Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

The entirety of the statement:

> As we oppose all government intervention in the marketplace, we favor the repeal of intellectual property laws. Disputes between inventors, creators, authors, artists, businesses, and other such entities should be resolved without government intervention.

This is madness. Without a notion of "property", there is no marketplace. Even the more extreme libertarians will generally agree that it is necessary for government to have police powers, partly to ensure that property rights are respected.

Now, one can argue (without being completely incoherent) that intellectual property should not exist as a concept, but that amounts to abolishing a certain marketplace, not preventing "government intervention in the marketplace". Moreover, denying property rights outright for intangible goods is a strong position, and not one I usually associate with libertarians.

Sometimes local third party politics is the only thing less sane than national two-party politics.

> Sometimes local third party politics is the only thing less sane than national two-party politics.

I'd say that applies to all the local politics, regardless of party. Some of the wackiest crap I've ever seen in politics happens locally, even under the banner of one of the big parties. Stuff they'd never say at the national level.

> This is madness.

Perhaps their notion of property is more spartan than yours. :)

More seriously, property is a technology for resolving problems stemming from scarcity. If there is no applicable scarcity, then property rights are not necessary. Even more, if property rights in some arena effectively cause scarcity, as is the case for some forms of IP, then they ought to be abolished.

On this model, a particular copy of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is scarce, where the right to copy "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" isn't, since two people exercising that right at the same time need have no effect on each other. If they both want to sell copies, then the wider availability may lower the price of a copy, but this is only the same effect as two widely separated gold miners have on each other, and giving one miner the right to restrict mining of gold by the other would seem a weird application of property rights to many libertarians.

Copyright addresses the scarcity of _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ that exists before it is written, roughly in proportion to the value of the work itself. Saying that it "causes" scarcity is narrowly/technically correct but misses the point.

Property rights cause scarcity anywhere and everywhere; there's plenty of gold to go around in in Goldstrike but only Barrick Gold is allowed to extract it.

Ultimately it comes down to whether one believes that the smart and creative don't deserve to extract profit from their creations nearly as much as the wealthy deserve to extract rent out of physical stuff they didn't create...

Interestingly, Samuel Clemens wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer expecting to make money from it.

"By the time the prospectus and agents were in the field [TATS was published in the US by the American Publishing Co., on a subscription (!) basis], a pirated edition of the novel had been on the market for four months. [I]t is [...] likely that [a Canadian publisher, the Belford Brothers] set [the pirated edition] from a hastily imported copy of the British one [published in Britain to secure a copyright there]. Their version of the novel was available in three prices: $.75, $1.00 or $2.25 -- considerably less than the authorized one would cost. And there was no way to keep pirated copies of the book from coming into America along steamboat and train lines. ... The copy in the Barrett Collection graphically indicates what [Clemens] was up against on its titlepage, where someone (the name has been effaced) recorded where and when the book was bought: on the steamer St. Lawrence, perhaps on its way into America, and in September, 1876 -- fully three months before [the American Publishing Co.] was ready to sell any copies on which [Clemens] could make money.

"The delay cost [Clemens] over $10,000, according to his own reckoning, and contributed to the book's weak first-year sales. ... [T]he fate of Tom Sawyer not only soured him on the American Publishing Co; it also seems to have discouraged him as a writer. During the next five years he published only one book." (https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/tomsawye/tomcomp.html)

> Without a notion of "property", there is no marketplace. Even the more extreme libertarians will generally agree that it is necessary for government to have police powers, partly to ensure that property rights are respected.

No. Read Machinery of Freedom by Friedman for a primer on why this is not necessary.

Any chance you could summarize the argument?

Briefly, he argues for private courts and police companies which would prefer to settle things with money rather than force, because force is so expensive.

It requires a utopia to work as described. Libertarians love it.

How would that even work? Like, why would I find a private court's ruling binding over me, and if there was some way to force that ruling to become binding … that's what we call "the government".

The plan seems to hinge on people and companies caring very much about reputational harm.

