I ditched streaming services a while ago, because I was fed up with the lousy curation of their catalogues and the tendency for albums to randomly disappear and reappear based on licensing disagreements.
Now I'm back to a ~25K track FLAC library and a small collection of LPs for fun. It's backed up to a NAS, to a cloud storage account and to a portable drive I keep in my locker at work. Nobody gets to take the music from me.
I've moved to purchasing music only on Bandcamp, where I get the option of downloading every purchase in the format of my choice (and offers artists an 85/15 profit split!).
And, after one adverse incident, I am very diligent about exercising that download option. Turns out, artists can withdraw themselves and their music from the platform at any time, which leaves customers without access... mostly. For some reason, I still have access to that music on my phone, though I haven't tested whether that's only thanks to the local cache.
I do the same thing, download as FLAC and store locally.
There are two options for artists/labels on Bandcamp if they want to remove an album from sale, for whatever reason.
One is to deactivate the album, which removes it from public view, but keeps it in the backend, so people who bought it still have it in their collections.
The other is the "nuclear option" of completely deleting the album everywhere, which also takes it away from the people who bought it.
While I can understand why they need to have the latter option, probably for legal reasons, I do find it troubling that something I've bought can just be arbitrarily taken away from me.
It really should be impossible to completely delete content from Bandcamp, without contacting them first. It should not be an option directly in the artist/label control panel.
Completely opposite of the nations foundations, I had no idea the concept of property being theft was actually entertained as a feasible concept
"America's Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself. Thus, through the common law, state law, and the Constitution, they protected property rights"
The concept of private property advocated by America's Founders is mostly based on Lockean ideas of "labor mixed with natural resources creates property". But as Benjamin Tucker pointed out, that doesn't justify absentee ownership (either as landlord or as employer), since you're no longer there actually mixing your labor. And landlords and employers are exactly the roles who Proudhon and other anarchists see as illegitimate, not the small farmer who tills his own land.
Of course, as large absentee owners themselves, the Founders were only too happy to let that consequence of Lockean theory slide, just as they were able to write "all men are created equal" while keeping men in slavery. But that merely shows that Upton Sinclair's quote, cliché as it may have become, still holds an inescapable truth.
Slavery has always existed and does to this day. We are all slaves to the banks who create currency out of thin air and loan it to others. The irony of calling the US a free country with the number of incarcerated is obvious.
The fact remains property is required to exercise any right. I wish the US would go back to only landowners being able to vote. Would realign society IMO
No, I think we incentivize poor people to not work. ( I have been poor and the benefits you get are better than many jobs right now)
I also believe the corporations having rights of a human without the punishment is a problem on that side. If a corporation breaks the law they should put the C level and the board in jail just like they would any other person.
Things are imbalanced on both sides and the concept the US is not a Republic but is a Democracy is being sold so propaganda machines can manipulate the public.
Term limits on congress, remove the ability of congress to vote themselves raises and get bribes via lobbying. Eliminate the poor from being able to vote themselves other peoples money... things like this would set is off to a better direction.
1. Property is theft is an anarchist position. While libertarians (as you cite the Cato Institute) and anarchists have an overlap of some positions, they are greatly at odds in others.
2. Whenever somebody starts telling me what the Founding Fathers thought I expect some BS which is only there to support their opinion and is so lopsided that it might as well be called a lie.
