In one of Nina Paley’s cartoons (she wrote the song “Copying is Not Theft,” which you should look up at YouTube just as soon as you finish reading this), one of the characters says “Copying a song instead of buying a copy is stealing!” His friend says “Doing for yourself what you could pay someone else to do is stealing!” Together: “Competition is theft!” That’s pretty much the actual operating philosophy of capitalism as we know it.
Capitalism is commonly defined as being about “private property.” And it is — but not in the sense that “property” would be used in a genuinely free market (i.e., property resulting from the products of our own labor and peaceful exchange). “Property rights” under capitalism, as we know it, are about the right to control access to natural opportunities.
The Marxist Maurice Dobb, in “Theories of Value and Distribution,” raised the hypothetical example of the state granting an exclusive right to erect toll gates across highways and thoroughfares — not to fund the operation of the roads, mind you, but simply to pocket the tolls in return for letting people pass. By the standard rules of J.B. Clark’s marginal productivity theory, whatever the cost of tolls added to the final price of finished goods would be the “marginal productivity” of the toll gates, and that portion of the price of goods would reflect the toll gate owner’s “contribution” to production. As John R. Commons observed in “Institutional Economics,” many of the “productive services” for which the rentier classes exact tribute consist of not obstructing the production of others.
The main effect of patents and copyrights, as well as business licensing, local “safety” codes and zoning, is to erect a toll gate in the way of your ability to transform your energy and skills directly into use-value.
Consider local zoning and “safety” laws that require a seller of baked goods to rent expensive commercial property instead of operating out of their home, and to use standard industrial-sized ovens and dishwashers instead of the spare capacity of their regular household appliances. The only way to amortize that cost is by operating on a scale that requires several employees, lots of hours of paperwork, extensive remodelling to meet local code and ADA requirements, and so forth.
From the consumer standpoint, a major part of the price of the baked goods you buy is the embedded cost of that expensive rent, the cost of servicing the loans, and other overhead. And from the producer standpoint, all possibilities of starting out small with minimal capital outlays and overhead, and expanding incrementally with minimal risk, are foreclosed.
In every case, the effect is to require more hours of labor, more capital expenditures, and more overhead to be serviced, than a given unit of output would require for purely technical reasons.
Most of the hours we work, far from being required to produce the value we consume, go to feeding useless eaters or to the equivalent of digging holes just to fill them back in. The holders of artificial property rights are thereby able to protect themselves against competition from overly efficient production, and collect rents from artificial scarcity. The managers who control the economy, from the $50 million/year CEOs on down, are protected against the possibility of defection by people producing a major part of their needs in the informal sector, outside the control of bosses — escaping the plantation, so to speak.
In legal terms, transforming your labor directly into use-value, without paying tribute to those who hold property rights in access to natural opportunities, is theft.
It’s time for every honest person to be a criminal.
Thanks, Joel. That is a good one. I haven't been a regular enough reader to know the characters had names, or what gender they were. That I assumed they were male probably says something about my cultural conditioning. (But then, I really hate to imagine penises being involved in that copying video).
I don't agree with his use of the words "criminal" and "theft". Maybe he should have put them in quotes. The people extorting tribute from the productive are criminals. People should stop supporting criminals and just live free.
This one is even more to the point:
http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ME_160_Rivalrous1.png
Also, it’s possible to tell which character is which since \Mimi has pointy ears and Eunice has floppy ears.\
Kevin needs to write an updated "Anarchist's Cookbook" with a step-by-step guide to starting your own illegal bakery.
"The main effect of patents and copyrights, as well as business licensing, local “safety” codes and zoning, is to erect a toll gate in the way of your ability to transform your energy and skills directly into use-value."
