Given all the studies about micro-purchases and turning a blind eye to piracy actually INCREASING sales -- which the studios are currently ignoring -- yes, I think there's a fairly obvious set of changes to the current business model which would pair well with either of those companies.

This is happening already, they're just growing it organically. Apple is getting into digital publishing. Amazon has been self publishing digital for a while, and recently started printing physical books on its own label. Buying one or more major publisher in any of the 3 major media would give them access to a huge amount of established content, as well as the facilities and manpower to ramp up their publishing chops that much more quickly.

Granted if they wait a couple years the major publishers will probably just be that much cheaper of a purchase, but there's a question of who gets what, too. Whichever one eventually buys Disney/Pixar gets a lockdown on all their copyrights as well. When the content distributors finally turn around and start buying up the content producers, it'll be a land grab to get access to the most desirable IP.

Seriously. Apple has 76B sitting in the bank, Microsoft has 55B. Time Warner has a market cap of 37B, hell even the media giant that is Disney/Pixar has a market cap of only 70B. A lot of the music companies are a fair bit smaller.

The distribution channels (Apple, Google, etc) are bending over backwards on deals with companies that they could acquire in a hostile takeover tomorrow if they wanted to. It's crazy.

I'm not saying there are no outliers. And some parts of libertarianism are very attractive, and I find Ron Paul's stance on social freedoms fairly reasoned and compelling. I'm talking more about the large number of people who were suggesting with any level of sincerity during the health care debates in 2010 that the rich should seriously start "going Galt". It's kind of the same crowd of libertarians who were recently in the news claiming that nobody needs college anymore... they're almost always convinced that they're such astounding geniuses that their small business will naturally be in the 5% of small businesses that don't fail in the first year.

In general, public figures are probably not going to be sheep in the movement. But most of my experience with the rank and file of self-identified "libertarians" is that they're not really adding new ideas to the body of the movement. It's really just anecdotal, so I realize it's not definitive.

Most libertarian-ish people have to find that way of thinking on their own (or at least seek out alternative literature)

Are you shitting me? Most "libertarian-ish" people bought into the Ayn Rand (tm) brand and are convinced that they are a unique and special flower who should be worshiped by the rest of the world for gracing them with their existence because they read it in a book. Almost by definition, any belief system that has a widely recognized name is going to be made up of mindless sheep.

and may even face a speedier than usual decline unless they actually sell shit (real hardware or software products, not just sets of "mouse clicks") like Microsoft and Apple do

You must not have looked recently... they have stores for music, movies, and books, and have for at least 6 months or so.

You've succeeded in a country rich in infrastructure and a well educated populace, both supported by public tax dollars. You can afford the fossil fuels necessary for such a trip in part because they are subsidized by further tax dollars, both in the form of direct subsidies and in military spending to guarantee us access to said resources. And you plan to take this drive on a public highway system which was built as part of one of the largest socialist economic stimulus projects in the history of the world. Congratulations. You're an asshole libertarian in the middle of a collective, and you've accomplished nothing on your own except being a giant self-deluded tool.

Not really... even in the case you're talking about, of a person paying for another person's services out of their private income, the plumber is going to negotiate their wages in the same market you negotiated yours... that is, in terms of pre-tax income. And your negotiations of your own salary take into account the fact that you'll be paying the full price including tax for the goods and services you purchase with the salary. The result if the "double taxation" went away would be that things would be cheaper, so you'd be paid less.

And all that is ignoring the fact that the plumber only pays tax on the portion of their fee that ends up going to their personal income. Money spent on supplies, maintenance on their work vehicle, advertising costs, and generally running and expanding the business are not taxed. In practice it's more like a 5-10% tax in terms of the amount they keep out of what you pay them.

Ignoring some of the more blatant forms of stupid in that response, I'll just point out that while it's possible to traffic in bootleg cigarettes, enough people find it easier to just pay taxes on the legal version that they generate in excess of 16 billion dollars in tax revenue per year. Source: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=403

If you hit even a small fraction of that, it would still be a pretty significant amount of revenue for cash-strapped state governments.

I know that there is a good number of people on the internet who don't want to hear it, but legalizing marijuana just so that you can get high is a pretty selfish thing to be expecting the president to deal with. There are, and have always been, way more important issues than sending that kind of nonsense to his desk.

How about legalizing it so we can stop spending billions of dollars on cannabis enforcement, generate millions (possibly billions) in taxes on its sales, and at the same time cut off American gangs and Central and South American drug cartels at the knees by taking away control of one of their biggest products?

This. Plus the implication that the first guy is employing the second, and in that situation the first guy wouldn't actually pay any tax on their income, provided they turn around and spend it on salary for an employee.

Your links are incredibly bad at explaining how the current tax system works, to the point that they're flat-out wrong.

While true, the number of cases that break with next-line style braces are vanishingly small. In practice you can write tens of thousands of lines of javascript without ever running into this problem.

This. Unfortunately none of the protesters seem to understand the reasons behind it -- they mostly appear to think it's because of political maneuvering and the rich "cheating" the system. I don't buy it... the rapid obsolescence of the working class in the US is caused by an entirely different effect than the economic disparity in the 3rd world. In our case, we've engineered millions of people out of any kind of job they can effectively or enjoyably perform, and this is the result. Unless we resort to make-work programs, these people will either have to retrain to a level that's likely drastically outside their comfort zone, or accept that they're not going to make a comfortable wage. It's a nasty choice to be forced into.

A major news columnist, I forget who, recently proposed that maybe we are reaching the point where it is no longer a desirable social goal to have everyone in a job. I mean, the whole point of Progress is to eventually achieve a 100% unemployment rate, right?

This sounds nice until you realize that while automated labor may become essentially free, it can't change the fact that natural resources are limited. Under the current economic system, the end state is one where your own effort and labor are effectively worthless, and the only people who can afford to buy natural resources are the people who already "own" some natural resources which they can trade. Not a pretty picture.

This only holds true if level of education among humans stays the same. We may eliminate repetitive jobs, but humans will learn new techniques which won't be easily automated.

I think you have a lot more faith in the species than I do. Do you really believe that every person on the planet is suited to do work more complex than what can be automated today? Or that even if they can, every single one would be happy doing such work? And even if that's true of future generations (assuming we fix our broken school systems), do you really think it's feasible to retrain all the people who find themselves suddenly out of a job because what they were doing just got automated?