David Brin is the author of science fiction novels The Postman, the Uplift series beginning with Sundiver, and others as well as the ever-popular nonfiction work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. He recently sat down with Reason.tv’s Tim Cavanaugh to discuss his recent criticisms of “dogmatic libertarians,” his hobbyhorse of government transparency, and the subject of uplifting dolphins.

I have much to say about Brin’s attacks on “dogmatic libertarians,” by which he means followers of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand who worship property too much, but watch the video first and then continue on below for my commentary.

I’ll state right up front that I do not think of Brin as a libertarian, much less as a heretical one (as he describes himself). To the extent that he is right on anything, he’s not telling libertarians anything new. As for the rest, I’ve seen enough on his blog and various social networks to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t understand the actual positions held by principled libertarians (as opposed to the bizarre straw men he’s concocted and attributed to us) and that it’s impossible to carry on a civil, constructive conversation over the internet with him about libertarianism if you disagree with him on the subject. Although he says in the video that he doesn’t want to insult, after he’s already insulted, if you dare to challenge his views about “dogmatic libertarianism,” prepare to be mocked and insulted and misinterpreted and talked past.

Brin says, “The issue should not be government. It should not be unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property,  which is the path that the libertarian movement has gone down.”

I have no idea what he means by “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property” and I’ve yet to see him give a clear explanation of this magic-talisman phrase he bandies about like a Hammer of Refutation. I can’t imagine what problem he sees in upholding private property rights. He seems to think our “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry” somehow leads to oligarchy, but I’m at a loss as to how it is supposed to do so. I can only assume he thinks it means we must uphold “rights” to even unjustly acquired property, but this is simply not so.

The phrase is also code for “Hey, man, let’s be practical; sometimes one has to make compromises, break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Those who want government solutions to perceived problems hate it when libertarians stand on principle and refuse to budge. It drives them into uncivilized fits of apoplectic, frothing rage.

Brin also seems to think that so-called “dogmatic libertarians” have lost sight of the importance of competition and transparency and whatnot. Uh… No. No, we haven’t. I don’t know where he gets this stuff from. We see private property rights as making fair and creative competition possible in the first place; and we value fair and creative competition greatly, especially those of us who see intellectual property as illegitimate government grants of monopoly privilege that can only be enforced by infringing on the pre-existing rights of others to their physical property.

“Libertarians need to be reminded that, across 6,000 years, the greatest enemy of free enterprise, of market enterprise, innovation, creative competition… have always been oligarchs,” says Brin.

No… No, we don’t. But mayhaps you need to be reminded that all forms of government, not just the one labeled oligarchy, are ultimately ruled by oligarchs. It’s in the nature of the state. You know… that organization you said we shouldn’t concern ourselves with. Theory and history show us that it is through the state that oligarchs acquire and exercise their power. Without it, they are impotent. It is the state, always ruled by oligarchs, that has been the greatest enemy of free markets, free enterprise, innovation, and fair and creative competition.

The Pyramid of Oligarchy

In the video, Brin lays out a plan to rein in government growth, corruption, and “abuse.” Here’s a summary: Let’s draft 10,000 average Americans into a pool every year. Excuse Brin’s poor choice of words; this “draft” is one that can be refused without penalty (although an opt-out system is an unnecessary hassle for people and is frowned upon by savvy Netizens). We’ll then do background checks on this pool of candidates to winnow it down to a list 1,000 trustworthy, loyal citizens who can keep their mouths shut. Give them security clearances and arm them with a badge that let’s them get in any door in the United States of America — you read that right, any door. They are tasked with watching the watchmen. There will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” Brin suggests a mere month in jail. The idea being that spending a month in jail will be a price worth paying to patriots in order to bring truly heinous acts of government out into the light so that they can be stopped.

What was interviewer Tim Cavanaugh’s response to all this? “Huh. Okay.”

That’s it?

