Instapundit's Fingers to Lance Armstrong's Tweet

On August 30th, Instapundit asks: IS IT PARENTAL NEGLECT to let your kid bike to school?

Within 24 hours the story is around the globe and Lance Armstrong, the famous Tour de France winner, tweeted his opinion about the story: "That's ridiculous. I'm glad I was so "neglected". #thanksmom"

And mainstream media is gonna compete with the reactive ability and rapid, targeted, viral dissemination of these alternative information channels how?

Ever More Taxation

Recently, a friend pointed me to an article that made the rather surprising claim that "by historical standards, what we pay in federal taxes - rich, poor and everyone in between - has gone down."

Surprising, and not true.

I conveniently happened to have a table lying around that shows historical federal tax revenue. In constant 2005 dollars, 50 years ago (in 1960), federal government revenue was $631 billion. In 2010, it was $1,919 billion (i.e. $1.9 trillion) or three times as much. So by historical standards, we're paying a hell of a lot more on average.

There are more people now, so I also did the calculation on a per capita basis. In 1960 the federal government revenue per capita was $3,518, while in 2010, it was $6,215, or nearly double. Again, these are in constant 2005 dollars. I graphed per capita revenue and it basically shows relentless increases in per capita (and total) collected taxes. There is a bit of chop (i.e. the trend is not perfectly smooth), but it's definitely clear what the trend is - up, up, and up.

So while we spend about the same or less per capita for most goods and services due to increasing technology and efficiency, my question is why do we need to be taxed twice as much per person to fund government as we did 50 years ago? Why is the baseline assumption, even among tea partiers, that we should be taxed a constant percent of GDP, which means increasing taxes forever (assuming GDP keeps growing), instead paying the same amount of taxes per person over time (adjusted for inflation, of course)? Why is the base assumption that government should expand (beyond population growth) forever? Do we really need ever more taxation, ever more government regulation, ever more government intrusion, and ever more government redistribution?

Just wondering.

Musical Trespassing

A while back, I was trying to explain to my daughter why illegally copying music was stealing. To my surprise, she simply could not see why it was considered stealing. Since she's an intelligent, fairly sophisticated, and reasonably honest person, her response made me question my assumptions.

I've since decided she's right. Copying music may be somewhat like trespassing, but it's almost nothing like stealing.

The intangible property of value that you own when you create music is the copyright, not the song itself. The copyright can be bequeathed in your will, sold, etc., much like tangible property. On the other hand, you don't directly have ownership in any of the copies of the song.

When I copy a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a song, I'm not stealing or directly affecting your ownership of the copyright in any way. This is very similar to when I walk across your land uninvited, I'm not stealing your land or directly affecting your ownership of the land in any way. I merely trespassed, which while illegal in the US (but not other countries such as Sweden), is a much different level of moral and legal breach than theft.

Indeed, unlike laws against stealing which are derived from fundamental western morals ("thou shall not steal"), copyright is only a legal issue, has no objective or traditional moral component, should only exist only to further the arts and sciences (according to the U.S. Constitution), and is really only even relevant if a substantial majority of people believe it has a net benefit to society (which, to the dismay of the record companies is becoming less and less true by the day).

I think that calling copyright violations stealing is derived from the legal marketing of the recording industry and other stakeholders in monopoly rents from copyright. After all, what better way to get the public on your side than to try to assign an erroneous but much morally stronger word to the violation of a law you strongly care about.

My daughter and her friends are right, copying is somewhat like trespassing, but not at all like theft.

Ponderance

The vast majority of people have an above average number of legs.

Faster Than The Wind

In my opinion, One Man's Quest to Outrace Wind is a great article. It's well written, tells a great story with plenty of suspense, and is educational.

The core topic is "DDWFTTW", which stands for "Directly DownWind, Faster Than The Wind" and refers to a vehicle or vessel powered only by the wind. Until recently, it had always been thought to be impossible to build a wind-powered vehicle that could go faster than the wind while going directly down wind. That's because once the platform reaches the same speed as the wind, it seems like there would not be any wind forces acting on it, so how could it go faster if it's powered only by the wind?

Someone figured out how to do it and proposed his concept on the Internet.

And he was promptly ridiculed and called an idiot by almost everyone including physics professors.

He built a small prototype that proved the concept.

And he was promptly ridiculed and called a fraud and an idiot by almost everyone including physics professors.