I hope I simply misunderstood your tone, but saw no exception to your blanketing statement. Obviously some CEOs are earning the equivalent of hole-filling toll incomes, while others deserve every penny. However, patents and copyrights do have a good effect. They reward those who expended the effort to develop and exercise the ability to create. The introduction of a novel item at some price does not diminish or punish those who did not create it or conceive of it. The only punishment is the self-induced feeling of envy or coveting upon discovering the existence of novel goods that others have created.
SayAgain: From what I've seen, most million dollar salaried CEOs enrich themselves by doing the sort of thing described by Robert Jackall: stripping assets, gutting human capital, and hollowing out long-term productive capabilities in order to massage the quarterly numbers and game their bonuses and stock options. Every rich CEO I've ever seen lionized in the business pages or on CNBC has pursued the same formula: getting a multimillion dollar reward for laying people off.
As for patents and copyrights, my condemnation is indeed a blanket one, and without any exception of any kind. No one has a right to a reward that comes from preventing others from entering the market and producing a good cheaper than they can, or preventing others from using their own tangible property as they see fit. If someone can't think of a way to be rewarded for their effort other than a business model based on suppressing competition, they don't deserve to be rewarded. Copyrights and patents are spurious "properties" in the right to obstruct production by others, and revnues resulting from them are theft, pure and simple.
@SayAgain
If you saw a lone successful but too busy bakery in a town and knew enough about running a bakery and decided to open another one down the street, would that be theft since you saw that the town could use another bakery? You copied the idea from the original operator. Should the first guy have a monopoly forever? If not forever, then how long? And who gets to decide this arbitrary length of time? Some gang that extorts licencing fees? If not them, then who?
To stop you, would be to stop you from using your own land, building and cooking supplies, assuming you acquired them peacefully. Patents and copyrights stop people from using their own paper, ink, storage drives etc. in a competitive way.
Mr. Delano,
"If you saw…" You nailed yourself.
The only reason you want to open a bakery is because "you saw" someone else with a successful bakery, which eliminates your risk. Isn't it amazing how you know in exact, minute detail how to reproduce success? Ah, 20/20 hindsight. Once someone shows you how, you are free to emulate their success – minus having to use your brain to discover the formula without which there would be a grand total of ZERO successful bakeries to copy.
Always with socialists, anarchists, and thieves the efforts of the "brain" are trivial, their ideas put into action with results considered communal property to be seized by direct force or through threat of enforceable legislation, ideally democratic legislation, so that everyone had agreed that they can seize the efforts of the "brain", with no regard to the RIGHTS of the brain's owner. There is nothing like democracy at a dinner table with 2 cannibals and a vegetarian.
That's the way the universe is perceived as unfair by the mediocre: someone always seems to steal your idea before you think of it. Did I say "you think"? Not even – more like, "you saw".
Respect the human brain, without which our arms and legs would flail primitively like an animal's at the sight of food, danger, or a potential mate. Borrowing the thoughts of another human's brain to propel your arms and legs in mimicry of the donor brain's ability to sustain itself with a bakery IS THEFT.
Have you ever considered approaching the stimulus of your bakery insight and negotiating a royalty to copy their success? Why do you deserve a free insight and guarantee of success that the first baker never had? How do you know that baker didn't struggle for years earning a miserable pittance until figuring out what people wanted to eat? You would starve without the first baker. How do you know the first baker didn't have a heart attack working himself to the bone. Maybe the baker had a divorce because his wife would not stand next to him during the risky lean years. You don't know the whole, dirty, difficult, real story. All you see is the shiny results – the Rolex on the wrist – and you want the results without the efforts, costs, or risks. You want guaranteed success. You demand it, where the first baker only had a burning desire, willing hands, and an active mind and NO guarantees.
How does the moment you discover someone has something suddenly diminish you? It does not. You are no worse off materially. It is your lazy, puerile, myopic envy that diminishes you. If you learn to mind your business, maybe your business will flourish.
Well "SayAgain," by your own logic, since you didn't invent any of the words that you're using — you simply learned them by observing others — you're a thief.