This didn’t immediately strike him as a terrible idea? He didn’t think or, better yet, say: “Gee, this can’t possibly go wrong.” Not a single problem with the proposed system immediately sprang to mind that he could ask Brin to address? Or did Cavanaugh just not want to ask the celebrity any tough questions?

I’ll just toss a few ideas off the top of my head into the ring for consideration:

1. Who is going to administer this new system of citizen-watchmen — the lottery for the draft, the background checks, security clearance decisions, and so on? Oh, that’s right — the government. Despite Brin’s talk about non-governmental, or market, solutions to problems, his proposal is a government solution to a government problem (government failure).  What? You need me to flesh the implications out for you? Okay…
2. It means the creation of a new bureaucracy or ratcheting up an exsiting one. Either way, a WIN for big government and more spending! That’s what we libertarians are fighting for!
3. Who’s to say the penalty won’t be ratcheted up over time like the income tax? Thus decreasing the risk to government officials that their secrets will get out?
4. The selection process couldn’t possibly be rigged or gamed, could it?
5. No citizen-watchman would ever take a bribe to keep quiet,  surely.
6. Or stay mum in the face of threats to himself or his family… right?
7. Brin’s proposed system entails acclimating Americans to increased government surveillance of and deep-probing into their public and private lives. Oh, and revisit #4-6 in light of this. Worse, it might come to be seen as a patriotic duty to accept such scrutiny from the government.
8. Brin says there will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” I hope he’s only referring to classified or top secret, not unclassified, information here. Let’s take him charitably and assume he is; how much do you want to bet that this will lead to more and more aspects of government becoming classified so as to have the threat of the penalty for revealing what is seen hanging over the citizen-watchmen’s heads for matters of less and less importance to the “national interest”?
9. The system Brin proposes is likely to make people more complacent about government in the same way and for the same reasons that democracy fools them into believing they’re ultimately in charge and that regulations encourage them to abdicate responsibility for the quality of the goods and services they buy, for their own safety and security and that of their families, and so on. “Hey, man, there’s a system in place to make sure our representives and public servants do what they’re tasked with doing and to weed out corruption and bad secret policies and stuff. They have enough volunteers. I don’t need to waste my valuable  Celebrity Apprentice–watching time ((Bread and circuses! Bread and circuses!)) worrying about it. Did you see what happened last night? Aubrey O’Day is soooo right. She’s the only one with any talent on her team. Nobody else every has a creative.”
10. Brin doesn’t  mention monetary compensation for being a citizen-watchman. Is it likely that as many as 1 in 10 draftees will not only accept being drafted but pass the background checks to qualify for a security clearance? A much larger pool than 10,000 might be needed. And might there not be a selection bias in who chooses to accept the responsibility after being drafted? No potential for abuse there?
11. What if the citizen-watchmen are generally okay with things libertarians would deem heinous? In light of the direction this country has been headed lo the past couple centuries, this isn’t much of a stretch, is it?
12. Brin says that citizen-watchmen will be able to get into any door in the United States. Any door. I hope he means any government door, not really any door.
13. Let’s face it, Brin’s proposal is a pipe dream. The Powers That Be will never let it happen and the American people are not really interested in that level of transparency in their government — not enough to make Brin’s plan a reality, at least. And Brin has the gall to mock and blame “dogmatic libertarians,” the lapel-grabbing (lolwut?) Rothbardian and Randian wing of the movement, for the Libertarian Party failing to make headway (more than 1%) at the polls in presidential elections.
14. Brin’s citizen-watchman program will be funded by taxes, and taxation is theft. Oh, sorry, did I grab your lapels too hard?

I could go on, but what’s the point of continuing to kick a dead horse?

[Prometheus Unbound]

This question was recently answered in length by physicist Steven Weinberg in the NY Review of Books.

After a well-written overview of how science projects grew from privately-funded individual labs to publicly-funded international collaborations, Weinberg states that:

It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.

