Great piece by Henry Mark Holzer, Ayn Rand’s former attorney.
F**K THE DRAFT
Here is where I part company with some of my conservative and patriotic friends. [continue reading…]
Paine forfeited his copyright in “Common Sense” so that any printer could publish it (this was prompted by a dispute with his printer, if memory serves), but he later defended copyright. For what it’s worth, he also defended the evil Pennsylvania Test Oaths, and expounded a variant of socialism in land in “Agrarian Justice.” A few more libertarians like Paine, and we’ll be laboring in slave camps.
I could never figure out why libertarians are so quick to embrace Paine (ditto for Andrew Jackson, who didn’t put an end to the 2BUS for any high-minded libertarian reasons, but so that its deposits would go into the pet banks owned by his political backers and cronies).
Stepp was right. Paine argued in a 1782 pamphlet that “the works of an author are his legal property,” and that it was critical for the country “to prevent depredation on literary property.” See The Life and Writings of Thomas Paine: Containing a Biography (Daniel Edwin Wheeler, ed., 1908) vol. 8, pp. 180, 182, quoted in Paul Clement, Viet Dinh & Jeffrey Harris, “The Constitutional and Historical Foundations of Copyright Protection,” Center for Individual Freedom [sic] (2012). Paine here refers to the unauthorized copying and publishing as piracy, fraud, embezzlement, purloinment, and so on.
See also Paine Was A Socialist. But see Jeff Tucker’s comments to X-Treme Thomas Paine, where he writes:
I’m not a Paine scholar but it seems obvious that the application of his principles ebb and flowed a bit here and there. He wrote in favor of the inheritance tax after he exiled from England and before his arrest in France. I do know this: he is one of the greatest champions of liberty ever. No one of his generation wrote as powerfully on the relationship between the individual and the state; and I also know that it is extremely difficult to find any thinker in any country who pure by modern standards who wrote before the age of Rothbard. So give the guy a break and learn what you can from him.
Update: See Paine’s complete writings, here; and also the fascinating series of V76 lectures by Andrew Galambos, which focused on the significance of Paine’s thought and his crucial role in the American Revolution (and Galambos’s contention that Paine was the actual author of the Declaration of Independence, not merely its intellectual inspiration). See Galambos on Paine (July 4, 2022).
Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: RSS
This Huffington Post piece by Alan Kaufman, “Google Books And Kindles: A Concentration Camp Of Ideas“. I thought this piece was a joke at first, but realizing it’s not only reminds of how terrible the left remains. Utterly hostile to technology, commerce, progress, industry, individuality, freedom, and modernity. A few choice sentences are enough to turn one’s stomach:
When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. And when I hear the term “hi-tech” I think not of helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between 1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient ways the mass murder of six million of my people. The instruments of so-called progress, placed in the hands of the modern state, disappeared six million Jewish men, women and children, into a void from which they will never return and in which a majority of them remain forever unidentified. This was done in the name of progress by means of technology for the creation of a better world. [continue reading…]
A brilliant post by Kevin Carson, Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time, discussing an article by Matt Welch in the January issue of Reason, makes a persuasive case that there is little reason to think that the French “socialized” healthcare system is inferior to the nominally “private” American healthcare system. Yes, a real free market system would be preferable to either the French, or the current American system. “But enemies of Obamacare need to drop the bullshit about the American healthcare system being ‘the best in the world,’ and defending it as ‘our free market system.’ … there’s really nothing all that astonishing about a comparatively well-run socialized system beating a really incompetent and slipshod mixed government-private system.”
They have a point. I am not sure if I believe that the Western welfare states’ socialized healthcare systems are so obviously superior to the current American system, as distorted as it is by state involvement, but it’s not hard to believe that the kluged “public/private” system that Congress is about to produce will be even worse than straight-out socialized medicine. And suppose we do get a version of socialized medicine, and the typical person likes it better than our current bastardized system–they’ll then believe socialism is superior to the market! That’s a reason we opponents of socialism need to make it clear that the current system is not a free market system, that most of the things people dislike about the current system are due to state involvement, and that increasing state involvement will only make matters worse than it could be under a free market system.