He and a very small group of supporters managed to raise $15,000 to build a full size version that could carry a person. They demonstrated it to the Land Sailing Association where it clearly went directly down wind much faster than the wind.

Finally, most people believed him!

What's interesting to me is that the approach is very, very clever, but it's not really that complex, yet a lot of people just refuse to believe it, even after it's been clearly demonstrated.

No one is so blind as those who refuse to see.

Ahoy Matey

The really important news of the day is that it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arrrrrrr!

Higher Education Loan Bubble

Instapundit has had a number of posts regarding the supposed higher education bubble. However, to me, the most disconcerting part is the massive amount of student loan debt that exists (it exceeds total credit card debt now) and the onerous terms that are attached to that debt as shown by the graphic below.

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

A whole generation has mortgaged their future (literally). Where are tomorrow's entrepreneurs going to come from if nobody can afford to take risks?

So you want to be simpleminded?

The world is very complex. It generally pays to look at things from many different perspectives drawing upon history, data and theory. My experience is that very few people are willing to do that, especially in a political discussion. Well, if anyone insists on being simpleminded...

via redstate

h/t instapundit

Flawed Metrics

One of the repetitive debates throughout society is when to leave things to individual action and when to have government intervention. Eric Raymond points out that flawed and incomparable metrics are sometimes used to compare private and government action. In his post he focuses on an example of a "collective-action problem" which anti-statists often have to answer for.

Our key insight is a pessimistic one: this is the sort of situation which, though individuals and markets don’t handle it well, isn’t actually handled well by governments either. The fundamental mistake of statist thinking is to juxtapose the tragically, inevitably flawed response of individuals and markets to large collective-action problems like this one against the hypothetical perfection of idealized government action, without coping with the reality that government action is also tragically and inevitably flawed. [...]

The second level of error, once you get this far, is to require that the market action achieve a better outcome without including all the continuing, institutional costs of state action in the accounting. So, for example, other parts of the continuing costs of accepting state action to solve this individual toxic-exposure problem in the Deep Horizon aftermath is that Americans will be robbed every April 15th of five in twelve parts of their income (on average), and be randomly killed in no-knock drug raids. And it’s no use protesting that these abuses are separable from the “good” parts of government as long as you’re also insisting that the prospect of market failures is not separable from the good behavior of markets! [...]

Rational anarchists like myself know that stateless systems will have tragic failures too, but believe after analysis that they would have fewer and smaller ones.

If this seems doubtful to you, do not forget to include all the great genocides of the 20th century in the cost of statism.

In other words, don't take imperfect and possibly even very bad situations and make them even worse because you assume that individuals who act badly in the private sphere will suddenly become virtuous when they are part of the government.

Tea Party Organization Phenomenon

Whether or not you like the Tea Party's politics, and whether or not they succeed in achieving any of their objectives, I find their "Radical Decentralization" fascinating. Jonathan Rauch has documented the Tea Party's structure in a recent and well written article.

Making it more difficult than it needs to be

An IBD editorial nails it pretty well right here:

Jobs: Obamanomics has done more than just keep unemployment high during a modest recovery. It may also be keeping high joblessness permanent by raising the costs to businesses of hiring new workers.

July's 9.5% unemployment level was bad enough. But the real problem is that the private-sector jobs machine, which is usually going full tilt at this point in a recovery, now seems to be broken.

To many, it's becoming clear that if President Obama's radical job-killing agenda stays in place, job growth will be nonexistent.

One of America's great advantages has always been its flexible, private-sector labor markets. From 1985 to 2008, U.S. unemployment averaged 5.6%. For the six largest economies in the European Union, the average rate was 34% higher, at about 7.5%.

Yet many of those countries now have jobless rates lower than ours. Why? They've been dropping Keynesian stimulus as a strategy and moving more toward cutting spending and, in some cases, cutting taxes.

Businesses today face rising burdens — from ObamaCare, the financial overhaul, the expiration of tax cuts for entrepreneurs, the threat of new energy taxes or the surge in growth strangling regulations on business — that discourage hiring.

"The real threat to a robust recovery on the labor side," Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, warned recently, "has come from employer and entrepreneurial fears that once the economic environment improves, a Democratic Congress and administration will pass pro-union and other pro-worker legislation that will raise the cost of doing business and cut profits."

It's never been costlier to hire and keep a worker employed. And as ObamaCare kicks in and Bush's tax cuts expire — not to mention the huge tax hikes that will be needed to make Social Security and Medicare solvent — businesses will simply quit hiring.

