The terrorism of intellectual property
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Antistatist writer Kevin Carson took aim at the weakest link in Ron Bailey's "free market" economics, in a post at the C4SS think tank.
After criticizing Bailey's (who is a transhumanist "liberation biologist" and a strong influence on The clubof.info Blog) attacks on Naomi Klein's theories of "disaster capitalism", Carson draws our attention to weakest and most paradoxical part of Bailey's economics: his paranoid defense of patent law while otherwise insisting that the state is not needed in economics. From Carson's writing:
Speaking of patents, “intellectual property” is the state-enforced monopoly which is most structurally central to global corporate capitalism. The dominant corporate players in the global economy are in industries whose business models center on “intellectual property”: entertainment, software, biotech, pharma, agribusiness, and electronics. And of course the ability of corporations like Nike and Apple to outsource all actual production to independently owned factories in the Third World, while retaining a legal monopoly on disposal of the product at whatever price they care to set, depends entirely on patents and trademarks.
So Ron Bailey defends a system that depends, completely and utterly, on a boot stamping on a human face, and calls it the “free market.” I tell you this: If I thought the free market meant what Ronald Bailey calls “the free market,” I’d hate it more than a thousand Naomi Kleins and Michael Moores put together could hate it. The system of corporate power Bailey loves, the system he defends, was founded on robbery and enslavement, and couldn’t survive for a single day if it weren’t backed by armed thugs interfering with peaceful trade and cooperation between ordinary human beings.
"Intellectual property", a form of heavy state intervention in the economy, is legal terrorism by companies and individuals that are so lacking in creativity that they need "rights" to stifle the works of others by suing them for petty violations of supposed "ideas" they drew up. While rejecting other types of state intervention in the economy, Bailey sees this particular type of state intervention and attacks on creativity as a necessary part of his so-called "free market" despite it being blatantly prohibitive in nature. Intellectual property is increasingly seen as a farce on the Internet because every other human economic contribution is based upon copying and all other remuneration is based upon labor rather than mere "ownership". Intellectual property, rather than offering monetary incentives to work and create, is instead a type of terrorism that allows companies and states to refuse to share information that could save lives and benefit mankind, and attack other people for their own works. Along with "national security", "intellectual property" is the monarchy of creative works, an assault on freedom, a denial of humanity's right to prosper. It is worthless terrorism that shall enable the perpetuation of economic and power monopolies to be awarded based on nothing other than prior historic theft and possession of such monopolies.
#Snowden's extralegal actions were needed to expose the crimes of the regime: @Jason_M_Farrell http://t.co/zplHDgvEVa pic.twitter.com/Ix1uMfwB5q
— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) August 9, 2015
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