Sunday, January 5, 2014

Monopoly and Property Rights

 Written in December 2010
Originally published 12-30-2010

Say you have an idea, an invention, or a way to improve a product. You want the exclusive right to get paid for your idea and secure your intellectual private property. So you go to the local, government-run patent office to do so.
Now nobody can compete with you unless they change their idea until it's different enough by government standards. Then you have a virtual monopoly. Monopoly is government protection of industry. So libertarianism and state capitalism are practically the same thing, especially when it comes to economic issues and the protection of property.
And all patents are registered at the federal level, so it's a centralized state capitalism, i.e., fascism, which easily sways towards totalitarian state socialism as soon as the state comes to favor building up its bureaucracies and creating government jobs when it thinks it can survive without cementing its business ties. So state capitalism and state socialism are the same thing.
So libertarianism and state socialism, though traditionally perceived as opposite, are really more similar than anyone could imagine.
And, obviously, anarcho-socialism cannot exist in any real way, because you can't take commercial or propertarian liberty away from the individual without having some form of public or socialized governmental organization with which to do so. So anarcho-socialism and state socialism are the same for all intents and purposes.
The public chooses at detriment to property owners, and property owners continue to possess and own at detriment to the remainder of the public.
Public-possessed means of production, private-owned means of production. What's the difference? In any remotely statist system, all private citizens are members of the public, and all public entities are operated by government agents for private profit.
I saw someone on TV talking about North Korea, saying that as soon as a country comes to embrace capitalism, democracy is never far behind. But late-night host Craig Ferguson says that capitalism and democracy need each other to balance out, because one is evil and the other is good, like the Olsen twins.
But does democracy develop in order to protect capitalism, or rather, in response and in opposition to it?
This country is built on the idea espoused by Franklin, Jefferson, and Rousseau - that private property rights are secured by public consent.
     So now that we've realized that both socialism and capitalism are bullshit and basically the same thing, where do we go from here?




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