Some social problems are blatantly obvious in daily life, while others are longer-term, more corrosive and perhaps mostly invisible. Lately I've been worrying about a problem of the latter kind: the erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property.
The main culprits for the change are software and the internet. For instance, Amazon's Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionised how Americans consume text. Fifteen years ago, people typically owned the books and magazines they were reading. Much less so now. If you look at the fine print, it turns out that you do not own the books on your Kindle. Amazon.com does.
https://www.afr.com/opinion/americans-own-less-stuff-because-of-the-internet-and-thats-a-worry-20180812-h13vkdI don't think this is such a big problem. It may actually be a good thing. Imagine how much paper we are saving by not printing so many books. I can see that the worry could be that theoretically Amazon could just say, "The books are ours, you can't read them anymore." I don't think they could do that legally, for one thing. The other thing is that, even if they did do that, there's plenty of competition. Everybody would just go to another company. That is the main reason that Amazon would never do that. They want to make money. I think owning less things is actually a great thing. Do you think that to be a "true American" you need to own lots of things? The bigger the better? I think that's a relatively new idea. Did the founding fathers think like that?