4. Labor could form unions, and demand health care as a standard part of all employment. Employeers would be forced to pay for medical care, or face a highly organized nationwide strike.
This argument is somewhat flawed. Without government interference, strikes are mostly useless. Without government forbidding others workers to replace the strikers, a labor union cannot change anything by striking.
I'm a diehard libertarian, and I have to say you are wrong. Sure, there may be some folks who call themselves libertarian without being principled pro-liberty people. Those are not libertarians. They are something else. What they are does not matter, what matters is that they are not libertarian. A libertarian is someone who takes a principled stance for liberty and against oppressive government, in all areas, on all levels. One cannot be a libertarian while advocating liberty in some areas (such as drugs) and not advocating it in other areas (such as economics, or privacy).
If you invent a cure for AIDS and keep it to yourself, well, can't force to reveal it. However, the profit you would make from selling that drug would be huge. Inventions will maybe (a large maybe) not be revealed publically, but that's where reverse engineering comes into the picture. Eventually, other will produce the product. And probably a lot sooner than the patent would expire. Patents kill competition and threaten innovation.
Patents do not encourage inventions, nor do they make inventions better. What they do is shift invention from non-patentable areas to patentable areas. You cannot prove that this is good. Further, the free-rider argument is bullshit, as I have shown in a previous comment.
Actually, the argument against intellectual "property" is largely based on the difference between scarce and abundant resources. An idea is not a scarce resource, tangible objects are. Your use of a car excludes my use of it. Therefore, there has to be private property rights, to allocate the use of scarce resources. Ideas do not suffer from this, my use of, for example, a one-click ordering application does not exclude Amazon.com's use of it.
There is no way you're ever, ever going to stop abuse of the patent system. That is, unless you completely and totally abolish all patents in all areas. No more patents, no more USPTO, no more abuse. As any libertarian will be happy to point out, if you put a gun in someone's hands and give them the legal right to use that gun for whatever their purposes is, you're going to have a huge mess and abuse of power. That's government for you. Patents are unnecessary, morally unjustified, arbitrary and extremely prone to abuse. There is no possibility of ever making an objective statement about what can and what can not be patented, or how long a patent should last. It's impossible. If you say 20 years - I say why not 21 years, why not 20 years and three days? Because you say so? Because the State says so?
Further, patents are legal monopolies and basically an infringement upon property rights. If it is my steel, my wood, I'm going to build exactly whatever I want to build with it. I don't care if you've invented it before, it's mine, mine, mine and you have no right to stop me. Neither does the State. Software patents are even worse. I'm going to put ones and zeros on my disks, and what those ones and zeros do when put through other ones and zeros is none of your business. Get off my property! If you invent some new metal alloy twice as strong as steel, well, congratulations. You own some metal. You do not own my metal, I repeat: you do not own my metal. If I make the same alloy as you do, well, bad news for you. It's called competition. Welcome to capitalism, dude.
Now you say, won't people stop inventing stuff? Yeah right. Ever heard of that invention, the steam engine? Watt's patent stopped others from building better engines, and most of his time and money was used not to build steam engines, but to lobby the government and collecting royalties (See Against Intellectual Monopoly, chapter 1 for a longer discussion of Watt's patent and how it stopped progress.). Further, they stop many new inventions. Just look at Blackberry. So much for patents and innovation. As the old joke goes, if pro is the opposite of con, congress is the opposite of progress. No other organisation has hindered progress more than the coercive beast that is government.
Moving on, the argument that no one will develop expensive stuff is completely false. First, it's just another protectionist argument, one that relies only on what is seen and what is not seen. With patents, you see X dollars being invested in developing Y. Without patents, what would those X dollars be used to do? You have no idea, I don't, no one does. We can't prove that society benefits from X being developed instead of some Z, W or Q. Secondly, the argument shows a huge lack of economic insight. No person can predict the future, or the future economic situation. If so were the case, no humans would act (Rothbard explains this in Man, State and Economy). Ok, so say company X develops some miracle drug. You think company X would need a patent, to prevent free riders, people who rip off the product and sell it cheaper because they have no R&D costs. Ok, well, how are companies Y, Z, Q going to know that the drug is a sucess? Isn't success defined as earning a huge profit? Well, then, when the drug is a success, company X has obviously made a lot of money from it. Arguing for patents because of free riding effects is stupid.
Imagine you're in a race. You try to imitate the guy who wins, to win yourself. However, to know what he does and who he is - you have to let the race progress and let him win. That'll help you, I'm sure. You cannot know who the winner is before he has won, and then it is too late. That's what the free rider argument is all about.