When boiled down, what Weinberg promotes is actually stated most clearly by H. L. Mencken, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”  Weinberg has created a existential slippery slope, one that assumes that only governments can provide the goods and services that are currently on the chopping block.  Will we all run around like headless chickens if the government no longer is the sole financier and provider of roads, schools, modern art and particle colliders?

The actual problem facing Big Science is a lack of creativity and critical thinking.  In Weinberg’s mind, because the state has historically had the largest piggy bank at the table and has historically divvied out funds, he thinks the solution to all solvency issues is to continue appropriating (my euphemism for coerced) funds from the haves.    However if you remove the state and its funding, the monies it appropriated from taxpayers does not disappear into a black hole.   Rather the less money that goes to the government necessarily means the more capital is available for spending by private individuals, companies and institutions.

For example: Sergey Brin, Larry Page, James Cameron and several other high-rollers are set to announce next Tuesday about a private endeavor to capture and mine an asteroid.

Weinberg’s plea is just the latest in a line of well-intentioned science promoters (following most notably Sagan) yet his solution is misplaced.  Science took place before the state monopolized both scarce resources and skilled human capital.   In the event that government agencies are defunded and taxes are returned to individuals, what would stop private individuals in the future from financing other such activities?  If there is a commercial and practical application to the research surely there will be capitalists and entrepreneurs nearby.

In an ironic twist, Weinberg also noted in the same article that:

Space-based astronomy has a special problem in the US. NASA, the government agency responsible for this work, has always devoted more of its resources to manned space flight, which contributes little to science. All of the space-based observatories that have contributed so much to astronomy in recent years have been unmanned. The International Space Station was sold in part as a scientific laboratory, but nothing of scientific importance has come from it. Last year a cosmic ray observatory was carried up to the Space Station (after NASA had tried to remove it from the schedule for shuttle flights), and for the first time significant science may be done on the Space Station, but astronauts will have no part in its operation, and it could have been developed more cheaply as an unmanned satellite.

Look, the bottom line is that Big Science is socialism for engineers.  Despite claims to the contrary, the same problem that plagues all socialized endeavors (e.g. politicization, favoritism, subsidization, price distortion, misallocation) also plays a leading role in government planned science projects.  What particle scientists really needs is to take a page from NASA and hire Hollywood  spin-doctors  to portray the life-or-death drama at CERN.  And then get a voice over actor like the late-Don LaFontaine to talk about one physicist who is on a mission to save all of humanity by pressing the “any key.”

It is not a tumor

Many moons ago back in the suburb of Richardson I found out my high school physics teacher had originally moved from California to work on the SSC project down in Waxahachie — the same high-energy particle project that Weinberg discusses at length in his article.  And at the time my teacher held a similar opinion as Steven.

I haven’t spoken to her since I graduated last century but when the dust settled, science marched on.

Innovation in telephony did not end when the FCC privatized the air-waves.  Innovation in computing did not end when the NSF privatized their supercomputing facilities.   Innovation in the web browsing industry did not end after Mosaic’s team developed Netscape.   Innovation from pre-Web 1.0 technologies did not end after the national pipes were opened to commercial activity.

Twenty years from now – barring an apocalypse – science projects will continue to be carried out by curious individuals and enterprising firms.  We still might not know anything new about the Higgs boson, but then again maybe there is nothing commercially useful about the god particle.  And besides, it is not fair or just to coerce taxpayers to fund any agency, let alone NASA, NIH or any other alphabet organization.

Who knows, perhaps twenty years from now the Intel-IBM-Hasselhoff supercolider will have finally solved some of the fundamental questions of the day such as unifying quantum mechanics and gravity or how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.  After all, the big in Big Science is entirely relative.  Just ask the winners of the Ig Nobel’s.

President Obama pays a lower tax rate than his secretary – the very sort of disparity which, according to his own staff, illustrates why the so-called “Buffett Rule” needs to be implemented so that the wealthy pay more.

