LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
how long before a more serious person – or thing – hacks in and starts running your life? (Kamala Harris, Jared Kushner, George Soros, the NSA, the UN, the alt-right, the IRS, the Bavarian Illuminati – you can bet that what hacks you will be the person or thing that keeps you up at night.) And how do you know they haven’t done it already? How hard can it be? The Internet treats user privacy with the same respect that snakes get in a cage at a carnival sideshow. And Zuckerberg is a 35-year-old still wearing his underwear in public. His mother no doubt writes his password on the waistband of his Y-fronts with a laundry pen. Plus, the average cost of an Internet connection in the U.S. is $67.17 a month, so free speech isn’t free anymore, anyway. Property rights will be next to go. Here, too, the Internet aids and abets, particularly in the destruction of intellectual property rights. “The Internet treats user privacy with the same respect that snakes get in a cage at a carnival sideshow.”
Take it from me ... I spent 40 years as a print journalist. “Content Is Free” – that’s the founding concept of the Internet. Now I’m a “content provider.” And... Content Is Free . Our remaining property rights – that is, our rights to physical property – will be sacrificed either to the campaign for income equality or to the campaign against climate change. This depends on which end of the world comes first – everybody on Earth in bankruptcy court (total global debt is now $244 trillion, three times the size of the world economy) or everybody on Earth crammed into the last 1,878 vertical feet of Mt. Everest because of the rising sea level. In the former case, a horde of people will show up at polling places under the impression that voting machines are like the slots at Mohegan Sun. If they pull the lever often enough, there will be a huge payout. The Internet tells me (for free) that, using the broadest definition of “money” (cash plus all banking and money-market account balances), there’s about $80 trillion in the world. The world’s population is 7.5 billion. Dividing it equally, we each get $10,666.67. We’ll blow through that pretty fast, and the aftermath will be interesting. I’d make some technical recommendations about what to do in this situation, but the Second Amendment is just one more property right soon to be dispensed with. In the latter climate change end-of-the-world case, we’ll all die, which makes abiding by the principles of Classical Liberalism extra hard. But before we die, we’ll panic.
10
May 2019
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