead of buying reels, maintaining screens and projectors, and paying utilities bills.  As many people know, concessions at movie theaters are priced so high to help keep ticket costs reasonable. Popcorn sales subsidize ticket prices. The Messenger isn’t offering the same product at a better market price than the movie theater, he’s inserting an entirely different market, with entirely different costs, and entirely different pricing pressures, and pretending what he’s doing is a competitive price.

Or rather, unlike the movie theater, he’s not trying to make money selling popcorn.  He’s using the popcorn to talk to customers about choice in pricing so they buy car insurance from Progressive. This is pretty much exactly what Amazon does to bookstores.

1. The Louisiana Purchase (Though, no Louisiana Purchase, no Alaska, no Sarah Palin, so, toss up.)
2. The Homestead Act (Can you imagine how “socialist” giving away free land would seem to Allen West?  Though it should be said, The Homestead Act was a disaster for America’s indigenous population.)
3. The National Parks System
4. The Electrification of Rural America (Hey, remember how vital the brand new industry of consumer and home electronics was to the mid to late 20th. How successful would it have been if it had taken an extra two or three decades for thousands or perhaps millions of homes to get electricity? I suppose we could ask former Iron Curtain countries.)
5. The Eisenhower Highway System (How cheap would our food and other goods be if railroads had been the primary shipping method throughout the 20th century? Walmart and Monsanto should have freaking shrines to the Eisenhower Highways.)
6. The GI Bill (Remember all those homeless WWII vets? Exactly.)

I’m not going to get in to all the regulatory agencies that made sure our food didn’t have rat poison in it, our medicine was actually medicine, our factories weren’t fatal, and our rivers weren’t inflammable, or how America essentially test-drove laissez faire style market capitalism from about the 1870s up to about 1929, or spend any time on the argument that FDR’s New Deal might have SAVED AMERICA FROM COMMUNISM.

The point is, Federal investment in infrastructure was absolutely essential to the rise and dominance of the American economy of the late 20th century, often having benefits to society far beyond what as initially intended. If contemporary Republicans had been in charge, the era of American dominance so many of them are nostalgic for, never would have happened.

Some people have added cogent critiques of the publishing industry and others have tried to add context to the debate, but by and large there are two trends in the comments on articles about the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers; competition is good for the consumer and those rich greedy publishers are charging to much for books.

To the price complainers: You Never Ever Have to Pay for a Book.

There, the secret is out.  I said it. If price is the only consideration you have, you don’t ever, ever have to buy a book. Use the library.  I assure you, the library has more books than you could read in a lifetime.  And if you want to do your reading electronically, just stick to the gagillion (rough estimate) public domain books available also for free from websites like Project Gutenberg.  Again, you will not run out. 

Oh, the newest hottest book has a really long waiting list at the library but you want to read it now? To me that sounds like demand, and if I remember my basic economics, demand generally drives prices up. But with books, no matter how much demand there is, the cover price never goes up. In fact, quite often with the most popular books, the books with the most demand, are discounted as loss leaders.

Even though no one ever has to pay for a book, new books keep getting published because they add value to our society, value that many people are willing to pay for. But if that value isn’t worth it to you, just go to the library and all of your book price problems are solved. (And let me know where you’re meeting all of these wealthy publishing professionals. Until you show me one in the wild, I’m not buying this whole, “greedy publishing magnate” line.)

It’s a bit odd that conservatives are leading the charge against the individual heath care mandate, because conservatives are usually devotees of the “free market.”

Health care doesn’t work like other products or services. When you need it you need it and that’s it. Furthermore, you don’t usually find out the cost of the service until have you’ve received it, because, well, since the care is necessary, it doesn’t really matter how much it costs. You can’t really shop around.

The individual mandate was an attempt to shoe-horn health care into the private market. By making healthy individuals purchase health care, a pool of capital is created to support those who are not healthy; a pool of capital a lot like Social Security in that nearly every one who is healthy now is eventually some version of unhealthy.

If the individual mandate is struck down, then pretty much the last market based solution for our healthcare crisis is removed and the option of a national single-payer health care system moves up in the queue of solutions. Conservatives should be fighting tooth and nail to preserve it, because it might be the only thing keeping health care in the “free market.” (Then again, it’s an Obama policy, so it needs to go down.)