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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…]

(See also Put Your Hands Up In The Air For Peace! and Peace Art.)

My comments on Mario Rizzo’s great post Peace:

***

You know, in honor of the end of Anthropogenic Global Warming and the doubtless onset of global cooling, maybe we should strive for a cooling (warming?) of the cold war between people who should be allies.

In the past there have been personal battles between various libertarian, Austrian, and free market factions. Despite any merits of various participants in these disputes, nothing much has changed as a result of these petty squabbles over the last couple decades, except a waste of time and energy of all involved, and possible alienation of potential new adherents and students.

As Rizzo said, little headway has been made by either side with opponents on the other side, as a result of personal fighting, nitpicking, and battling.

From what I can see, some progress, reconciliation, has been made in recent years, and that this has been the result not of personal attacks and arguing, but as the result of the power of attraction as Read explained. Our steadfast devotion to libertarian principle, our incessant work in the service of liberty and sound economics, has gradually worn down some of our opponents and warmed their hearts towards us (I will not mention names but I have some firm ones in mind; and I am grateful to them). It has made them realize we are allies, not enemies. That we are principled, and honorable–not horrible and nasty.

We also need to realize our fellow libertarians and free market economists are our allies in a grand struggle.

We should renew our commitment to our primary goals of advancing the principles of liberty and sound economics. We should commit to eschewing time-wasting personal battles and internecine squabbles, and to using that freed time to fighting our enemy–the state, and economic illiteracy. I call on our Austrian, free-market, libertarian, liberal, and classical liberal brothers to join us. We should just move forward; considering the slate to be wiped clean, even if this is a fiction.

If future personal attacks arise, we should ignore them, and focus on working for liberty and wisdom, and hoping and praying for our separated brethren.

Let us all in the liberal community renew our commitment to each other, to our core values, and to our cause.

As for Read and the power of attraction, he wrote:

Attraction is the best answer to influencing others creatively. Daily experiences supply evidence to support this conclusion. If one would influence another to become a better cook or golfer, he should increase his own proficiency at cooking or golfing. He should attain a perfection, a leader ship, a head-of-the-class status that would attract others to draw on him. No person is influenced to greater creative activity on any subject by one who is inferior on that subject. Influence of one on another in upgrading materialistically, intellectually, spiritually–is by attraction only.

One can do things to others destructively, but not creatively. Creatively, one must confine himself to what he can do for others. One can do things for others materialistically by having money or tools to lend or give, or goods and services to exchange; intellectually by having knowledge and understanding; spiritually by possessing insights that can be imparted to those who want them.

Self-interest can best be served by minding one’s own business-that is, by the process of self-perfection. It isn’t that this idea has been tried and found wanting; it is that it has been tried and too often found difficult, and thus rejected. Actually, coercive meddling in other people’s affairs has its origin in the rejection of self-perfection.

Many persons conclude that they can easily improve others in ways they refuse to attempt on themselves. This is an absurd conclusion. Thus it is that in our dealings with our fellow men, we so often try to coerce them into likenesses of our own little images instead of trying to make of ourselves images that are attractive and worth emulating.

(Read’s words also call to mind those of Nock: “The only thing we can do to improve society, he declared, ‘is to present society with one improved unit.” Let each person direct his efforts at himself or herself, not others; or as Voltaire put it, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.'”

Jeff Tucker’s Bonfire of the Missalettes is fighting the IP forces inside the Catholic Church!

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…]