As we have seen patents are no more than arbitrary government monopolies given at the whim of some random bureaucrat, in effect giving someone the right to control what you do with your property. Further, they are an obstactle for innovation, and protectionist. They are clearly nothing else than a pure, counter-productive government intervention into the economy and an abuse of governmental power.
Support property rights, help innovation, abolish patents.
The most reasonable definition of 0.9999... is the limit of the series 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009... where the nth term is 9*10^-n. This limit is 1, thus 0.999... = 1.
1) People are too stupid to fix stuff themselves (i.e., let the market do it). 2) Therefore, we have governments. 3) To create the illusion that there still is freedom, and that your life and liberty is not dependent on some politician's or bureuacrat's arbitrary decisions, people get to vote for the government they want. 4) But, by 1, people are too stupid to fix themselves - how are they then going to be able to make the most important decision: who's going to use coercion against them and why? Clearly, 3 contradicts 1.
You know, the problem is not that the patent system is abused for all kinds of wacky patents, software and hardware, the problem is that there is a patent system. Whenever there is a system of government control, you bet it will be abused. Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. Patents are not morally justified and utalitarian defenses cannot be proven valid.
I say we get rid of this protectionist infringement upon property rights. Governtment should not give company A the power to tell me what I am allowed to manufacture with my property. It's mine, I do whatever I want with it. Including exercising my cat with my laser pointer. In your face, patent system!
If companies A, B, C... Z agree to mark their games with symbols indicating which age groups they are suitable for (a benefit for the consumer, isn't it?), and retail stores agree not to sell games marked 17 to persons under 17 years of age, that's perfectly fine. It's called a free market in operation. You can sell what you want to whomever you want - or you can chose not to. The problem is when the coercion of government comes into the picture. If mommy doesn't want Billy to play GTA3, well, fine. But if the government uses coercion to achive the very same goal, it is wrong - it's a perfect example of a nanny state. Who decides what's OK for Billy to play, and what's not? And - if it is enforced by coercion - who says he's right? There can be no objective definition of unsuitable. What's perfectly acceptable according to one person can be offensive to other persons. It's up to the parents to decide, not the government.
Fucking politicians trying to force their views onto everyone else.
Wow, that sounds awesome. Kind of like Piratbyrån's (Piratbyrån is an anti-copyright organization, its name means "The Piracy bereau") book Copy Me. Basically, they put together some texts they had on their webpage in a book. Gave them some attention (though they already have a lot of that).
There are more than one million file sharers in Sweden, out of a population of 9 million. Not bad.
And yes, I do believe that "stealing" intellectual "property" (huge misnomer) isn't theft, as scarcity is the base of property rights. Further, intellectual property laws prevent me from doing what I wish with my property, even if I have not agreed to a contract with anyone.
"I dont agree that porn qualifies under the right of free speech. Therefore its not a right. its a privilege. And if the Chinese government wants to deny that privilege, i see no issue."
And what makes this opinion objective truth?
"Aside from that, according to the way the constitution was written, the US supreme court DOES have the jurisdiction to decide what are protected rights are what are not, in this country at least."
Read my post again. Rights recognized by the government != Rights you have. Even if the government says you have no right to freedom of speech, you still have it. What do you think "unalienable" in the constitution means? The government can use coercion to stop you from using your rights, but that does not mean you don't have those rights. All it means is that the government infringes upon you rights.
Wow. You really do not understand what rights mean. Rights are independent of government and legislation. You have the right to freedom of speech, and no government can take that from you. The government can use coercion to stop you from using that right, but you still have it. That others (including government) don't respect your rights is not equal to your not having them. Indeed, others cannot violate your rights if you don't them. In short: the US supreme court has no right to decide which rights you have, neither has any other government agency. Your rights are the right to your own body and all rights which follow as consequences of this. That is, all rights can be derived from self-ownership.
I for one don't want countries like China, North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran to have anything to say about my internet. Oh yes, they want to control it. We should never let them do it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Finding new drugs, building scanners and catering for patients is expensive."
Well, then, please how government makes man richer. Further, the largest reason drugs are so expensive to manufacture and research is spelled FDA...
4. Labor could form unions, and demand health care as a standard part of all employment. Employeers would be forced to pay for medical care, or face a highly organized nationwide strike.
This argument is somewhat flawed. Without government interference, strikes are mostly useless. Without government forbidding others workers to replace the strikers, a labor union cannot change anything by striking.