Update: See Welch, Matt Welch on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” at 7:30 AM EDT Saturday to Talk French & U.S. Health Care and Carson, Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time, both below:
Because what better things do you have to do at the crack of the weekend? Subject will be this column, which has provoked some interesting reaction from Kevin Carson and Stephan Kinsella, among others. Show will last a half-hour, and we’ll be taking phone calls.
***
Carson, Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time:
Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time
In an article for the January issue of Reason, Matt Welch compared his experiences in the “private” American healthcare system and the French “socialized” system, and found the latter a lot more attractive from the perspective of the average healthcare consumer. The “waiting lines” were a lot less of a problem in France than in the U.S., and the French system was a lot more user-friendly and simple from the standpoint of bureaucratic hassle. While people rich enough to pay for major procedures out of pocket might prefer the American system, the average American insurance policyholder would probably find the French system heaven on earth.
The point, Welch said, is not that a socialized system is better than a private system. The point is that their honestly socialized system is better than our socialized corporate system masquerading as a “private” one. He’d prefer a genuinely free market system to either the French or American system. But enemies of Obamacare need to drop the bullshit about the American healthcare system being “the best in the world,” and defending it as “our free market system.” Anyone with direct experience of foreign healthcare systems will be more than happy to expose such lies.
One of the commenters on Welch’s article, at Reason Hit&Run blog, made a good point: there’s really nothing all that astonishing about a comparatively well-run socialized system beating a really incompetent and slipshod mixed government-private system. But a genuine free market system wasn’t even in the running.
The fact that we’re dealing in the U.S. with a choice between two or more alternative state-private mixes is one reason I haven’t gotten too worked up about the whole Obamacare debate.
I especially don’t understand why the public option, of all things, is where self-described opponents of a “government takeover of healthcare” chose to draw a line in the sand.
The features of the plan that the Democrats, Republicans and Blue Dogs all agree on are far more statist than the public option as such.
An individual mandate, coupled with taxpayer subsidies of hundreds of billions over a ten year period to people at various multiples of the poverty rate strikes me as about as statist as you can get–especially when the “reform” maintains the insurance cartel’s jacked-up prices. As far as I’m concerned, a “private” insurance company that gets a huge share of its income from the taxpayers, and “sells” insurance to people who were forced to buy it, is as much a component of the state ruling class as a straightforward government agency. Even more so, in a sense, because the taxpayer-funded overhead includes an additional layer of parasites known as “shareholders.”
Prohibitions against denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, and other forms of denial of coverage, don’t bother the insurance companies at all. Since the entire industry is required to do these things it’s not a competitive issue, and the lack of cost controls means they can simply pass on increased costs to policyholders with a generous markup. They will subsidize coverage of the sick and currently uninsured by increasing everyone else’s premiums.
Consider this in light of the principles of dialectical libertarianism. A particular government measure is not to be evaluated on an atomistic basis, but in light of its contribution to the level of statism in the system of the whole. As Brad Spangler pointed out, when you’re held up at gunpoint the bagman who collects your money is just as much a robber as the guy holding your gun. The corporate bagmen who lobby for government intervention and profit from it are, therefore, part of the government. And when government intervenes to grant special privileges for nominally “private” actors, that is a net increase in statism. On the other hand, when a second government intervention qualifies or limits the exercise of this grant of privilege for the sake of ameliorating the worst effects of privilege, it is a net decrease in statism.
In this light, the public option would actually have represented a net decrease in statism. The major components of the healthcare “reform” that everyone agreed on were a naked power grab by a state-enforced cartel, forcing the entire population to purchase insurance at cartel prices and taxing the public to buy it for those who can’t afford it. The public option, on the other hand, would have been entirely self-financed after the initial seed money of a few billion, and nobody would have been forced to buy it. But it would have offered price competition to members of the insurance cartel.
It’s interesting, don’t you think, that all the professed enemies of “big government” and friends of “our free market system” objected to the public option of all things.
