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Bourbon for Breakfast / Tucker
With piracy and struggles over intellectual property in the news daily, it is time to wonder about this issue, its relationship to freedom, property rights, and efficiency. You have to think seriously about where you stand. This is not one of those no-brainer issues for libertarians, like minimum wage or price controls. The problem is complicated, and solving it requires careful thought. But it is essential that every person do the thinking, and there is no better tool for breaking the intellectual gridlock than this book. The issue is impossible to escape, from the grave warnings you get from the FBI at the beginning of “your” DVD to the posters warning kids never to download a song, to the outrageous settlements transferring billions from firm to firm. It even affects the outrageous prices you pay for medicine at the drug store. The issue of “intellectual property” is a ubiquitous part of modern life. Some of the police-state tactics used to enforce IP have to make anyone with a conscience squeamish. You have surely wondered about the right and wrong of all this, but, if you are like most people, you figure that copyrights and patents are consistent with the justice that comes from giving the innovator his due. In principle they seem fine, even if the law might be in need of reform. The first I’d ever thought critically about issues of intellectual property was in reading about it in the abstract many years ago. The Austrian position has traditionally favored copyrights on the same grounds it has favored property rights in general, but has tended to oppose patents on grounds that they are government grants of monopolistic privilege. Machlup, Mises, and Rothbard—as well as Stigler, Plant, and Penrose—have discussed the issue but not at great length and with varying levels of cautious skepticism. That changed in 2001 with the publication of Stephan Kinsella’s article and now monograph “Against Intellectual Property.” He made a strong theoretical argument that ideas are not scarce, do not require rationing, are not diminished by their dissemination, and so cannot really be called property. All IP is unjust, he wrote. It is inconsistent with libertarian ethics and contrary to a free market. He favors the complete repeal of all intellectualproperty laws. The argument initially struck me as crazy on its face. As I considered it further, my own view gradually changed: it’s not crazy, I thought, but it is still pie-in-the-sky theorizing that has nothing to do with reality. Kinsella’s article appeared just before the explosive public interest in this subject. The patent regime has in the meantime gone completely wild, with nearly 200,000 patents issued every year in the United States, and half a million