I'm a diehard libertarian, and I have to say you are wrong. Sure, there may be some folks who call themselves libertarian without being principled pro-liberty people. Those are not libertarians. They are something else. What they are does not matter, what matters is that they are not libertarian. A libertarian is someone who takes a principled stance for liberty and against oppressive government, in all areas, on all levels. One cannot be a libertarian while advocating liberty in some areas (such as drugs) and not advocating it in other areas (such as economics, or privacy).
Then I want to copyright the Riemann hypothesis.
If you invent a cure for AIDS and keep it to yourself, well, can't force to reveal it. However, the profit you would make from selling that drug would be huge. Inventions will maybe (a large maybe) not be revealed publically, but that's where reverse engineering comes into the picture. Eventually, other will produce the product. And probably a lot sooner than the patent would expire. Patents kill competition and threaten innovation.
Patents do not encourage inventions, nor do they make inventions better. What they do is shift invention from non-patentable areas to patentable areas. You cannot prove that this is good. Further, the free-rider argument is bullshit, as I have shown in a previous comment.
The patent system has to be abolished.
Actually, the argument against intellectual "property" is largely based on the difference between scarce and abundant resources. An idea is not a scarce resource, tangible objects are. Your use of a car excludes my use of it. Therefore, there has to be private property rights, to allocate the use of scarce resources. Ideas do not suffer from this, my use of, for example, a one-click ordering application does not exclude Amazon.com's use of it.
There is no way you're ever, ever going to stop abuse of the patent system. That is, unless you completely and totally abolish all patents in all areas. No more patents, no more USPTO, no more abuse. As any libertarian will be happy to point out, if you put a gun in someone's hands and give them the legal right to use that gun for whatever their purposes is, you're going to have a huge mess and abuse of power. That's government for you. Patents are unnecessary, morally unjustified, arbitrary and extremely prone to abuse. There is no possibility of ever making an objective statement about what can and what can not be patented, or how long a patent should last. It's impossible. If you say 20 years - I say why not 21 years, why not 20 years and three days? Because you say so? Because the State says so?
Further, patents are legal monopolies and basically an infringement upon property rights. If it is my steel, my wood, I'm going to build exactly whatever I want to build with it. I don't care if you've invented it before, it's mine, mine, mine and you have no right to stop me. Neither does the State. Software patents are even worse. I'm going to put ones and zeros on my disks, and what those ones and zeros do when put through other ones and zeros is none of your business. Get off my property! If you invent some new metal alloy twice as strong as steel, well, congratulations. You own some metal. You do not own my metal, I repeat: you do not own my metal. If I make the same alloy as you do, well, bad news for you. It's called competition. Welcome to capitalism, dude.
Now you say, won't people stop inventing stuff? Yeah right. Ever heard of that invention, the steam engine? Watt's patent stopped others from building better engines, and most of his time and money was used not to build steam engines, but to lobby the government and collecting royalties (See Against Intellectual Monopoly, chapter 1 for a longer discussion of Watt's patent and how it stopped progress.). Further, they stop many new inventions. Just look at Blackberry. So much for patents and innovation. As the old joke goes, if pro is the opposite of con, congress is the opposite of progress. No other organisation has hindered progress more than the coercive beast that is government.
Moving on, the argument that no one will develop expensive stuff is completely false. First, it's just another protectionist argument, one that relies only on what is seen and what is not seen. With patents, you see X dollars being invested in developing Y. Without patents, what would those X dollars be used to do? You have no idea, I don't, no one does. We can't prove that society benefits from X being developed instead of some Z, W or Q. Secondly, the argument shows a huge lack of economic insight. No person can predict the future, or the future economic situation. If so were the case, no humans would act (Rothbard explains this in Man, State and Economy). Ok, so say company X develops some miracle drug. You think company X would need a patent, to prevent free riders, people who rip off the product and sell it cheaper because they have no R&D costs. Ok, well, how are companies Y, Z, Q going to know that the drug is a sucess? Isn't success defined as earning a huge profit? Well, then, when the drug is a success, company X has obviously made a lot of money from it. Arguing for patents because of free riding effects is stupid.
Imagine you're in a race. You try to imitate the guy who wins, to win yourself. However, to know what he does and who he is - you have to let the race progress and let him win. That'll help you, I'm sure. You cannot know who the winner is before he has won, and then it is too late. That's what the free rider argument is all about.
