If your ideal is at odds with reality, your claims are useless.
How do they do this? By rent-seeking, of course, especially by deploying the patent system to forbid alternative mousetraps.
The argument for intellectual property law is utilitarian: Forbidding Jerry to profit from what he has learned from Jim’s innovations is bad for Jerry, but it’s good for everyone else, the claim runs, since without the state imposing monopoly protection to Jim’s exclusive benefit, Jim will have no incentive to innovate in the first place. The proposition itself is dubious, and utilitarianism is never more that elaborately-rationalized crime. In an actually-free society, how Jim defends his property is his own problem, not something to be collectivized in pursuit of alleged collective benefits. And whatever argument there might have been for patent laws in 1789, it is by now obvious that the patent system is simply odious rent-seeking.
The same logic applies to every other kind of government “help” for business: It is all Rotarian Socialism – lining Jim’s pockets with wealth extracted by threat of violence from Jerry and everyone else.
The Federalist’s Robert Tracinski gets this, at least with respect to full-time professional rent-seeker Elon Musk. Good on him. I expect he might trip over the larger problem, though: Rotarian Socialism is the only kind of business left in America.
Which brings me to my pet bête noire, Yaron Brook, evader-in-chief of the Ayn Rand Institute (official motto: “Turning smiles into snarls for what seems like forever”). Brook and his ghost writer Don Watkins have a new book out called Equal is Unfair, a tome that might have fulfilled a vitally-important need – in 1852. As with Ayn Rand’s fiction, it celebrates the ideal of an independent creator of new wealth – without acknowledging that there is no such creature on the modern economic scene. Instead, as with Elon Musk and the “Shark Tank” investees, everyone in business in America today has one or more unfair advantages – coercive monopolies or tax-extracted subsidies – provided by force of arms from the über-state. Me, too, to my shame, it were well to disclose.
To be scrupulously fair, I have not read Equal is Unfair, nor will I. The premise is obvious, and obviously anti-actual-reality. Plus which, Watkins writes like an earnest sophomore – high school, not college. Yaron Brook and the Ayn Rand Institute are ‘solving’ a problem that does not exist – the supposed suppression of the rapacious urges of wannabe Musks – while ignoring the one that does: America is by now a Rotarian Socialist country – a National Socialist country.
I don’t know how they could fix these defects, even if they wanted to. The Ayn Rand Institute is a statist think tank, after all, no mater how anti-thought they might be. They are explicitly in favor of the utilitarian intellectual property laws, and implicitly in favor of all of the rent-seeking incursions upon American liberty introduced in the 1789 Constitution. They are poorly thought out, yes, but they have voluntarily forbidden themselves from thinking about how poorly thought out they are. More fools them, but sic semper tyrannosauris – thus always to dinosaurs.
But if Robert Tracinski can learn better – even if just a little better – there is hope for America yet. The issue is not equality or inequality. The issue is liberty – actual liberty, with no extra-special utilitarian whose-ox-is-gored exceptions. All we have to do, to quote Missy Rand, is “Get the hell out of my way!” and everything else will take care of itself.
