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Jeff Tucker’s Sing Like A Catholic (2009) looks very interesting. It’s available on Amazon, and Scribd (below). Buy a copy, help a seminarian attend the Sacred Music Colloquium.
Sing Like a Catholic

Someone recently told me “I just ran across a few of your interviews and writings. I was particularly impressed with the point that IP creates scarcity where none existed before. Despite its obviousness, it is characteristic of IP that had not occurred to me before.”

So I thought I would elaborate a bit on this. The “artificial scarcity” insight is indeed a good one, but it is not mine. From pp. 33-34 of Against Intellectual Property:

Ideas are not naturally scarce. However, by recognizing a right in an ideal object, one creates scarcity where none existed before. As Arnold Plant explains [“The Economic Theory Concerning Patents for Inventions,”Economica, New Series, 1, no. 1 (Feb., 1934)]:

It is a peculiarity of property rights in patents (and copyrights) that they do not arise out of the scarcity of the objects which become appropriated.  They are not a consequence of scarcity.  They are the deliberate creation of statute law; and, whereas in general the institution of private property makes for the preservation of scarce goods, tending (as we might somewhat loosely say) to lead us “to make the most of them,” property rights in patents and copyright make possible the creation of a scarcity of the products appropriated which could not otherwise be maintained.  Whereas we might expect that public action concerning private property would normally be directed at the prevention of the raising of prices, in these cases the object of the legislation is to confer the power of raising prices by enabling the creation of scarcity.  The beneficiary is made the owner of the entire supply of a product for which there may be no easily obtainable substitute.  It is the intention of the legislators that he shall be placed in a position to secure an income from the monopoly conferred upon him by restricting the supply in order to raise the price.[64]

Bouckaert also argues that natural scarcity is what gives rise to the need for property rules, and that IP laws create an artificial, unjustifiable scarcity. As he notes:

Natural scarcity is that which follows from the relationship between man and nature. Scarcity is natural when it is possible to conceive of it before any human, institutional, contractual arrangement. Artificial scarcity, on the other hand, is the outcome of such arrangements. Artificial scarcity can hardly serve as a justification for the legal framework that causes that scarcity. Such an argument would be completely circular. On the contrary, artificial scarcity itself needs a justification.[65]

Thus, Bouckaert maintains that “only naturally scarce entities over which physical control is possible are candidates for” protection by real property rights.[66] For ideal objects, the only protection possible is that achievable through personal rights, i.e., contract (more on this below).

[64] Arnold Plant, “The Economic Theory Concerning Patents for Inventions,” p. 36. Also Mises, Human Action, p. 364: “Such recipes are, as a rule, free goods as their ability to produce definite effects is unlimited. They can become economic goods only if they are monopolized and their use is restricted. Any price paid for the services rendered by a recipe is always a monopoly price. It is immaterial whether the restriction of a recipe’s use is made possible by institutional conditions—such as patents and copyright laws—or by the fact that a formula is kept secret and other people fail to guess it.” [For more on Mises’s view of IP, see Mises on Intellectual Property.]

[65] Boudewijn Bouckaert, What Is Property? (text version) in “Symposium: Intellectual Property,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990), p. 793; see also pp. 797–99.

[66] Bouckaert, “What is Property?” pp. 799, 803.

Bouckaert’s paper, What Is Property? (text version), is, by the way, superb and highly recommended.

Update: Jeff Tucker’s article and recent speech had me thinking about something that ties into this post well. People want to impose artificial scarcity on non-scarce things because they think scarcity is good. But they have it backwards. If anything, we should want material things to be non-scarce.

In Tucker’s talk, he was pointing out the difference between scarce resources and non-scarce, infinitely reproducible ones. Yes, they are different, but I think we also need to combat another fallacious view: people seem to implicitly think it’s bad that ideas are infinitely reproducible. This is a “problem” we need to combat by making them artificially scarce. But it’s a good thing.

i.e., at least ideas are non-scarce; but unfortunately, material things are scarce. But it would be good if material things were more abundant. So imagine that some benevolent genius invents a matter-copying device that lets you just point it at some distant object, and instantly duplicate it for free for you. So I see a coat you are wearing, click a button, and now I have an identical copy. I see you having a nice steak, and duplicate it. Etc. This would make us all infinitely wealthy. It would be great. Of course people would fear the “unemploymetn” it would cause–hey, I want to be unemployed and rich! And the rich would hate it because they would now not be special. They couldn’t lord their Rolls Royces and diamonds over the poor; the poor would have all that (it would be similar to how audiophiles were irked by the advent of the CD so tried to find granite turntables etc. to pretend they were still better). So imagine a rich guy suing a guy who “copied” his car…. imagine farmers suing people who copied their crops to keep from starving… how absurd! And what damages would they ask for? Not monetary damages–the defendant could just print up wealth to pay him off! So the only remedy he could want would be to punish or impoversih the defendant… for satisfation, to once again feel superior. How sick.

