Let’s stop with the class warfare and focus on encouraging people to make good decisions, produce and compete.

The only stealing from one group by the other I know is done through the government, where middle and lower class citizens vote to take money from those who are more successful through an aggressively progressive tax system. Federal taxes are almost entirely paid by people in the top 10%.

Issuing dumb patents for the obvious is another grant of common sense to entities that can afford lawyers….

Netflix recent patent for apparently changing rental rates from f(movie) to f(t) is an example. If you’ve ever been charged for a library card (maybe an alumni granted semester access to a school library), then you’ve previously undergone a real world version of the Netflix innovation. Or had an unlimited calling plan for a flat rate.

I have been developing a voice enabled website. How to pay for it? VoiceXML hosters want a bundle of money, on the order of $150-$1500 per month for a few (1000) limited minutes. The media is almost certainly too expensive to pay for with advertising. Using a 900 number would pay for it, but I think would keep a lot of people away for fear of falling to a 900 number scam. Up until this morning, I had considered a bundled time with rates and usage based on things like bell curve distributions. Sell people so many minutes per month, or so many calls per month for one flat rate, but also sell others a flat rate for unlimited numbers of calls for one phone number.

I can do that knowing that the vast majority of people will only be making 5-10 calls per month max. (And in fact how is Netflix’s innovation any different than how unlimited calling plans work now?)

Now I worry that if I try this latter price scheme, it will conflict with Netflix’s patent. So there’s another example of corporate transfer….

Slate’s economist, Daniel Gross, discusses economic research showing that America has changed, and the rich do get richer, namely, by having found a way to get the Federal Government to work on their behalf. But he says it much better than I do, here.

To borrow another phrase from Schumpeter, our bias in recent years has switched from creative destruction toward creative preservation. The rich have figured out how to use the federal government to help them stay that way.

oops – here’s a clickable url: http://www.paydemocracy.com

One counter-trend is collective action via the Internet: http://www.paydemocracy.com

Is there a better link to that background story (on aero-news)? I spend a few minutes looking for it, still don’t see it… oh wait, I found this one: http://www.aero-news.net/news/genav.cfm?ContentBlockID=0558d2a4-f6bc-4861-9306-1d61fdd357d9&Dynamic=1

The enclosure of the commons is an old story — see Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation for a history. Surely someone has compared the current copyright landgrab to this earlier phase in the growth of capitalism? Yes.

There are some good examples of moving public resources into private hands here. Many of them remind me of this story on Corporatism, here.

Somehow this seems like a new discovery?

The natural environment has always been shadely transfered from public to private hands. Our air, water, fish, critters and greenspace are raped at the hands of private corporations with full government support.

If folks don’t get upset with the trade off of life support systems are we really to expect outrage over cartoons and flying rights?

I would broaded your investment advise to the greedy to include investing in any company that can externalize true production costs onto the public.

OR….maybe You can focus investments into companies that are sustainable and socially responsible. Social Responsible funds seem to be holding reasonable returns.

http://www.socialfunds.com/media/funds.cgi#mc_rank_5yr

I’ve been considering running for office, my platform: move Sports into the public sector. We’ll still find a nice cushy spot for the owners so they musn’t cry. We’ll make all the players Federal employees (that out to hold wages) and drop the average ticket price. Then the opiate of the masses will belong to the masses.