Chickennights

There is a problem which is a major cause of the current economic downturn which I never see mentioned anywhere.  This problem needs to be examined if we as a society are ever to face this adversary and perhaps overcome it.  Whether it is a greater problem than the decline in the value of real estate, I cannot say with certainty, but I suspect in the long term it is.

There is a problem

Something is wrong

The problem is this: along with the decline in the value of real estate and a credit crunch, the American economy is suffering from a decline in the value of information.   Due to the internet and the resultant free flow of information it produces, and the further resultant loss of copy protection for intellectual copy rights, many large American businesses are going out of business or hemorrhaging money at an ever growing rate.

This problem saps the vital lifeblood of the United States which drains from its veins into the fanged mouths of law breaking American citizens and of entire other countries of the world who benefit as a parasite benefits from its host.  Examples are the film industry, the publishing industry, the music industry, the software industry, and many others.  These are all areas in which the United States stands preeminent and dominates hugely over the rest of the globe. All these industrial sectors are in mortal decline, or else exist in a tremendously stunted state, denied the majority of what profits they would have earned in a era previous to the rise of the internet.  Nowadays they suffer the death of a thousand cuts as billions of virtual people download their intellectual produce for free.

The downward pressing power of this dynamic will likely increase over time until, perhaps, all organizations in the mold of the New York Times will go out of business and only the more popular Drudgereports of the world will continue to exist.  Like King Midas who could turn everything to gold with a touch of his hands, we will click on the news aggregate websites and watch them magically all turn into a uniform consistency of secondary sources with no place left for sources that have been fact checked and are known to be reliable.  This is but one possible future consequence, you can no doubt think of other ways that this emerging phenomenon might gradually overtake each of the industries mentioned above and devour them.  But much of the phenomenon requires no imagination because it is occurring right now and has already occurred.  In most foreign countries, all the latest Hollywood films can be purchased on DVD for a dollar or less, and not one cent of the money generated will go to the producer of the film because it is an illegal bootleg.

Therefore it is my proposal that Obama should form a new department within his government to protect our national interests.  It should be called “The Department of Copy Protection.”   I recommend Obama devote at least $50 billion dollars to this endeavor.  This new government department can then do an investigation to determine the feasibility of perhaps threatening all foreign countries with a complete U.S. embargo if they do not enforce our copyright protection rights.  Another possibility they could consider is shutting down the entire internet and replacing it with a different sort of network which can be regulated more closely.  Also they can examine the types of internet survelliance of its citizens adopted by communist countries such as China and see if some of these techniques can be adopted to work on American soil.

Only then can we finally address and even subdue these fundamental forces that wreak havoc on our economy, thereby not only ending this current recession but inaugurating a brighter and more hopeful future for our children.