The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others... He thinks there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities... The businessmen are just the opposite—every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing.
—Milton Friedman
And both will ask a great special favour from the government: handout of intellectual property.
To quote another great economist on intellectual property vs free market and freedom:
""" Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made. [...]
The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.
Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period."""
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988 (p. 35) Friedrich von Hayek
Posted by: Laurent GUERBY | 22 September 2007 at 09:13
With apologies to Calvin Coolidge:
Nothing in the world can take the place of hypocrisy.
Leadership will not; nothing is more common than hypocritical leaders.
Intelligence will not; the world is full of intelligent charlatans.
Honesty will not; it is easy to deceive oneself.
Hypocrisy is pervasive. The slogan
"Do as I say not Do as I do" has caused and will always cause problems for the human race.
Posted by: Bob | 22 September 2007 at 11:27