This Keynes-on-steroids model has been tried before, in Europe. It didn't work. It led to permanently high levels of joblessness — what economists call structural unemployment.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Sweden found that for every 100 new jobs government creates, 114 are destroyed in the private sector. Similarly, a French study of data from OECD countries from 1960 to 2000 discovered, on average, "creation of 100 public jobs may have eliminated about 150 private sector jobs."

In short, it was a disaster that the U.S. is now duplicating. The next Congress should have no greater priority than reversing it all.

If the european statists realize that at some point the state starts to crowd out the private sector in a destructive manner, shouldn't we?

The very nature of an economy

Arnold Kling gives us his ideas about economic circumstances here: (heavily excerpted)

In the United States, the economic mystery of 2010 is the persistence of high unemployment, in spite of the application of the stimulus treatment that follows the prescription of the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy. I wish to offer an alternative to that orthodoxy.

For the followers of John Maynard Keynes, economic activity consists of spending. When economic activity slows down, their prescription is to increase spending by government, businesses, consumers, or all three. Instead, what I like to say is that “economic activity consists of sustainable patterns of specialization and trade.” This is my mantra of macroeconomics.

Here is a simple pattern of specialization and trade: Suppose that all of us eat grain and fruit, which we could grow for ourselves. If some of us have land better for fruit trees, while others have land better for growing grain, then specialization and trading can pay off. It is inefficient to waste good tree land by growing grain on it and to waste good grain land by planting trees on it. Instead, economic activity gives all of us more to eat.

What I mean by a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade is that everyone involved would voluntarily continue to follow the pattern. In accounting terms, profits are a sign of sustainability. If the accounts show a profit, then the value of output exceeds the cost of input. If not, then the pattern is not sustainable.

As conditions change, the patterns of specialization and trade evolve. For example, improvements in transportation make new trade patterns sustainable. Recall the changes brought about by ocean-crossing sailing ships, then steamboats, then railroads, then the automobile and the airplane. As new patterns become sustainable, older patterns become unprofitable and therefore unsustainable. The truck replaced the horse-drawn cart.

Patterns of specialization and trade have become more complex over time. The example of fruit pickers and grain harvesters could have been used hundreds of years ago. But many of the jobs that form today's pattern of specialization and trade are less than 50 years old—or younger.

The contemporary pattern of specialization and trade can be described as roundabout production. I first heard the term in a course on capital theory that Alan and I took from Paul Samuelson. Samuelson was explaining the Austrian theory of capital, as articulated by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who developed his analysis more than a century ago.

The idea of roundabout production is to use intermediate activities to increase final output.

The trend is for the proportion of people employed in final-stage production to get smaller and smaller. Two or three generations ago in the United States, agricultural workers and manufacturing production workers made up half of the labor force. Today, that figure is less than 10 percent. However, thanks to roundabout production, we can produce more manufactured goods and more food than ever.

Much of today's American workforce is engaged in roundabout production, which Böhm-Bawerk equated with capital. There is no longer a meaningful distinction between labor and capital. Labor is capital.

If labor is capital, then we have lost the automatic tight connection between spending and employment. Firms can vary their output with little or no variation in employment. This explains how we can have a “jobless recovery,” meaning a large percentage increase in output without a comparable percentage increase in employment. For firms in today's economy, labor represents an investment. Firms hire workers in order to develop capabilities that will eventually produce output more efficiently. The return on an investment in workers may take as long or longer to realize as the return on investment in a machine. The return on investing in workers may be at least as uncertain as the return on investing in equipment.

The phenomenon of roundabout production suggests a story for the current recession. The economy was suddenly caught in an unsustainable pattern of production, which involved too much housing construction in the “sand states” of Florida, Nevada, and California as well as too much financial activity related to mortgages and mortgage securities.

The suddenly unsustainable housing and mortgage boom comes atop the ongoing obsolescence of various patterns of specialization, as the Internet and globalization continue to foster new forms of organization and competition. The result of the boom-bust cycle superimposed on the ongoing obsolescence is to overload the market's ability to reconfigure production patterns so that workers are fully employed.

The market needs to undertake a recalculation in order to deploy workers in a new, sustainable pattern of specialization and trade. The process involves gradual, decentralized trial and error. Firms need to be launched by entrepreneurs, who will make risky investments in employees. The failure rate will be high, but eventually the successes will have a cumulative effect that brings about more economic activity.

