I write this is response to Fabio Albertin's letter of Feb. 16 to the editor "Feedback Letters Missed their Point" regarding my own feedback submission.
In his letter, Albertin noted that I had missed "the deeper meaning." This "deeper meaning" expressed by Albertin, whether purposeful or not, is the complete lack of respect for property rights and the advocacy of theft through the government instead.
Mr. Albertin calls for us to use the federal government to start "imposing limits on how much money customers could be charged for a CD, or conversely, how much of the profits made from album sales artists should be receiving."
Please follow me as I point out the "deeper meaning" of this to you. Albertin makes use of the words, "imposing," "could be charged," and "should be receiving." Ask yourself, should anyone have the right to use the federal government to impose upon you a mandate that would tell you how much your customers should be charged and how much you should receive from selling items to them? I say no.
Furthermore I want to point out that in my previous letter I wrote that Kazaa provides the downloader with the moral delusion that downloading is not theft.
When Albertin argues that we use the government to impose price and profit laws what he is actually advocating is that we use the government to provide us with the moral delusion that our ignoring of property rights is not theft. Both methods are theft and would just as unjustly provide us with the music as running out of the store with armloads CDs.
Despite what Albertin believes about what people are capable of doing in "reality" I know that they only buy music because they want to buy it and if they truly wanted to drop the prices they could stop buying.
If they choose not to, that is their choice. But I want to touch on the "deeper meaning" here because many people are probably still in agreement with Mr. Albertin's plan for government price and profit control.
The "deeper meaning" is that throughout history many people have supported this type of idea because it seems to benefit them as consumers. What they fail to see are the consequences of supporting this idea. For a list of the consequences you need only look in history in 1917 Russia, 1933 Germany and 1958 Cuba.
Although I should not be so surprised to find people so willing to engage in the wholesale stripping of other people's property rights, when at this very same moment the champion of stripping property rights, Adolph Hitler, is a nominee for the Nobel Peace prize.
In the end it is really up to each one of us whether we support theft in whatever form it comes, but I urge you to remember that in a free market economy, it is you, the consumer, who has the choice to buy.