Lieberman and others explicitly said that competition to “private” insurance companies was what they couldn’t abide. But holding up taxpayers and forcing them to buy insurance at gunpoint, at whatever price the insurance companies choose to charge, with no competition–why, that’s not “big government” at all. Because the insurance companies are businesses, you see, and anything that benefits business is part of “our free market system.”
Whenever you see a Republican or beltway “libertarian” talking about “our free market system,” remember that they’d have been using the same rhetoric about Krupp and I. G. Farben if they’d lived in Nazi Germany.
In the Winter 2009 issue of LSU Alumni Magazine, “Tigers in Print” section. Undoubtedly LSU’s first connection to Hoppe!
Objectivist Diana Hsieh says:
“Kensella [sic] is an unhinged and dishonest bit of nastiness, and he deserves to be shunned by all reasonable people — not treated as a civilized interlocutor.”
I can’t say I’m very bothered by this: this is the same person who officially announces her change in allegiance from David Kelley to Leonard Peikoff (both the decision, and the Official Public Announcement, is enough to raise eyebrows), the same person who says people who oppose aborting “mentally defective” fetuses “worship retardation,” 1 and who writes:
On this Memorial Day, I would like to honor the three men of the American Civil War who understood the terrible need for total war: President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant, and General William T. Sherman. Their vigorous prosecution of the war preserved the Union, the very first nation founded on the principles of individual rights — and, at the time, the only such nation. In so doing, they ended the most loathsome violation of rights ever known to man: chattel slavery. Without them, without the brave Union soldiers who fought under them, America would not exist today.
So thank you, Mssrs. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. We are forever in your debt.
Related:
- The Structural Unity of Real and Intellectual Property
- The “Ontology” Mistake of Libertarian Creationists
- Objectivists: “All Property is Intellectual Property”
- A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”
From Mises blog; archived comments below (1, 2).
So says Adam Mossoff, Objectivist law professor, here:
Just FYI, I am just about to complete my first draft of my article, tentatively titled, “A Value-Based Theory of Intellectual Property,” in which I explain why intellectual property rights are a fundamental property right. In fact, my thesis can be summed up as: All Property is Intellectual Property. As far as I’m aware, this will be the first full-length academic treatment of IP that is not only based on Rand’s ethical and political theory, but also contextualizes this IP theory vis-a-vis both the Lockean labor theory of property and the utilitarian scarcity theory of property.
Of course, Kinsella and the other scarcity-based advocates for property rights with the libertarian movement, such as Timothy Sandefur, are appropriately taken down in my paper. I’m presenting my draft at the APA meeting at the end of this month in NYC, and, hopefully, I’ll have a draft up on the SSRN website by the spring. So, people will either have to come to the APA meeting or they’ll have to wait a few more months to download a draft.
“The patent system: End it, don’t mend it“–“From AIDS to Android phones, research shows that intellectual property rights are detrimental to the social good.” Superb, concise piece in The Christian Science Monitor, by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly.
It is common to argue that intellectual property (IP) in the form of copyrights and patents is crucial for the creation of innovative ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, software, books, and music. Proponents argue that IP is just like ordinary property in houses and cars. In fact, empirical evidence shows that IP does not promote innovation and that, unlike ordinary property, it is detrimental to the social good.
Read the Full Editorial —
[Mises post]
From my comment on this thread [IP and Artificial Scarcity; archived comments]:
Re the issue of the prices charged for things like apples etc.–see my post Imagining the Fate of Copyright in a Future World (archived Mises blog comments).
Imagine 1000 years from now, if we still have these ridiculous IP laws …. Say you need some music–to play in your department store’s elevators, to go with a scene in a movie, etc.–you can choose between an almost infinite supply of older, public domain work, or pay for a new tune that is still under copyright. That will force new works’ price to be almost zero.