As we have seen patents are no more than arbitrary government monopolies given at the whim of some random bureaucrat, in effect giving someone the right to control what you do with your property. Further, they are an obstactle for innovation, and protectionist. They are clearly nothing else than a pure, counter-productive government intervention into the economy and an abuse of governmental power.
Support property rights, help innovation, abolish patents.
The most reasonable definition of 0.9999... is the limit of the series 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 ... where the nth term is 9*10^-n. This limit is 1, thus 0.999... = 1.
Further, 2+2=5.
1) People are too stupid to fix stuff themselves (i.e., let the market do it).
2) Therefore, we have governments.
3) To create the illusion that there still is freedom, and that your life and liberty is not dependent on some politician's or bureuacrat's arbitrary decisions, people get to vote for the government they want.
4) But, by 1, people are too stupid to fix themselves - how are they then going to be able to make the most important decision: who's going to use coercion against them and why? Clearly, 3 contradicts 1.
Someone had to say it, sooner or later. Patents are a monopoly privilege. They have no place in a free economy.
You know, the problem is not that the patent system is abused for all kinds of wacky patents, software and hardware, the problem is that there is a patent system. Whenever there is a system of government control, you bet it will be abused. Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. Patents are not morally justified and utalitarian defenses cannot be proven valid.
I say we get rid of this protectionist infringement upon property rights. Governtment should not give company A the power to tell me what I am allowed to manufacture with my property. It's mine, I do whatever I want with it. Including exercising my cat with my laser pointer. In your face, patent system!
" What both of you are saying is what I wrote in the first place!"
Sue them for copyright infringement.
If companies A, B, C ... Z agree to mark their games with symbols indicating which age groups they are suitable for (a benefit for the consumer, isn't it?), and retail stores agree not to sell games marked 17 to persons under 17 years of age, that's perfectly fine. It's called a free market in operation. You can sell what you want to whomever you want - or you can chose not to. The problem is when the coercion of government comes into the picture. If mommy doesn't want Billy to play GTA3, well, fine. But if the government uses coercion to achive the very same goal, it is wrong - it's a perfect example of a nanny state.
Who decides what's OK for Billy to play, and what's not? And - if it is enforced by coercion - who says he's right? There can be no objective definition of unsuitable. What's perfectly acceptable according to one person can be offensive to other persons. It's up to the parents to decide, not the government.
Fucking politicians trying to force their views onto everyone else.
Wow, that sounds awesome. Kind of like Piratbyrån's (Piratbyrån is an anti-copyright organization, its name means "The Piracy bereau") book Copy Me. Basically, they put together some texts they had on their webpage in a book. Gave them some attention (though they already have a lot of that).
Uppknullad bortom all möjlig reparation.
There are more than one million file sharers in Sweden, out of a population of 9 million. Not bad.
And yes, I do believe that "stealing" intellectual "property" (huge misnomer) isn't theft, as scarcity is the base of property rights. Further, intellectual property laws prevent me from doing what I wish with my property, even if I have not agreed to a contract with anyone.
Intellectual property laws != Immaterial laws.
"I dont agree that porn qualifies under the right of free speech. Therefore its not a right. its a privilege. And if the Chinese government wants to deny that privilege, i see no issue."
And what makes this opinion objective truth?
"Aside from that, according to the way the constitution was written, the US supreme court DOES have the jurisdiction to decide what are protected rights are what are not, in this country at least."
Read my post again. Rights recognized by the government != Rights you have. Even if the government says you have no right to freedom of speech, you still have it. What do you think "unalienable" in the constitution means? The government can use coercion to stop you from using your rights, but that does not mean you don't have those rights. All it means is that the government infringes upon you rights.
Wow. You really do not understand what rights mean. Rights are independent of government and legislation. You have the right to freedom of speech, and no government can take that from you. The government can use coercion to stop you from using that right, but you still have it. That others (including government) don't respect your rights is not equal to your not having them. Indeed, others cannot violate your rights if you don't them. In short: the US supreme court has no right to decide which rights you have, neither has any other government agency. Your rights are the right to your own body and all rights which follow as consequences of this. That is, all rights can be derived from self-ownership.
Freedom of speech is a human right.
Wonderful. Paying taxes to get one's privacy infringed. Just wonderful. I hope someone questions the logic of that...
You are wrong.
Fourth problem: What says that they are right, and have the right to force their morals onto everybody else?
I for one don't want countries like China, North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran to have anything to say about my internet. Oh yes, they want to control it. We should never let them do it.