Because they're not my bastards.
- Fortunately, I didn't have any ancestors Over Here in time for the Second War of American Secession. Those who did have some overdue bills. This is a serious problem with hero worship of all kinds: More of them are clay all the way up to the neckline, not just their feet, than the common mythologies will acknowledge. And some of them are just mud — like A.P. Hill, and John Bell Hood, and Robert E. Lee, and Henry Benning, to name four easily-identifiable traitors.
- But if you want to see some real bastards, look no farther than those who make most of the money from touring musical acts (hint: it's not the musicians). Naturally, oversimplistic fixes won't work — not to mention will be quickly and easily evaded.
Authors: You're next, in a few more years. That's been the pattern for the last century or so — what happens in the music industry happens to publishing around a dozen years later (usually with a different name attached to it).
- Then there's the problem of now-unlawful noncompete agreements. They've been a problem in publishing for quite a while, specifically clauses prohibiting authors from publishing "competitive works" under their own names without prior written permission (which, I should add, is never forthcoming — not even for option works that were rejected). The irony that most of the commercial publishers are controlled by European conglomerates whose home nation laws prohibit noncompete agreements far more broadly than this FTC rule is a bit much to tolerate.
- But that's more tolerable than yet more junk economics. <SARCASM> Inflation doesn't kill off the middle class — trustfund beneficiaries do. </SARCASM>
- Even within economics, or the arts, or the sciences, expertise is and must be acknowledged as limited — which loops back in to the "our bastard" meme all too often. Being an expert freedom fighter/revolutionary has very little indeed to do with being able to govern afterward.