One concern I have is that the IP socialists would at that point come up with a new IP right–basically a renewal of copyright held by someone who “rediscovers” older work forgotten in the almost infinite pile of public domain work. Imagine living in a world where Michael Jackson’s work, or the music of the 70s, had been basically forgotten and lost, a needle in a haystack, surpassed by all the music over the ensuing centuries … then some DJ starts playing it, people rediscover it anew.. shouldn’t he get credit for this? After all, it takes a lot of work to look thru all the old stuff and find “what to recommend” (a lot of IP law is based on the Marxian labor theory of value, the idea that you should be rewarded if you labor on something, as in the old “sweat of the brow” copyright law doctrine). Shouldn’t the discoverer be rewarded for this? After all, if he’s not, you consumers would never have heard of Michael Jackson, would not have the pleasure of knowing what (free) tracks to play at your party. What’s the harm of awarding the DJ a monopoly? After all, you would never have found that needle in an infinite haystack, so no one is worse off, and everyone is better off. Copyright can never die; it only gets reincarnated. O brave new world! That has such laws in’t!
[Mises post]
Four Problems with Spontaneous Order by conservative-libertarian lawyer Tim Sandefur on Cato Unbound, is a nice essay criticizing Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order. The paper is drawn from a longer article that appeared in The Independent Review, the excellent libertarian journal edited by Bob Higgs, who is also on the editorial board of my journal Libertarian Papers. The paper quotes Chandran Kukathas, who also had a nice article in Libertarian Papers–what a small libertarian world this is. Regarding problems in applying Hayek’s to legal theory, I’ve also written on related topics before in my “Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law,” a review essay of Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty in the Winter 1999 Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. See also my posts Hayek, IP, and Knowledge and Knowledge vs. Calculation.
Update: John Hasnas has a devastating reply to Sandefur’s minarchism and centralism here. The money shot:
I think it is fairly clear that I have not advocated doing nothing to help those who are suffering or to end injustice. Indeed, we should all work as hard as we can to end injustice. But the question under consideration in the present context is whether a spontaneous or constructed legal order is normatively preferable. Will advocacy against injustice be more likely to be successful in system of rules that evolve without any identifiable human agency having the power to impose a decision on the entire order or in one in which there is such an agency? I have argued for the former. My position is that advocacy against injustice is more likely to be successful in a spontaneous legal order than in a constructed one.
I understand the allure of the latter — the temptation to swoop in with the power of legislation to right wrongs and eliminate injustice. I also find the image of Don Quixote inspiring. But I believe both to be fantasies. The mechanism of collective choice that allows one to dream of achieving justice now and once and for all equally lends itself to the achievement of exploitative ends, and the incentives in constructed orders favor the latter.
Advocating against injustice in an open-ended spontaneous legal order can be unsatisfying in that it often requires a protracted effort and produces only partial success. One has to accept that progress will be gradual and incremental, and that the ideal of justice cannot be rapidly achieved, but can be heartened that the progress is likely to be sustained. One advocates for a continuously evolving customary/common law legal order not because it is ideal, but because human experience teaches that we need a prophylactic against the temptation to use the power of collective choice to achieve our ideals.
The power to legislate gave us Jim Crow. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston fought a decades long campaign to gradually undermine and destroy the injustice of this legislation through private lawsuit. I would not characterize their efforts as “doing nothing.” But I would suggest that their efforts might not have been necessary in a purely customary/common law legal order in which the power to pass such legislation in the first place does not exist.
Well, not exactly, but this delightful anecdote by Taki has a quasi-Galambosian ring to it (Galambos, you may recall, was the hyper-IP libertarian fringe personality from “California”).
When the Marx Brothers announced in 1946 that their upcoming film was called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Warner had produced the great hit “Casablanca” four years earlier, and insisted the funny men were trying to cash in on it. But Groucho was no slouch. He had his lawyer threaten Warner Brothers with breach of copyright for using the word brothers. The Marx boys won, as they were brothers before the Warners had formed the company. A Night in Casablanca turned out also to be a great hit.
On the Mises blog, I noticed one of the frequent commentators on IP-related blog threads, one Bala, used to defend the IP position but of late had been taking an anti-IP position. We discussed this privately and I asked him to give me a short write-up about his thought process as he changed his mind on this issue. I find such “conversion” stories interesting, and have seen it in others as well–myself, Jeff Tucker, etc. He sent it to me; I append it below. [continue reading…]
Recent Comments