[757] in libertarians
Re: Zimmerman case
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin THEOBALD)
Fri Feb 24 21:23:02 1995
From: theobald@duke.cs.mcgill.ca (Kevin THEOBALD)
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 21:20:35 -0500
In-Reply-To: sethf@MIT.EDU's message [Re: Zimmerman case] as of Feb 24, 15:00
To: sethf@MIT.EDU, vimrich@MIT.EDU
Cc: libertarians@MIT.EDU
| > What else is new? That's why we're libertarians and not Republicans.
| > Republican's think government is great as long as it's helping their
| > businesses. Libertarians don't want ANY people to use laws to thwart
| > competition whether they're rich or poor.
|
| I'd believe that a lot more if I saw Libertarians reflexively
| denouncing patents and "intellectual" property as attempts to thwart
| competition, instead of focusing almost exclusively on any Government
| presence. But I think that doesn't happen, because it's a very touchy
| argument - Libertarianism deals a lot with the importance of property,
So if you believe that intellectual property is an attempt "to thwart
competition," how would eliminating it increase competition? Many products
require great expenditures to invent, but relatively little to copy. Why
would anyone bother to spend the effort to invent something that a competitor
could then knock off for free? For instance, would a drug company spend
millions of dollars to invent and test a drug, knowing that upon releasing
the drug, it would have to share the market with competitors who would not
need to amortize any development costs? Under this scheme, the only
competition would be in existing drugs, since there would be NO new drugs.
(Of course, once new drug development ground to a halt, statists would step
in and say that we need government funding for new research, since the
"market" has "failed.")
I agree that a lot of patents -- probably more than 80% -- are bogus. Either
they are obvious, or their claims are overly broad. The major problem is that
the system was set up 200 years ago, when things were much easier to judge.
>From some of the patents I've seen, I think that the examiners lack the
expertise and time to weed out bogus claims. But the flaws in the system
don't necessarily imply that intellectual property per se should be eliminated.
| > at fault. In short, Libertarians view their government as the sleasiest
| > cheat around.
|
| And don't think of businesses as cheats at all.
You should read some libertarian journalism. It is full of stories about
businesses (usually big) using government power to stifle competition.
Kevin Theobald
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| Well, like they say: Live and learn -- die and teach the gene pool. |
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