Say Again: You forgot to call him a moocher and a looter and to say that he was anti-mind and anti-life. Beneath the fancy cape and cigarette holder, your actual argument boils down to "If I do something, I have the right to use the government to stop anyone else from doing the same thing with their own stuff on their own property, because I'm entitled to a return on my effort even if nobody contractually agreed to it ahead of time and the only way to obtain it is through government enforcement of a monopoly on the right to do a certain thing." In other words, following someone else's example, in the Randroid Bizarro world, is stealing.
Interestingly, though, St. Ayn argued as a matter of simple common sense that copyright should have a limited term. But by your argument, if the right to restrict others from following your example is a form of property morally equivalent to genuine property, then it should be as infinitely transferrable, for all eternity, as tangible property. In fact, people like Mark Helprin argue just that. If you really believe patents and copyrights are a regular form of property, then to be consistent you must be a Spoonerian or a Galambosian. You immoral whim-worshipper, you!
And if you believe it's permissible for the state to intervene in the market to suppress competition and erect barriers to free market entry, in order to guarantee someone's moral right to a return on their effort, then to be consistent you must support all state-enforced monopolies that have that effect. So just as Paley's cartoon characters suggest, any action you undertake with your own property that undermines a potential revenue stream going to anyone else is "theft." If you grow your own tomatoes, look out for the men from Monsanto coming to your door.
When I undertake an action, I do so based on my belief that it will maximize my own utility, without any government intervention to make it artificially profitable to me. If I adopt a more efficient way of producing things, it's with a view to the temporary competitive advantage that will accrue from being the first in the market. If that advantage is insufficient incentive, without my also using the government to erect an entry barrier against anyone else adopting the same methods, then I just won't do it. But nobody is obligated, without any prior commitment or contract on their own part, to refrain from following my example.
I'm not promoting democracy. I am promoting property rights. Non scarce things, like ideas that are publicly known are not property. Copying doesn't take away the original's property.
Sometimes we think of new things, and sometimes we copy. It is the way civilization advances. When someone puts public a new idea, he is likely not the first to think it, only the first to publicly state it. Have you ever had a thought that you heard no one else express and then later hear someone express it without doing so yourself? It happens. Whatever caused you to think it, also causes others to think it too.
Yes, the original probably struggled more than the guy that copied him, but so what? If we never copied those that went before us, where would we be? Would we even be at all? The original baker didn't invent the idea of a building or an oven or baking or even cooking food at all. He is benefiting from copying those that had a rougher life learning those things. Is it wrong that he didn't invent buildings, ovens, the recipes he uses, making flour into other food, the idea of homesteading land and using it to grow wheat, water purification or discover fire? No, it was his "lazy, puerile, myopic envy" that motivated him to "steal" these ideas.
Come on, be an original. Quit using the English language. You see the benefits of it, and you just copied it. How long did it take you to copy? A few years? Maybe decades to get better. You have no respect for all the people who spent centuries developing it, and all those who spent millennia prior developing language itself. And please, using the Internet? Go discover fire first before you even think of playing around here.
Mr. Delano et. al
I don't violate any English language copyrights.
Originality? I am hardly concerned about being an original every breathing second of my life, either. If water is healthy for other people to drink, versus getting poisoned by drinking gasoline, then I will gladly be unoriginal and drink water.
I personally dislike competition. The less creative one is the more one will have to face competition. Personally, I would avoid competition at all costs. The key to efficient survival, financial or in nature, is differentiation. If I saw a baker in town, but also noticed nobody wore shoes and had sore, callused feet I would be a fool to choose baking over being a shoemaker. However, if I don't have the wherewithal to be the first to observe the abundance of needy feet around town, but possess the acumen to notice the baker's Rolex, well I've already destined myself to a TAG Heuer at best in head-on market-halving competition, versus differentiating and becoming the first shoemaker with Rolex potential. Hopefully, it doesn't take me too long to figure out how to make shoes people actually want to wear…
The pace of civilization's advance is retarded every time someone competes, and is accelerated every time someone innovates or differentiates.