The challenge is made difficult by the increasing specialization of labor-capital. The problem of matching skills with needs in roundabout production is much more complex than the problem of adding or subtracting workers in final-stage production.

The Keynesian prescription for a recession is to increase government spending. Even if the resulting output is not valuable (the proverbial digging ditches and filling them in again), the thinking is that this will stimulate productive output. Again, this is based on the theory that economic activity is spending. Supposedly, spending will encourage more spending, through the “multiplier” effect.

From our more Austrian perspective, the Keynesian prescription will fail. Government spending tends to create or reinforce unsustainable patterns of production—temporary housing booms, transitory increases in auto sales, and the like. However, there is no reason to expect unsustainable patterns of production to stimulate the creation of sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. If anything, it would seem likely that government support for unsustainable patterns of production could make the market's recalculation problem more confusing. It will delay long-term recovery, rather than hasten it.

What needs to emerge are new, sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. Government does not have much incentive to create sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. In fact, the political system tends to favor subsidies to outmoded and unsustainable businesses.

Government could reduce the cost of investing in labor-capital. If it can be done in a fiscally responsible way, it would help to reduce the marginal tax rates on investment (the corporate profits tax) and employment (the payroll tax). This may require offsetting tax changes, such as eliminating the mortgage interest deduction or the deductibility of employer-provided health insurance.

On the whole, the best way to help the process of market recalculation and the creation of sustainable patterns of specialization and trade may be for government to get out of the way.

Well there are some things that might help but policy makers have chosen not to do them. Many of the things that have been done are counterproductive.

It's not pretty to watch

My impression is that the current president is moderately bright and moderately clever in a narrow way. I see little evidence of very high intelligence or impressive breadth and depth of knowledge. Jennifer Rubin captures things rather well:

To be blunt, Obama suffers from a lifetime of others excessively praising his intellect. It insulates him from ideas and facts that conflict with his pre-existing liberal rubric (so “every economist” believed his stimulus would work). It leaves him unprepared to engage in real debate with informed opponents (e.g. the health-care summit). It skews his understanding of how geopolitics works, as he imagines that his own wonderfulness can sway adversaries and override nations’ fundamental interests (the Middle East).

It’s a deadly combination — intellectual arrogance and lack of sympatico with the public — that leads him again and again to stumble. And when his shortcomings lead to embarrassment or failure, he strikes out in frustration — at Israel, at the media, and at the American people. The image of himself clashes with the results he achieves and the reaction he inspires. No wonder he’s so prickly. You’d be, too, if everyone your entire life had told you that you were swell but now, when the chips are down and the spotlight is on, you are failing so badly in your job.

(ht/instapundit)

We the People vs. The Elites, yet again

Thomas Sowell holds forth:

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in the Federalist, a collection of essays written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, but has been a continuing challenge — to this day — to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books, or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be at the forefront of those who seek to erode constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years, but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of “czars” wielding greater power than Cabinet members’, without having to be exposed to public scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.

Those ideas are captured rather well in this video:

News You Can Mews

I wonder if this brain parasite transmitted from cats could literally be the liberal disease:

The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, has been transmitted indirectly from cats to roughly half the people on the planet, and it has been shown to affect human personalities in different ways.

Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure. [...]

Can a common cat parasite account for part -- even if only a very small part -- of the cultural differences seen around the world? [...]

Toxoplasma, he notes, is "frighteningly amazing."

It can change the personality of a rat so much that the rat surrenders itself to a cat, just as the parasite wanted.

The parasite's eggs are shed in a cat's feces. A rat comes along, eats the feces, and becomes infected. The behavior of the rat undergoes a dramatic change, making the rat more adventuresome and more likely to hang out around cats.

The cat eats the rat, and the parasite completes its life cycle.

So the next time you think it's a good idea to appease murderous islamo-fascists or turn over complete control of our lives to the government, perhaps you should see if you're infected by this parasite.

Hat Tip: Tim Blair

That Was Lucky

Was it a miracle when the fronds of a palm tree broke his fall?

Authorities and witnesses say that a palm tree likely saved the life of Joey Williams, a 4-year-old boy who fell Friday morning from a 17th-floor balcony after chasing a balloon through his apartment home at the Doubletree Grand Hotel Biscayne Bay.