As my friend Rob Wicks noted, you could imagine a short story based on this in which judge orders a famine as a remedy to crop-copying.

[Mises cross-post; Am crosspost]

Update: See also May & Sell, Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (2006), pp. 22–23:

 One of the purposes of IPRs [intellectual property rights] therefore is to construct a scarcity (or rivalrousness) that allows a price to be taken and knowledge to be exchanged in market mechanisms to further social efficiency. In a clear statement of this requirement (utilizing the labor desert argument), Kenneth Arrow noted that if “information is not property, the incentives to create it will be lacking. Patents and copyrights are social innovations designed to create artificial scarcities where none exist naturally. … These scarcities are intended to create the needed incentives for acquiring information” (Arrow 1996, 125 [“The Economics of Information: An Exposition,” Empirica 23, no. 2: 119–128.]).

And Kirzner:

“hindrance of the market process may consist of artificial obstacles to resource mobility (for example, immigration laws). Or there may be institutional grants of monopoly power (for example, patent laws).”

From LRC, 2004

State and Religion

Update: For related posts:

• Libertarian Centralists
• The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment
• Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists; Healy versus Bolick and the Institute for Justice
• Judicial Activism and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality (draft, 2005)
• Doherty on Slaughterhouse, Libertarian Centralism, and the Fourteenth Amendment
• The Heroic Gene Healy on the 14th Amendment: “If this be heresy—then make the most of it!”
• Incorporation and the Fourteenth Amendment: The 140 Year Old “Riddle”

In Killing Slaughterhouse (Reason Online), Brian Doherty provides a superb, concise overview of the legal and libertarian issues regarding an upcoming Supreme Court, McDonald v. Chicago, about whether the Second Amendment should be “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment so that it applies to the states, and related issues such as the Slaughterhouse Cases, “the controversial 1873 decision at the center of the Supreme Court’s upcoming gun rights fight.” [continue reading…]

Rebellion in the Red: Manifesto (google translation) notes Spanish legislation allowing the suspension of Internet service to users “to safeguard the rights of intellectual property” has caused a huge backlash. Journalists, bloggers, users, professionals and Internet developers have put forth a statement “In defense of fundamental rights on the Internet”, which includes:

1. Copyright can not be above the fundamental rights of citizens, including the right to privacy, security, the presumption of innocence, to effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

People are beginning to recognize the growing conflict between individual rights and “intellectual property”–and, if forced to choose, are choosing real, individual rights over IP. Hopefully it won’t stop here.

(HT to Keith Krauland for the link)

[Mises cross-post; AM cross-post]

I was talking with a libertarian friend the other night. He was talking about that New Hampsire Free State Project. I think that will never work because not enough people who matter would move there–mostly people with little to lose.

But remember a year or so ago Texan Governor Rick Perry actually mentioned the possibilty of Texas seceding? Look, these politicians want to get votes. If there is a tipping point reached or sensed… imagine a candidate senses voter frustration in Texas with growing unemployment,  taxes, etc.–to win as governor some candidate might try to capitalize on this. Imagine running on this campaign: [continue reading…]

On stupid and confused “thickism” see various posts under tag thickism, and Cory Massimino, “Libertarianism is More than Anti-Statism,” C4SS (April 8th, 2014).

Some of my friends think this is a great post: Matthew Dawson’s (aka Wombatron) Why I Am A Left-Libertarian. While I like ole Wombatron, and find some nuggets of wisdom here, and an admirable (for a leftie) attempt at being clear and explicit, I have to demur. First, Dawson starts out without defining leftism or left-libertarianism; he just assumes you know what it is, and why it’s assumed to be non-libertarian: [continue reading…]

Great series of posts back on LRC a while back (referring in part to this clown): [continue reading…]

On the latest This Week in Tech, guest panelist and sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle has an interesting anecdote about his involvement with a copyright squabble between Fox and Universal in the 1970s concerning Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. As noted on Wikipedia:

Battlestar Galactica was finally produced in the wake of the success of the 1977 film Star Wars. In fact, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (the studio behind Battlestar Galactica) for copyright infringement, claiming that it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from the 1972 film Silent Running (notably the robot “drones”) and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1940s.