But Obama won’t consider the idea of simply donating more to the Treasury to address the gap – oh no! “That’s not the way we operate our tax system, okay?” his campaign strategist says. “We don’t run bake sales. It’s not about volunteerism. We all kick in according to the system.”

He’s right. It’s not about “volunteerism.” It’s about violence. Pay your “fair share,” or the government will take it from you by force. They won’t even entertain the novel idea that if people wanted to give the government more money, they could – the Treasury Department will gladly accept their check! But that’s somehow less legitimate than pointing a gun at them and taking whatever the law decrees is “fair.”

And yes, I am reminded of the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the peasant observes “now we see the violence inherent in the system!” If only we had a government which derived its authority from a mandate from the masses…

Bonus reading: Matt Welch on the five new ways the IRS is screwing Americans.  Happy Tax Day!

Last week, the Heritage Foundation published commentary on the number of Americans who pay income tax, and decried the fact that 49.5 percent of Americans are “not represented on a taxable return.” The Daily Mail then picked up the statistics and announced that “HALF of Americans don’t pay income tax despite crippling government debt.”

To its credit, the body of the Heritage post began with a reference to the “the sharp increase of Americans who rely on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid or other assistance.” The emphasis of the piece, however, and thus, the emphasis of the other news outlets and pundits who have picked up on the statistic, is that too few people pay taxes.

The increase in reliance on government assistance is the problem here, not a lack of people who pay income tax.

Yet, it has become something of a right-wing talking point to claim that a declining number of taxpayers among some income groups is a nefarious development in American history.

The emphasis on the lack of taxpayers is getting the whole issue backward. The problem is the increase of income from government transfer payments. There is nothing bad whatsoever about fewer people paying income taxes.

The Conservative obsession with getting people to pay more in taxes comes from a preoccupation with class warfare in which it is assumed that if middle-class and wealthy people are paying too much in taxes (which they are), then the solution is to punish low-income people by making them pay more in taxes. It’s allegedly not “fair” if everyone is not being extorted by the state in a similar fashion.

The just solution, however, is to greatly decrease the tax burden of those paying taxes now. In a recent NPR interview, Ron Paul nicely summed up what is actually “fair”:

MR. SIEGEL: This week’s release of Mitt Romney’s taxes and President Obama’s advocacy of a millionaire’s tax raise questions about fairness in funding the government. The first question: Do you believe that income derived from dividends interest or capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate than income earned from a salary or commissions?

REP. PAUL: Well, I’d like to have everybody taxed at the same rate, and of course, my goal is to get as close to zero as possible, because there was a time in our history when we didn’t have income taxes. But when government takes it upon themselves to do so much, you have to have a tax code. But if you’re going to be the policemen of the world and run all these wars, you have to have a tax code. But as far as what the rates should be, I think it should be as low as possible for – for everybody.

It’s a safe bet that Siegel’s underlying assumption behind the question is that in order to make taxes fair, then anyone who is paying a tax bill that is too “low” should therefore have his taxes raised.

The opposite is true, as noted by Paul.

So, when Conservatives get bent out of shape about some people not paying tax, the response should be to demand lower taxes for everyone, not to complain that people aren’t paying their “fair share,” which seems to be the Conservative sentiment.

We might also note that this statistic apparently only applies to income taxes. It says nothing about payroll taxes, which for many middle-class people is by far the largest part of one’s monthly tax bill. Any teenager with his first job notices just how much those payroll taxes take out of one’s paycheck. So, to claim that people aren’t paying taxes simply because they’re not paying income tax is rather disingenuous. Since there’s no such thing as a Social Security or Medicare trust fund, payroll taxes are really just income taxes under another name.

Also, any demand for more taxation is really just a demand for increased government revenue. It’s a call for more money so government can bomb more people, bail out more banks and spread around more largesse to politically well-connected friends.

So, the focus on whether or not “enough” people are paying taxes completely misses the point. The larger point is that far too many Americans receive government benefits. Indeed, recent increases in income as measured by the BLS, reflect increases in government transfer payments, as I’ve shown here.