The boy opened a sliding glass door, climbed over a covered balcony railing, bounced off the crown of the palm tree and safely landed on the ``dirt surface'' of an area surrounding the hotel's 10th-floor pool, said Kenia Reyes, a Miami police spokeswoman.

``It's a miracle -- he doesn't appear to have broken a bone,...''

Maybe. In which case, as James Taranto points out, it's good to have fronds in high places.

I just love it when real news sets up for full groan humor!

How Lobbying Works

Politicians need lots and lots of money for their election campaigns. Corporations want legislation that discourages competitors and boosts profits. Lobbyists, with the help of campaign finance laws, provide the match making between the politicians and corporations.

The executives of a corporation hire a lobbyist. The lobbyist figures out which Senators and Representatives can write and/or get legislation passed. The executives (and underlings) donate money to those Senators and Representatives and even the President in order to further that process. Because these donations are public information, the lobbyist is able to compile a list of donations from the employees of that corporation and calculate a total. The lobbyist goes to the politicians and points out the "generosity" of the corporation. The politicians push legislation through that benefits the corporation.

The politicians, the lobbyists, and the corporations win. The taxpayers lose.

There are some interesting subtleties. The corporation does not demand or require that anybody donate to various campaigns. That would be illegal. Indeed, they may not even suggest it directly. Instead, it's known through the grapevine (but certainly not officially) that your campaign contributions will be monitored (and can be because it's all public information).

When describing corporation strategy and business development in meetings and in company newsletters, the politicians that can help the company are identified. You then donate to those campaigns. You get raises and bonuses that are partly based on reimbursing you for those political donations. Again, not officially, but that's how it works. You don't have to do it, but it will adversely affect your compensation and career if you don't.

It's funny to me that most people think that making donation information public makes politics somehow more fair when, in fact, the whole purpose of doing it this way was to enable corporations to direct their executives and employees to support various candidates. If campaign contributions were secret, it would be much harder to do.

That's why a Media Matters "correction" (via an Instapundit post and Reason article) is so silly. The "correction" was that various articles in the main stream and non-main stream media were incorrect when they stated that Obama received a huge amount of money from BP. According to Media Matters, the money didn't come from BP, but rather from employees of BP.

It's pretty much the exact same thing!

The Warming Phoenix Rises From the Ashes

The argument for doing something about climate change is, in my opinion largely based on "appeal to authority". In other words, if climate scientists say something is so, then it must be so.

That's why Climategate was so damaging to the warmenist cause. The credibility and therefore the authority of the main IPCC scientists was called into question. Without that credibility, the warmenists main argument was damaged and public support for doing something disintegrated.

The National Research Council was funded by Congress to study climate change and has now produced 3 reports totalling over 800 pages. I've scanned the first 100 pages and it looks to be nearly a complete regurgitation of the IPCC's last report (AR4), except that at the end of many sections the primary conclusion was that new bureaucracies and scientific organizations should be created to continue studying climate change.

How clever! Since the IPCC's credibility was damaged, why not take more or less the same material and have some scientists with reputation intact spout the same old alarmist stuff. Now the warmenists can appeal to authority again and march forward to world domination or whatever their goal is.

The credibility of the IPCC is dead - long live the credibility of the National Research Council!

Mohammed

My attempt at Mohammed for Everybody Draws Mohammed Day.

The Future of Recorded Music

Once upon a time, I wrote, arranged, played the instruments for, mixed, and produced 17 songs on two CDs (here and here - they're free!). I really wrestled with whether or not to try and make money from those efforts for, um, well 15 or 20 seconds - 25 seconds top. Okay, maybe "wrestled" is a little too strong, but hey, I did at least contemplate it.

The reason I decided not to even try to make money is that the success of a band (or artist) and its music is only partly dependent on the music. More important is the marketing: the shows the band does (choreography, pyrotechnics, stunts, and other entertaining moments), the persistence of the band staying in the public's consciousness, the news and buzz about the band (personalities, arrests, drug use, etc.), and so forth. Sure, the music of some popular bands is pretty good, but some popular bands have pretty marginal musicians with pretty marginal songs. In any case, the music of popular bands is no better in any objective sense than the music of many unknown bands.

Relatively recently, I stumbled upon an interesting blog called Cerebellum Blues. Jeff Shattuck, the blogger, suffered a brain injury and woke up with a "rekindled" desire to write songs. He's now recorded his first album and is wrestling with how to make money from his efforts. He's spending a lot longer than 25 seconds thinking about it though. That got me thinking about it again as well.