Look, I understand that most humans are like animals, scavengers. Animals don't understand rights, they just tear at the communal carcass.
"If I saw a baker in town, but also noticed nobody wore shoes and had sore, callused (sic) feet I would be a fool to choose baking over being a shoemaker"
What if you LIKE baking and not shoe making? Do you sacrifice your preference for the sake of others' feet? Maybe your superior baking acumen ~drives out~ the competition! And then (S)HE can make the community's shoes!
"The pace of civilization’s advance is retarded every time someone competes, and is accelerated every time someone innovates or differentiates."
I understand people are prone to treat concepts as fetishes; and free marketers, whether ostensible or genuine (and I like to count myself in the latter category), are probably all too often guilty of fetishizing competition. Not that I think that's what you're doing; I think you're just being silly.
Mr. Taranto,
Really, callused (sic), Which e-dictionary are you uzing?
Honestly, I stepped into it when I chose baking, because it's trivial these days, it's obvious – it can't be patented. I should have focused on branding. I hope Zuckerberg can Trademark "face" to make up for Xerox's blunder.
The only way to compete is to innovate. People are creatures of habit. If you are the new baker, shoe maker, whatever, why would people do business with you if they are in the habit of doing business with the first guy to the market? They won't, unless you do something better. It can be something that is better for only some people, but you only need some people. You may be closer, have lower prices, have a nicer building, be a nicer person to do business with or something else.
When you innovate, you make a profit for your improvement over what someone else has done, even though you copied most of what you are doing. Your profit, if enough, will motivate others to get into the market. Profits are only temporary. Innovation is stifled by intellectual monopoly. Like all monopolies, it lets those that benefited from lower market entry restrictions keep their position on top with less innovation. Monopolies always come after periods of great innovation, never before. Golden Ages are always times when entry into a field was relatively open.
Mr. Delano,
First, before I dispense with the pleasantries, I sense that we are on the same page, and would probably vote for the same politcal candidate. However, I take umbrage at your stance toward your own otherwise correct statement, "Patents and copyrights stop people from using their own paper, ink, storage drives etc. in a competitive way."
What you state is cause for celebration, not consternation. Patents promote the very differentiation and innovation to which I refer. Patents prevent two disparate organizations of endeavor from producing identical goods. Patents prevent stagnation. Patents prevent conflict: a consumer won't be confronted by 2 identical widgets produced by 2 different companies and wonder which is built better. Patents, in essence, state, "Add value and you will get a patent."
For example, the manufacturer of a black and white TV with a brown cabinet is protected from a competitor that might attempt to sell a black and white TV with a black cabinet. However, someone who designs a color TV will have been found by a Patent engineer to have in a novel manner differentiated and innovated a previous idea whereby a color TV fundamentally ADDS VALUE that had not previously existed. A color TV inventor will most deservedly be granted a color TV patent that WILL NOT COMPETE with a black and white TV patent. You see, the B&W TV patent will have effectively compelled innovation and differentiation with added value. Yes indeed, patents PREVENT competition, which by its nature is a waste of resources expended in the efforts of retarding creativity, differentiation, and innovation. Of course, you certainly can steal a patented idea and use it to recreate a patented device in the privacy of your home, using your materials – just don't try to go out into the market with it.
To be against patents is to be against differentiation, innovation, and novel advances. Patents celebrate, encourage, and reward evolution. Ultimately, patents reward new work by the mind and the hands. After all, the whole of the mediocre world revolves around getting someone else to do your work for you, if you can get away with it through theft, slavery, diluting the value of earned money by printing more fiat money, and taxation, the worst kind which is not autocratically, but democratically condoned taxation. Most people are lazy, intellectually and/or
physically. Patents protects us from having 10,000 black and white TV manufacturers wasting their energies destructively on competition and instead have them channel creative energy into advancing the state of the art.