Ludwig von Mises wrote in Bureaucracy that a system in which a majority of the population is dependent on the government dole leads to an unstable political and economic situation, since a majority of the population then has a vested interest in increasing the power of government to redistribute wealth. While the Heritage article makes some comments in this vein, it nevertheless makes the claim that “The rapid growth of Americans who don’t pay income taxes is particularly alarming for the fate of the American form of government.” Really? By that logic, “the American form of government” would be in danger if the income tax were abolished. Oh, how did America ever survive prior to the 16th Amendment?

There is no doubt that the growth in dependency on government largesse is a serious problem, but that doesn’t mean that any American pays too little in taxes. It simply means that the government spends too much money.

The Conservative reaction to this statistic, however, seem to be: “Hey, those guys aren’t being taxed! Tax them!” This is hardly a phrase that should be uttered by anyone who claims to be for limited government.

From Salon:

Can the 1 percent accept “enough”?

The rich can’t stop trying to justify exorbitant salaries for everyone from Wall Street bankers to college coaches

Read more>>

When I hear this tripe,  I am reminded of Francisco D’Anconia’s “Money Speech” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” Likewise, anyone who talks about the 1 percent accepting “enough” is to be watched, very closely. (See Against the Non-Aggression Principle and Self-Ownership? Run!)

Many libertarians, perhaps most notably Thomas E. Woods, support the decentralization of power from the federal government, including the power of nullification. Many people fear and denounce this power, often because they like the immense power of the central state and are supporters of big government. There are, however, some very real concerns by people who desire freedom as their highest political goal. A simple question, which is asked in various forms is “if decentralization leads to more freedom, why did African slavery thrive in a more decentralized America, and only go away (well, sort of) when the central state forced it to go away?” Similar statements could be said of Jim Crow.

Tom Woods briefly addresses a critical point which bears emphasis: a major problem with decentralization is that decentralizing power may have huge negative effects for people who cannot vote.  The very people who are most obsessed with them not having political power are the people who are most empowered by the receding power of the central state. This points to the people that libertarian activists should concentrate on protecting: non-citizens (including both legal and illegal immigrants) and convicted felons in states which strip them of the franchise. As most minorities have the ability to exercise the vote, the greatest evils of the past have no chance of being repeated. And some unprecedented benefits may come about. Without the significant support of the federal government, individual states could not maintain the murderous drug war at the levels at which it is currently prosecuted.  Family and morals-destroying welfare programs would have to be greatly scaled back without the ability to print money. Taxes would have to be levied to pay for these things, forcing citizens to carefully evaluate just how much they wish to impoverish themselves in the attempt to eradicate various victimless crimes.

The benefits don’t end there. Freedom would be catching in this country for several reasons. Our national myths support the value of freedom. The proximity of states and the freedom of movement among them, in the face of massive differences in the amount of liberty inside them, would mean that the most inventive, industrious people would tend to leave less free areas and go to more free ones. This would impoverish the most oppressive states, further pressuring them to liberate. Perhaps the single most important factor which would allow liberty to really catch in the United States is that the US military would not be looking to crush these efforts, as it does in other countries. If liberty is to be permitted by any government, it is likely that it will have to be permitted in the USA, as the American government is among the world’s most fervent supporters of foisting government on people, whether they like it or not, in the name of “stability.”

I despise all the Republican candidates for President, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson excepted, but including Michele Bachmann, the fake conservative. I am continually amazed the so-called “conservatives” and “Tea Party” types think she is praiseworthy at all.

What is most annoying about her is that she continually refers to herself as a “federal tax litigation attorney”. This is annoying on so many levels.  First, it’s an attempt to credentialize, to show she’s smart or deserves limited government credibility of bona fides because of this.

Second, I have never heard this kind of description in my entire 20 years of practicing law, many at large law firms. No one calls themselves a “federal tax litigation attorney.” Tax lawyer, maybe. Litigator. But “federal tax litigation attorney”? She sounds like a rube.

