A Swan

Or was it that the boy was so beautiful

she called him a swan

though he really was not a swan

as she’d made them

as they were willing

to believe. He wasn’t

a swan and he wasn’t

a boy. He just looked like a boy

innocent and harmless, someone

you could handle if you had to.

It was just better to say that something divine

entered an innocently beautiful creature grazing

the tender shoots of soft grass on the banks

of the infinitely flowing river, better to believe

a curious deity knowing she would come this way

violated an innocent beast and that

the violated beast raised its head

with double seeing

and drove this god curious for beauty before he knew

it was happening to the crest of the hill until

even a god
became victim

of a swan’s
desire.

Winning

He pulls a card from the stack.

Without looking at it he slides it into an envelope

seals it

puts it back.

They know the rules.

They play the game as well as they can

scoring as many points as possible

until time runs out.

He unseals the envelope

to reveal the criteria that will be used

to declare a winner.

It may be the points.

It may be who scored the most before time ran out.

Or it may be who had the lead for the greatest number of minutes

or plays

or who ran the most plays

or who had the ball the longest.

It may be any number of other things too.

Someone objects:

We should always use the same criteria for deciding who wins.

We could do that, he says,

but then we’d start to think we know

what winning is.

The Necessity of Regulation for a Robust Culture and Economy--The Case of Copyright

Copyright is a form of regulation. If I spent five years  and a million dollars whittling a tree into a toothpick, that toothpick won’t be worth a penny more for all my work than any other toothpick. But if I spend five years and a hundred million making a movie, that movie, says the law, should be protected. According to the market, it should be worth what you can get for it—which is nothing. It’s easy to copy and distribute for free. You’re spending a fortune to create an object which in the free market is worthless. Only regulation gives it any value. This falsification of the real market value of a movie is necessary however. Without it, no one would make movies. And movies are valuable to the culture in ways that have nothing to do with money.

Value is not limited to economic value—that’s merely the simple metaphor by which we understand (imprecisely) the notion of value. Regulation may sometimes stifle the market. At other times regulation creates and releases value. The value it creates may be frankly economic—as in copyright. The value it releases transcends the whole economic paradigm.