Unfortunately, I've come to the same conclusion: even though his songs are, in my opinion, quite good, he's going to have a tough, tough time of it. Especially since he can't really do the concert thing due to persistent dizziness due to his brain injury.

The standard business model assumes that the demand side of the equation is the people who want to listen to music and the supply side of the equation is those involved in producing the music to satisfy demand.

However, in the case of music, demand and supply are also inverted in some sense. Humans are driven to create, and creating music is particularly fun and satisfying (at least for people like me). It's even more satisfying when people actually listen to your music. For example, I can't imagine that even a single musician or song writer would say something even vaguely like, "I couldn't care less if people listen to my music as long as I make money at it." Everybody wants to write and play for other people. That's a fundamental need.

In the case of that need, the demand is for people to listen to your music. The supply is then those people who are willing to listen to that music. In other words, regarding satisfying the need of the musician or song-writer to have others listen to his or her music, that musician should be paying the listeners, not the other way around.

However, first let's consider supply and demand from the more traditional perspective. Even from this perspective it's tough and getting tougher to make money solely based on recorded music.

Supply

Let's say approx 1 in 10,000 people has wherewithal and motivation to write and record songs with no expectation of generating any income from the recording those songs. Why might these people do that?

1.) Musicians create "demos" to get gigs at various venues (vast majority).
2.) Serious hobbyist (me for example, also silicon-valley entrepreneurs after IPO).

I'm guessing that there are on the order 100,000 such people in the United States alone, and soon there will be 1,000,000 such people worldwide. Let's say each writes 10 songs a year. That's 10,000,000 new songs per year. However, songs are forever (for example, I noticed that my 13 year old daughter has a 40 year old album by the Beatles on her iPod). So there will be around 1 billion new songs created per century.

Cost of Supply

Each song can be replicated for tiny fractions of a penny. With today's equipment, it takes maybe 40 man-hours per song to record and engineer (mix) and the efforts will likely result in a pretty high quality recording. The recording equipment is an iMac (or other computer) with a few hundred dollars of software (or even free if you don't mind some limited functionality and an occasional crash) and a few microphones (for vocals and to mike the instruments, amps and drums). The musicians have instruments which may be quite expensive, but they probably don't need anything special for recording.

So there's very little cost and very little effort involved in recording songs. Other than the musicians' and song writer's effort, the total cost can be almost nothing.

Demand

My guess is that an average person is interested in listening to maybe 10,000 different songs in a lifetime. My personal observation is that about half the people can't even really tell if a recording is in tune or not and another 40% can tell but don't really care very much. As a result 90% of people are happy enough with fairly low quality recordings and certainly today's computer based recording equipment is plenty good for that. Therefore, the vast majority of songs being recorded are good enough for 90% of the population.

With 1 billion songs per century and the need for a total of 10,000 songs, that's an oversupply of 100,000 to one! Even dividing by some large number of genres and even if I'm off by orders of magnitude, that's quite an oversupply for 90% of the population.

Connecting Supply to Demand

One argument against free music in the past is that there may be millions of songs, but how does one find songs that they like? Certainly some intermediary like a recording exec needs to do some filtering, right?

Well, no. One problem is that the recording execs can't get through the millions of songs either, so that route guarantees inferior music being distributed.

Technology to the rescue! With the Internet radios (Pandora, Jango, last.fm, etc.) people rate songs so you'll be automagically fed songs you like!

More on Supply/Demand Inversion

It's actually already nearly gotten to the point where Supply versus Demand has inverted, where the supply is ears to listen and demand is songwriters who want to have their music heard. Jango has a service call Jango Airplay where song writers can pay to have their music heard. It's $30 for 1,000 plays (i.e. a thousand individuals will be fed your song when listening to Jango). Pretty cool really. And the 90% of the population that's not to picky will have no reason to ever pay for recorded music again. Who knows? Eventually they may even get paid to listen to songs.

Back to Jeff. The best chance he has, in my opinion, is that he has a unique and interesting story (at least to me): "Suffered a serious injury and woke up with a rekindled desire to write songs." Seems like that could get him some human interest stories in major media which might bring people to his site and sell his CDs.

However, from what I can tell, he seems determined to "make it" based on the quality of his songs. Though his songs are good, I wish him luck because I think he'll need it.