But this is a ruse. It’s just an intentionally ambiguous, made-up job description designed to sound impressive while hiding the fact that she worked for the IRS. Yes, she was an IRS tax goon. As noted here:

You’ll never guess what Michele Bachmann, the rabble-rousing, tax-reviling, government-bashing idol of America’s tea party movement, used to do for a living. Sue tax scofflaws for the Internal Revenue Service.

As she flexes her credentials as a Republican presidential candidate in a field of former governors and corporate executives, Bachmann is more likely to describe herself as a “former federal tax litigation attorney” — as she did in her first nationally televised debate — than as a three-term member of Congress. But she rarely, if ever, mentions the one and only employer of her legal services: the U.S. Department of Treasury.

When the revolution comes, this fake, stupid, lying, dishonest, statist, sociopathic socialist poseur will have a lot of crimes to answer for.

Interesting post from Libertarian News:

Rothbard vs. CATO’s Richard Epstein on the Benefits of Violent Looting

December 17, 2011

By michaelsuede

Adam Liptak and Richard Epstein discuss the most efficient way to rob people.

After listening to Epstein run his ivory tower mouth, my fury over his nonsensical bullshit hath runneth over.  A video reading of the following article can be found here for those of you that don’t have the patience to read long text articles.

Epstein admits that, “There is no coercive action by government which will have the same beneficent effects of voluntary transactions in competitive markets,” yet flushes his own statement down the toilet when he adds, ”but you can’t get competitive markets with respect to the provision of public goods and you can’t get competitive markets with respect to the operation of network industries.”

Epstein never bothers to explain why “public goods” are of such necessary importance that VIOLENCE against PEACEFUL PEOPLE should be advocated in order to pay for them.

Epstein lists off a few so-called libertarian economists that support the initiation of violence against the innocent to pay for public goods, including Locke and Hayek, but he never bothers to mention the rest of the libertarian economics field, the majority of which disagree with the legitimization of the initiation of violence.

Let’s start off with the parable of the robber by Rothbard to demonstrate why any violent theft can not lead to a more productive society.  The following citations all come from the essay The Myth of Neutral Taxation, by Murray Rothbard:

Read more>>

Recommended podcasts:

• Aaron Burr and the Challenge to Jefferson’s America, KERA Think, Dec. 1, 2011 (“Who fostered imperial dreams for the young United States of America? We’ll explore the life and story of our country’s third vice president this hour with historian David O. Stewart. His new book is American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America“);
• 238. Lew Rockwell Attacked By a Parasite, LewRockwell.com Podcasts, Dec. 2, 2011 (“Ron Smith talks to Lew Rockwell until a federal employee intervenes”. In the podcast, Lew quotes a great line from a recent Gary North column: “Europe’s game of kick the can will continue. The best summary of the outcome was made by a Spanish government worker on Sunday, November 20, the day of national elections. The socialists were thrown out of office. He said this: ‘We can choose the sauce they will cook us in, but we’re still going to be cooked.’”).

Land Registry: Land Certificate, from A Short History of Land Registration in England and Wales

Opponents of intellectual property often point out that modern patent and copyright are purely legislated, artificial schemes. For anarcho-libertarians and libertarians opposed to legislation as a means of forming law, this is yet another stake in the heart of IP. (See my post The Mountain of IP Legislation, and my article “Legislation and Law in a Free Society.”)