Like I said, competition is wasteful. It is also stupid. When you see a ring on a woman's finger it saves you the trouble of having to compete for her affections. Look at all the variety of plants and animals and the extent tow which nature avoids competition is downright sublime! Nature is sustained by an astounding myriad symbioses of co-existence – all virtue of avoiding competition. You then have to look no further than at any individual specie during mating season and watch the destructive effects of competition.
As humans, through civilized, intellectual evolution we have established patents to PREVENT competition to ensure civility, stability, and advancement. It is the mark of a highly moral, orderly society to adhere to such principles. Patents are totally at odds with the cults of socialism and anarchy. They are conducive to sentient animation, as in, life, versus a bunch of insentient rocks scattered on a beach in an arbitrary arrangement for a 100 million stagnant years that will never turn themselves in a 3D HDTV or cure for cancer.
Civilization is all about copying the ideas of the past ad be manufacturing TVs ind finding some way to do it a little bit better. Do you think we would really have 10,000 b&w TV makers without patents? Or that the only innovation would be to change the cabinet color? So what if someone wants to innovate in a small way by just offering a different color? The market may demand another color option.
Henry Ford was known for saying that you could have his cars in any color you like, as long as it was black. Competition from other manufacturers forced Ford to offer other colors.
How many people would be manufacturing TVs is something I don't know. But with 10,000, they would all be forced to look to do something better, and they would innovate far beyond color, HDTV or anything you or I can imagine. With nearly 7 billion people there would be plenty of innovation once they give themselves permission to be entrepreneurial and stop thinking like a serf.
in a truly free market, manufacturing would also likely be broken down among more people with the people at each step having more ownership over that level of production. Have an idea on improving a product by adding just a small change? Then order a shipment of partially finished goods, and finish them a little bit differently, or you could make a change earlier on in the process and sell them to someone else who will finish them off. You would have to use your innovative mind to come up with the solution.
It's kinda twisted thinking to assume that 7 billion people all trying to earn an income by doing something a little bit better would not make you, me and everyone else better off. We would all be wealthier than the wealthiest people on the planet today. Even if those innovations are all as simple as changing the color of a cabinet, they will add up to something far more amazing than we have today.
Look up Jeff Tucker's articles on IP. You will see that the claims made to support the supposed necessity of this flawed concept have absolutely no evidence to support them in the history of civilization, EVER.
@SayAgain
I'll let other, more erudite, souls here school you on the finer points of IP. Though, let me say, you seem to be fine with government-buttressed monopolies controlling our lives.
"I personally dislike competition."
"As humans, through civilized, intellectual evolution we have established patents to PREVENT competition to ensure civility, stability, and advancement."
I'm SO glad that someone is around to make sure I remain civil, stable and advanced (by THEIR definition).Yikes!
(Though, I assume, that, for, consistency's sake, you would support one huge worldwide union that would set labor prices. After all, competition's a bad thing, right?)
But your attitude toward competition, I guess, reflects your attitude toward people in general.
"Look, I understand that most humans are like animals, scavengers. Animals don’t understand rights, they just tear at the communal carcass."
"Most people are lazy, intellectually and/or physically."
Well, under the circumstances, naturally you think that the great unwashed are just sheep to be shorn. Maybe I'm wrong, but the folks who contribute their time and effort to this site and to the Anarchist movement in general have a somewhat more hopeful view of the POTENTIAL of humanity. Did it ever occur to you that part of the reason many people APPEAR lazy or feral is that they live everyday in a rigged game set up by politicians to benefit the elite, enforced by the coercive might of the state. Hopelessness leads to some very sociopathic results.
"The pace of civilization’s advance is retarded every time someone competes, and is accelerated every time someone innovates or differentiates."
I'd be interested to see you explain how innovation and differentiation (the latter in particular) are not forms of competition. What exactly is your definition of competition?