The Constant Erosion of Laws and Regulations in an Environment Where Money is Like Water

You learn in chemistry that water is nature's near universal solvent. You learn in geology classes that water, either by the cycle of freezing and thawing, or by the simple fact of constant movement, can cut down any mass of rock, or mountains of soil. So deceivingly gentle one moment in individual drops, warm and cleansing in a shower, or quenching thirsty plants when it rains, and so terrifying the next when those drops collect into raging torrents down even the slightest of inclines, or as the relentless waves of oceans crashing against coastlines.

Money, as a universal translator of productive output from all of the many specialized endeavors that constitute our ability to apply knowledge in practical terms, is very similar. And now that money has been turned into electrons moving at mind bending speeds, it becomes an even more powerful translator, gaining levels of relativistic mass and inertia that begin to rival the movement of planets.

If you think that legislative sea walls, or regulatory levies, can hold back this new elementary force any better than the ones we have to keep rebuilding to hold water back now than you are a fool; whether of the ordinary variety, or the damned variety remains to be seen.

The thing is, however, with money a choice was made to give it power in the first place. As such we can choose to take that power away if we let go of the operating system that makes it possible at all.

Not being able to let go makes us like a certain species of monkey. Relatively small and desired by the natives who live among them. These natives learned that, if you hollow out a coconut through a hole that's just barely big enough for a monkey hand to fit through, and you then fill it with treats that the monkeys find irresistible, secure the coconut to a tree by vines, the monkeys will come along, put their hands in to grab the treats and thus be snared. All the monkeys have to do to avoid being captured is to let go of the treats so that their hand can fit back out of the hole that was cut into the coconut. But they don't. Such an option probably doesn't even occur to them.

Are you going to remain being the monkey who can't let go? A monkey who isn't just risking being captured, but also being swept away by raging torrents of its own creation.

Net Neutrality Is in More Danger Than Ever