So let me put a little more structure content and reason behind my rants about the best and brightest of our freedom-lovin’ web companies “blacking out” some content on the web Wednesday.

Yes, yes.  The bill itself is too harsh a solution to piracy.  And yes, yes, the rights of copy right holders should be protected.  No doubt about it. 

But that is not what sparks my concern and yeah, anger, about the “black out” strike.  What concerns me more is a Silicon Valley plutocracy that sees itself as above regulation and government -- and has no real intention of ending piracy and honoring copy right law. 

Believe me, these are smart people.  They could if they wanted to. Why haven't they?

Because their intelligence and morality is far more funneled into theocracy and self-interest than any grand concern for freedom. 

The “black out” smacks far too much of John Galt’s strike.  If you know your Ayn Rand, you know Galt’s story.    

And believe me, Silicon Valley right wing hippie billionaires sure do.  It’s the last thing they read before ditching all their liberal arts and history classes, dropping out of Stanford in their junior year when they got their venture capital funding. 

Galt is Rand’s prototypical uber-man -- the super talented one percent of humans from whom all value flows.  Constantly, he and Rand it would seem are fighting the leaches of the untalented (us) and the incursions of the government. 

One day, Galt says to hell with it and goes on strike.  He has organized all the other talented people in the world and they go on strike too.  Suddenly, the untalented lackeys are plunged into despair and hunger.  Galt then comes back and saves the world. 

Yeah, well, it was a 70-page monologue I read 50 years ago.  Whaddya want from me. I think that about sums it up, but even at age 14 I knew it was crap and it still is. 

But it is the bible in a lot of the Silicon Valley. 

So what does that have to do with web censorship and Silicon Valley.  

Tons of these folks are libertartian Ayn Randers living in that same deluded bubble. There should be no regulation of them. No taxes.  No government.  No touching. 

Which is odd of course because you and I and the government actually built them the infrastructure -- the Internet -- upon which they built their billions. 

So what’s wrong with freedom?  Nothing of course, but this is less about freedom and more about the business model and a very warped theology than freedom  It’s more about I want to take anything I damned well want and put it on the web.  Freedom in China?  Doesn’t fit the biz model. Censor away.  We’ll even give you the addresses of blogging journalists so you can throw them in jail. 

But surely I can’t criticize them for their protest Wednesday.  

Well, for a lot of them, I think it was far less about a fear of censorship than it was the overhead -- cast as “freedom.”

If piracy is truly checked, if copyright law is honored, if creative people receive the payment they deserve, then wow, overhead just went way up.  Appropriating content is better even than shipping jobs overseas.  

As I say, these are smart people.  If they want to craft legislation that protects copy right and fight piracy, they can do it. 

Or they can grandstand -- just as the NRA does over the 2d Amendment -- cry wolf and generate a lot of support in the name of freedom.  In a sense, it’s almost union busting.  If these folks can manage to appropriate content for free -- and make no mistake that is at the heart of most of their business models -- then their labor costs are low. If not they go up. 

Far easier to sound the alarm, and cry censorship.  Far easier for the one percent to again con the 99 percent.  Far easier to cast a war against talent as a fight for freedom.  The best I can say for them is that they may also have conned themselves. When you get into the libertarian echo chamber of Silicon Valley, that's pretty easy to do. 

But for anyone who holds a copyright, this type of freedom is indeed as the song says, just another thing  for nothing left to lose.