Like the idea of intellectual property? Then clearly you’ve never read Stephen Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property, nor signed up for his class (which started today and goes until December 17). Luckily, the first of his slideshows is available (and seen below), as well as a recent speech of his on the fact that intellectual property actual hampers the cause of capitalism. So go ahead and check it out and see if you can still proclaim the fallacies of intellectual property (it is what is “owed” to somebody, it inspires creativity, etc) with a straight face.
By: Barry Belmont
By: Barry Belmont
This comes by way of the LvMI blog, by Ryan McMaken.
Microsoft is slowly dying as a consumer brand. As recently as five or six years ago, though, left liberals and other anti-business ideologues were still making comments about how Microsoft was a monopoly that was crushing competition in the market place.
The less sophisticated of these critiques centered on nothing more than the fact that Microsoft enjoyed huge market share ten years ago. The more sophisticated critiques noted that Microsoft had been successful at expanding market share through agreements with PC providers like Dell who pre-packaged their PCs with Microsoft software.
Anti-IP libertarians have made convincing arguments about patents, but the IP-loving competitors of Microsoft (and the Feds who make IP possible) hardly have a problem with IP.
None of this behavior around bundling products is remotely “monopolist” of course, since there were no real barriers to entry into the market beyond the fact that people really liked Microsoft’s products and weren’t interested in going out of their way to get other products. Linux and Apple’s OS have always been available for purchase and use. People simply didn’t like them as much.
We should mention, of course, that a lot of this anti-Microsoft hysteria came form the early Apple fanbois who saw (and still see) one’s choice of computing products as some kind of moral issue. Thus, the Apple disciples never tired of portraying Microsoft as an evil corporation contrasted with the cute and cuddly people at Apple.
Other competitors of Microsoft resorted to monopolist talk also, and Sun Microsystems, which had been producing far less popular products for many years, sued Microsoft for “anti-competitive behavior.”
Eventually, the federal judiciary sided with Microsoft’s competitors, and federal judges who could not even turn a computer on, started making sweeping judgments about the software industry and computing and forced a variety of reforms in Microsoft’s structure to make it less “monopolistic.”
In spite of all of these efforts by competitors to use the power of the state to crush Microsoft, Microsoft continued for several years to dominate the computing market with both businesses and consumers.
Eventually, however, Microsoft ceased to be inventive and its browser, operating system and platforms either failed to impress, or were never adapted at all to deal with the new realities of modern computing.
The decline of Microsoft simply illustrates what many free market economists had predicted all along. Namely, that Microsoft, never having been a actual monopolist (monopoly only being possible within a framework of government privilege) would some day fade from view as other, more inventive organizations took over Microsoft’s market share.
This happened to IBM, of course. IBM was once denounced as a monpolist, yet today, who could make such a claim without producing smirks in response?
Microsoft’s retreat has little to do with the rent-seeking lawsuits levied against it by Sun and others, but has everything to do with the fact that Microsoft hasn’t produced any interesting or inventive products in years.
With losing market share, Microsoft is no longer the bogeyman of the anti-monpolist crowd. Now it’s Google that is supposedly forcing us all to bend the knee before its monopolist power.
(Better get the federal courts involved, or we’ll all be living in Google-owned company towns within a decade!)
Unless they enjoy government privilege, (as was the case with Pan Am under the Civil Aeronautics Board, for example) these alleged “monpolists” come and go, and these reversals of fortune happen all the more quickly in the fast moving technology world.
The fact that Microsoft now struggles to even keep up with the rapidly-changing computing world illustrates just how unconvincing and short-sighted are the claims or monopoly that are usually little more than an expression of personal opinion and self-interest.
By: Barry Belmont
The city council of Cambridge, MA passed this resolution a month or two ago ordering an investigation into the feasibility of a installing a slide on a subway platform. SPOILER ALERT: This is not a joke.
This is the video they are referencing:
By: Barry Belmont
Donald Symons is a renowned anthropologist over at UC Santa Barbara. I’ve read much of his work (and I suggest you do too) and it is truly amazing how well scientists can convey meaning. Let me explain: the other day I was having a legitimate argument with someone (a girl known around town as a fairly respectable proponent of feminism) wherein I was trying to convince her that female circumcision was ‘bad’ thing and she was trying to convince me that it was a culturally determined practice that was “okay for them [in that culture].”
Disgusting.
However, as I was fumbling through a few science books, I came across this absolutely perfect refutation by Dr. Symons of genital mutilation, moral relativism, and actually spouting such rubbish as it’s “okay for them”:
If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it become “culture,” and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western “moral thinkers,” including feminists.
14Oct10
The Tragedy of the Commons
By: Barry Belmont
So for those of you interested in theory behind the experiment to be conducted today at 12:15, consider this blurb from Garrett Hardin:
The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it “the tragedy of the commons,” using the word “tragedy” as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.” He then goes on to say, “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in factinvolve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.”
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.
1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of
1.
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
By: Barry Belmont
How exactly is a libertarian to respond to the following video? It would appear that participation within a religion is a free exercise of one’s will. On the other hand, many people believe in a particular religion because they are afraid of the consequences if they don’t (the threat of eternal torture would be enough to invalidate any earthly contract, why should it be different for a cosmic one?). On yet another hand, the man in this video isn’t causing this woman in direct harm and is probably making her feel temporarily very good, something she may value highly. And yet, on a different hand entirely, he likely prevented her from receiving the actual medical attention she needed and at the very least lied to her (in the sense that it is quite unlike that all that BAM BAM BAMing made the God of the Universe cure her hip condition).
Tell me liberty-loving folks, what do you make of this:
