In an age when ownership meant everything, downtown Los Angeles languished. Today, current tastes and modern technology have made access, not ownership, culturally all-important, and LA’s “historic core” is the hottest neighborhood around. Likewise, from flashy metros like San Francisco to beleaguered cities like Pittsburgh, rising generations are driving economic growth by paying to access experiences instead of buying to own.
.. Rather than a fad, the access economy has emerged organically from the customs and habits of “the cheapest generation” — as it has been dubbed in The Atlantic, the leading magazine tracking upper-middle-class cultural trends.
.. Once associated with ubiquitous private property, capitalism is becoming a game of renting access to goods and services, not purchasing them for possession.
.. Hegel, for instance, theorized that the very concepts of human freedom and integrity could not develop and flourish unless the possession of property was a general right, exercised by virtually all.
.. In laying out the case for a distributist alternative to both capitalism and socialism, Belloc worried that a Lockean view could allow property to become so concentrated that the popular tradition of ownership would collapse. But he disagreed with Marx’s claim that this process was inevitable. Belloc intimated that a government facing a severe concentration of property would have to take radical measures to restore the tradition of ownership.
.. Raising the specter of “the public interest state,” Yale law professor Charles Reich warned in the mid-1960s that a public policy organized around the dispensation of largesse fostered a theory of property wherein government could give or take away without regard to the due process of law.
.. On the one hand, we have become accustomed, when installing software — computer programs, smartphone apps, video games, etc. — to clicking our blind assent to so-called “end-user license agreements,” which function roughly like government largesse in their lopsidedness: if you want the goods, you agree to the terms, narrowed and capricious as they may be or may one day become. Recently, what has been good for the software goose has become good for the hardware gander, with many of our devices, like our iPhones, being “owned” only in a sense dramatically attenuated by the terms of the contracts we sign when we pay for them. Not only have tech companies expanded the logic of licensing to the four corners of their market, but that full-bore advance has marched apace with a growing public belief that these terms are reasonable and commonsensical.
.. Despite the collapse of newspapers, subscriptions are booming — to everything from newsletters, podcasts, and on-demand video to short-term goods like shaving kits and steaks. The AMC theater chain recently announced it will begin experimenting with a flat monthly rate for an unlimited number of movies, in effect bringing the Netflix subscription model from the small screen to the big
.. The rise of the sharing economy has shifted massive sums toward innovators whose financial success has enabled the rise of what Noam Scheiber, in an influential New Republic essay on Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett, pointedly termed “boardroom liberalism”: “it is a view from on high,” he wrote — “one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.”
.. Instead of “the most transparent administration in history,” progressives got the fiercest crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers in history. Instead of a White House where no lobbyist could tread, they got a team of cronies — ultimate insiders devoted to patronage politics on a comprehensive scale. Instead of a renewed respect for the press, they got carefully rationed access to power, used to control reporters and exact loyalty. Instead of a clean break with the Bush era’s push for “total information awareness,” they got a surveillance state, more than willing to access Americans’ intimate information, anywhere, anytime. Because progressives put equality above liberty, they did not anticipate these changes in fortune.
.. Unfortunately, as he shows, fewer and fewer Americans care about owning things. That is not just a problem because it cultivates passivity toward concentrated property and power.
.. If you’re not paying to play with the regulators in Washington, you’re mistreating your stakeholders.
The End of the Modern World, by Romano Guardini
Guardini’s vision of the present and the future is bracing stuff, going beyond optimism and pessimism into the prophetic wilderness where the difficult truth can be proclaimed. The truth, in his view, is that man has lost his place in the universe–and he has not lost it because God no longer has a place there. Guardini sees a new age coming, however, in which the fight between Christianity and secularism will be sharpened and in which it will be possible, if we have the nerve for it, to restore man’s dignity and his sense of place…. It is a urgent call to holiness, and inspiring challenge, and an exceptionally important book for a new millennium. — First Things, January 1999
.. He contends that the wellsprings of the Modern World have run dry. A new age is being born, the outlines of which are still very indistinct. The new age will foster a more frugal personality; it will view nature more from a distance and as something which man is called to master; the culture will be defined less by artistic expression than by the use of the enormous power over nature made possible by technology.
Is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments?
In the late 1980s, US researcher Robert Pozos argued the Nazi hypothermia data was critical to improving methods of reviving people rescued from freezing water after boat accidents, but the New England Journal of Medicine rejected his proposal to publish the data openly.
.. So should the results of Nazi experiments ever be taken up and used? A simple utilitarian response would look to the obvious consequences. If good can come to people now and in the future from using the data, then its use is surely justified. After all, no further harm can be done to those who died.
.. Murder victims sometimes become organ donors, for instance, but there is no concern that is inappropriate.
Nietzsche’s Will to power
.. Nietzsche had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty are pleasurable because of exercise of power.
.. There is will to power where there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power. This suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive.
.. The influence of Rolph and its connection to “will to power,” also continues in book 5 of Gay Science (1887) where Nietzsche describes will to power as the instinct for “expansion of power,” fundamental to all life.[16]
.. Having derived the “will to power” from three anti-Darwin evolutionists, as well as Dumont, it seems appropriate that he should use his “will to power” as an anti-Darwinian explanation of evolution.
.. For example, Nietzsche claims the “world is the will to power—and nothing besides!”
.. I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)