>On Sep 11, 2012, at 12:43 AM, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps the problem is the writers who expect to get paid for their stuff,
>
>Imagine that!
>
>No one would seriously suggest that carpenters or nurses shouldn't
>get paid. But it's ok when it comes to writers and artists? Fuck
>that noise.
Unemployed carpenters and nurses don't get paid. Unemployed writers and musicians don't get paid. Its how the capitalist system works. If no-one is suggesting it, its because it is too obvious.
What percentage of writers have ever made a living from selling their work to the public directly anyhow? Unless you define writers as people who make a living from it, which would be circular logic, a very small percentage I suggest.
But even that is in the past. That model doesn't work any more, made redundant by technological change, another model has to be found.
The difficulty of course is that the market economy is a system designed to distribute goods and services where the demand exceeds the supply, it doesn't cope very well with abundance. Technological change means books and so on can be distributed for virtually nothing. Marxists will recall that lesson about value being determined by the socially-necessary cost of production - well the socially-necessary cost of production is now virtually nothing. So it is no use ranting and raving about how we would like writers (or carpenters and nurses) to be paid a living wage. The market system isn't about looking after writers, any more than it is about looking after carpenters and nurses.
The price of things in a market system supposedly hovers round about value. So we should expect the price of books to be roughly free where the cost of distribution is nothing and the supply of writers greatly exceeds the demand. In a market system.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas