posted on Sep, 5 2013 @ 02:43 PM
Well, I'm ambivalent about that.
On one hand, I agree -- for example, everything I do online in some topics is always free even when people have offered to fund it, give it ads,
whatever -- not because I think money is inherently bad, but because every person I have ever seen involved at a topic, the minute money got into it,
integrity bit the dust. All the sudden they couldn't really be honest because they'd offend someone, or they had to promote something because they
needed cash, or they had to promote everything equally or seem biased even though most the marketing stuff was BS, or whatever. The only way I have
found to keep things clean is to keep money entirely out of it, and control it myself, since every time I think someone is good for it they end up
drooling all over government men or they turn out to be an out-there space cadet.
On the other hand, there is only so much time in life, and not everybody begins independently wealthy. Most people work for a living, plus family,
plus friends, hobbies, community, whatever. What little time is left over is hard to allot, and sometimes it actually costs a bunch of money to do
various research, go around and meet people, etc. So to me, it's reasonable that someone puts in a massive amount of work to a book, they sell the
book -- I mean sheesh, anybody who doesn't want to pay 10 bucks for a book can just go steal the ebook version on a bittorrent site, at this moment
probably the last half million books made into ebooks are easily available. That people who can and will afford it, can contribute to the efforts of
someone trying to write books or whatever, seems fair to me.
Money isn't evil on its own. I agree it generally wrecks the integrity of most things. Then again it's also the only reason a lot of things ever
existed to begin with, even imperfectly.
So it's kind of a dilemma....