Patent protection.

This is a very interesting area of study.

It is often said that patents are necessary in order to incent invention/innovation. It is said that patents protect individual property. But does that empirically hold true and at what cost?

However, think on this. Patents can only exist via State violence. What is the State? The State is an institution where a minority claims the moral/legal right to INITATE FORCE/VIOLENCE against the majority. In order for it to even exist, it must initiate force against said persons and decide how much property they get to keep (taxation).

Patents aren’t free. The benefits of a patent (intellectual property) accrue to the holders of it, but a patent can only exist via State violence: the removal of property of others. A patent holder seeks economic rent from the State to charge a higher price than it otherwise would be for the article protected under patent.

Put another way, we directly pay higher prices for said article and indirectly *PAY AGAIN* via taxation! Privatized profits and socialized losses. Concentrated benefits and distributed costs.

Some may say, “Without patents or intellectual property, how would, say, a musician be paid?”

What is obfuscated by the above question and should be reiterated is this, “Without State violence, how would a musician make a living? Would the creation of music disappear in the absence of State violence?” This causes immediate cognitive dissonance in the advocate of intellectual monopoly.

There is an excellent book devoted to this topic. I highly recommend it:

Amazon: http://amzn.to/95Ioy4 (Amazon)
Free PDF: http://bit.ly/7SFpCy
Online: http://bit.ly/fcQ1