So it’s not surprising that one retort of the IPers is to argue that patent- and copyright-like rights “could” evolve in common law courts. Even though they didn’t; even though the idea of statutorily enacted schemes arising from judicial decisions is more than implausible: it’s ridiculous. Some of them simply posit that there could be private “title” offices in a free society akin to real property title records in use today: you just go down and “register” your “idea”; later, when you sue an “infringer” of “your” idea in court, you can prove you “own” it by introducing evidence from the IP title records office. For example, in a recent Mises blog threat, someone suggested there might be some private invention title office (my reply). And the anarcho-libertarian Tannehills, in their classic The Market for Liberty, argue (pp. 58-59):

Ideas in the form of inventions could also be claimed by registering all details of the invention in a privately owned “data bank.” Of course, the more specific an inventor was about the details of his invention, the thought processes he followed while working on it, and the ideas on which he built, the more firmly established his claim would be and the less would be the likelihood of someone else squeezing him out with a fake claim based on stolen data. The inventor, having registered his invention to establish his ownership of the idea(s), could then buy insurance (from either the data bank firm or an independent insurance company) against the theft and unauthorized commercial use of his invention by any other person. The insurance company would guarantee to stop the unauthorized commercial use of the invention and to fully compensate the inventor for any losses so incurred. Such insurance policies could be bought to cover varying periods of time, with the longer-term policies more expensive than the shorter-term ones. Policies covering an indefinitely long time-period (“from now on”) probably wouldn’t be economically feasible, but there might well be clauses allowing the inventor to re-insure his idea at the end of the life of his policy.

One problem with the Tannehills’ reasoning was the question-begging assumption that it’s “theft” to use an idea if it’s “unauthorized”; this presupposes there is property in information.

The idea of private IP arising on the market, and idea-title registry offices, is utterly confused and implausible.

Under current law, ownership of real (immovable) property is proved by records kept by government offices. Of course, in a private society this function would be handled by private agencies. But not surprisingly, the state coopts this function in order to know who the owner is and what the “market value” is so as to enable it to extract taxes. (For more on how the state coopts key institutions to gain increasing power over its subjects, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order, pp. 62-66.) For example, a main purpose of the Domesday Book, an English land survey in 1086, “was to determine who held what and what taxes” were owed. And as noted in the fascinating study by Mayer & Pemberton, A Short History of Land Registration in England and Wales:

The Romans introduced a form of land registration to England and Wales [, to form] the basis of a land tax called tributum soli.

Similarly the Anglo-Saxons had a land tax (Danegeld), which would have required details of land ownership. The culmination of this system was the Domesday Book (1086)—an unique and almost complete survey of landowners, at least at manorial level, it is the crowning achievement of the administrative system of Anglo-Saxon England.

… According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William the Conqueror “by his foresight … surveyed so carefully that there was not a hide of land in England of which he did not know who held it and how much it was worth”.

The Domesday Book was just about the last land register in this country for taxation purposes.

So, yes, there would be private land title records services in a free market, just like there would be private roads, even though today’s state has arrogated to itself the monopoly right to provide these services. For movable property (personalty), other evidentiary and procedural rules would develop as to how to prove ownership–such as the maxim “possession is nine-tenths of the law“.

So, in a private order society we would have claims to scarce resources such as land proved by records filed with private record-keeping agencies. When someone buys property they hire experts (lawyers, title companies) to examine the records to verify that the putative owner has good title; and they would probably purchase title insurance to compensate them if some defect in title showed up. The point is: for every scarce resource that matters, that is valuable to actors and potentially contestable, owners would have an interest in having a way to prove their ownership in the event of such a contest. For every such resource, whether movable or immovable, there would be a way to determine the owner. And in a libertarian society, that rule would be based on the idea of Lockean homesteading and contractual title transfer. (See my What Libertarianism Is.) This means that the person who is the first (or earlier) owner, or someone who can trace their title to such a person, “wins” in a contest over a “latecomer.”

So just try to imagine an “idea registry” office. As many have observed, the IP owner really wants control over others’ scarce resource. He wants to use his IP claim to persuade state courts to use physical force against his competitors, say, to coerce them into not using their own resources (bodies, factories, etc.) in certain ways. It comes down to a claim of ownership of those resources. To file an IP claim you have to claim partial ownership over everyone else’s property. The problem is these things are already owned. So these filings would be rejected as bogus; the claimant is just an illegitimate latecomer.

[Mises post; c4sif]