Pournelle says [go to about 1:15:45 of the TWiT episode] that after Universal was sued by Fox, he was paid $20,000 by Universal to help show that BG was not too similar to Star Wars. Pournelle says that to write a brief showing there was no plagiarism. He says,

I looked at it, and said, why, that’s easy. If you ask me which is the better movie, then no question, Star Wars is the better one. But if you ask me which is the most original, there ain’t an original frame in either one of ’em! They’re both derivative from fiction that was published centuries ago–for instance the male-pair bonding between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker was echoed in Battlestar Galactica–I said, yeah, and they both got it from Homer, didn’t they?

[continue reading…]

Update: For related posts:

• Libertarian Centralists
• The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment
• Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists; Healy versus Bolick and the Institute for Justice
• Judicial Activism and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality (draft, 2005)
• Doherty on Slaughterhouse, Libertarian Centralism, and the Fourteenth Amendment
• The Heroic Gene Healy on the 14th Amendment: “If this be heresy—then make the most of it!”
• Incorporation and the Fourteenth Amendment: The 140 Year Old “Riddle”

He writes:

Pilon sees in the Fourteenth Amendment an effective check on such abuses. I see it as a source of further abuses. Collectivists in Congress and on the federal bench will seize on the expansive construction of the amendment Pilon urges to subvert the very liberties he seeks to secure. In so doing, they are unlikely to be restrained by what Pilon views as the proper understanding of the amendment.

Fragmentation of political power, even—perhaps especially—when such power is invoked in the service of our natural rights, is a surer guarantor of liberty than the goodwill of federal legislators and judges. I’d have thought that this was a respectable position for a libertarian to take. But if, as Bolick and McClaughry suggest, this be heresy—then make the most of it.

Update: For related posts:

• Libertarian Centralists
• The Libertarian Case Against the Fourteenth Amendment
• Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists; Healy versus Bolick and the Institute for Justice
• Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists
• Judicial Activism and the Presumption of Unconstitutionality (draft, 2005)
• Doherty on Slaughterhouse, Libertarian Centralism, and the Fourteenth Amendment
• The Heroic Gene Healy on the 14th Amendment: “If this be heresy—then make the most of it!”
• Incorporation and the Fourteenth Amendment: The 140 Year Old “Riddle”

From: Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists, LRC blog, 2005:

In Gene Healy’s blog post about Liberal Federalism [archived here; also here–see below], he notes, “I’d like to think that the Republican assault on federalism would lead to a resurgence of decentralist liberalism” (emphasis added). As I commented there– it would also be nice to see a resurgence of decentralist libertarianism too.

[Update: see Healy versus Bolick and the Institute for Justice]

Healy, a Cato Senior Editor, is a great opponent of “libertarian centralism”: see Healy’s great articles: States’ Rights Revisited, from The Freeman, and the following 4 articles from LRC (all linked at his LRC archive) : Contra Centralism (libertarian states rights scholar Gene Healy takes on Clinton Bolick, Roger Pilon, and John McClaughry, advocates of liberty through federal power); Roger Pilon and the 14th Amendment (Gene Healy, the libertarian legal scholar who’s brought sanity to discussions of an evil amendment, continues his work); Libertarian Reflections (Gene Healy on Waco, Paul Johnson, neocons, war, and left-libertarian nonsense); and The Squalid 14th Amendment (ratified by trickery during the federal military dictatorship over the South, this treacherous appendage to the Constitution is an attack on liberty and its American political foundation, states rights); see also my pieces: Supreme Confusion, Or, A Libertarian Defense of Affirmative Action, Barnett and the 14th Amendment; and Happy Bill of Rights Day — The Problem with the Fourteenth Amendment (which contains links to other articles on this). See also the HNN discussion thread Should We Celebrate Enforcing the Commerce Clause against the States? (2), in which some libertarians oppose the notion of federalism (discussed in Libertarian Centralists and Europe). [continue reading…]