You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.
The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.
If one record company pulls a track, so be it. That track will simply be out of my rotation. If I happen to be listening to popular music and I really want to hear the song, it is probably available other places. If I can't find it, so be it: I'll listen to something else and soon forget about that song. No big deal. In the end, I'm still dependent on the record company making it available in some way or another.
As an example I enjoy games and my Steam account likely now is 'worth' some thousands of dollars that I should be able to sell at some depreciated rate. Except it's not, and I cannot. As I'm effectively renting access to these products instead of actually 'buying' them, my account is worth exactly $0. I could try to sell it nonetheless, but it would be unlawful. If I was instead able to actually own these games, my little hobby would still have cost me money, but I'd be able to recoup a substantial portion of it at a later date -- or perhaps even work to monetize "my" games in some way, again within the confines of the law.
This is sort of a microcosm of what causes wealth inequality. A more typical example would be a poor individual spending decades paying rent each month that is simply subtracted from his net worth. A wealthier individual might be paying off a mortgage on a property that eventually begin to earn money for him, or at the minimum provide him a residence with no rent due other than that which the government demands. It's interesting to consider this aspect of the migration to cities. People move into these extremely dense areas where they're obligated to rent homes which, due to high demand, consume a very large chunk of their earnings - and then at the end of the days, weeks, years, decades, they have absolutely 0 to show for what will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for most people.
I don't think a bank account applies here. If I have a large bank account but no other ties to the community, I have no real skin in the game as it applies to community proceedings. I'll vote however and if I make mistakes I will leave with no losses.
'Property and stakes' in the context of American history and feudalism means land, not doodads. It's so many banal platitudes. Tyler is a smart guy but some of the stuff he writes and says is just...bad.
And we should find ourselves completely at ease at the end of our investigation, for in every species success is distributed inequitably. Inequality of net worth is a natural law, and human society is no exception. And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products.
The connection between hard work and wealth is also rather more attenuated than your simple ideal suggests.
I'd love to agree with you and rewarding work is very important, but in our current society outcomes seem mostly determined by starting conditions. People born into poor household that cannot offer good parenting & education are expected to "work way harder" to achieve a similarly happy life than people who spawned lucky. That's fine to some degree, but should be kept under control. Once enough people feel the system isn't fair and rigged against them will they burn it to the ground.
you're joking with this part, amiright?
don't you think "very hard working people" receive more like the vulture's share, only after the lions have fully fed?
Tell that to a single mom who works 2 jobs.
> Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.
What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.
And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you.
If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.