I'll... leave judging the soundness of that plan as an exercise for the reader.

It may have seemed more reasonable in 1973 than it would in, say, 2019.

It has approximately nothing to do with reputational harm. The plausible end result of violating the law is either that you have to accept the result of arbitration or you end up getting shot - essentially the same as today, except you have a lot more flexibility in picking arbitration rules.

The Machinery of Freedom's system doesn't rely on firms' and individuals' strong wish to avoid reputational harm? Because that exact mechanism is mentioned repeatedly as the enforcement mechanism of arbitration, absent government. It may not be the only factor cited, but it's a lot of it.

No, the chief proposed enforcement mechanism for violating arbitration agreements is that if you do, no one is going to stop people from shooting you and taking your stuff. I.e. you become an outlaw.

Well, the book's text is available online. I suppose anyone can go figure out for themselves whether reputation (beyond just the extreme form of "people kill you because you're so unpopular") is a significant part of what it supposes would keep people and businesses in line, absent government.

It has nothing to do with people killing you because you’re unpopular; it’s to do with the fact that if you seriously violate arbitration agreements it becomes too expensive to buy protection.

> no one is going to stop people from shooting you and taking your stuff. I.e. you become an outlaw.

[edit, also:]

> The plausible end result of violating the law is either that you have to accept the result of arbitration or you end up getting shot

That seems like the monopoly on violence with... more actual violence.

Contracts!

You would contract with a particular for-profit legislative system the same way you contract with an insurance company and a police company and a war-defense company. The insurance company would have contracts with investigative companies and retributive force companies.

When you get into a dispute with your neighbor over whether they are allowed to build a wall that might cross on to your property, you contact your court company and your insurance company. The court company sends someone to talk to your neighbor and get details of their jurisprudence subscription. If they subscribe to the same courts, excellent! They have jurisdiction and can decide whether this is a minor violation of the contract (see rules on respecting property lines) or a major violation. Violations can be punished by corrective action or fines equivalent to the costs of such.

If the neighbor uses a different court system, perhaps they have a treaty-contract with your court system. In that case the treaty-contract will supply the rules.

Oh, but maybe there isn't a treaty-contract. The court companies might take this opportunity to negotiate one. Or, they might notify their insurance companies that they have a conflict. Maybe their insurance companies have a mutual non-aggression contract, in which case they might force the court companies to negotiate a treaty-contract or lose insurance coverage.

See? Utopia!

Read the book. The cost of defecting from an arbitration agreement would be very high (i.e. you would be at serious physical risk). You're arguing against a strawman you made up.

I don't think it required a utopia, he's simply describing warlordism, which was the way of the world for thousands of years before the liberal revolutions. Why we would want to go back to that is a mystery to me, however.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/18/book-review-the-machin...

There's a long quote down a ways (starting: "How, without government, could we settle the disputes that are now settled in courts of law?") that does a pretty good job of giving you the gist. The very TL;DR, and I don't think an unfair one (read Friedman's own, quoted story of how his system might work, if you don't believe me) for anyone who's familiar with cyberpunk fiction is that it's basically just unironically advocating the corporate-security-is-the-only-security future that those settings often feature. Given the timing, it seems probable to me that Friedman and others' writings on this topic inspired those elements of that genre, in fact.

In Friedman's version of the story, this looks like a lot more freedom than we have now[0]. In the cyberpunk version, it looks a lot like feudalism.

[0] I don't really see that, personally, in his and similar writing, which looks like it replaces de jure restrictions with a pile of stress, anxiety, and risk, which don't really feel like more freedom in any practical sense, to me, but it's supposed to be there, so let's just grant for the sake of argument that he's successfully painting a picture of a more-free system, as that's what he intends.

Okay, this is at least honest. Yes, we could certainly effectively return to a form of feudalism/warlordism. I don't think it's a very good idea though.

These authors comment on the idea that war being expensive would be a barrier, and surely it would be some kind of barrier. On the other hand, during the late medieval and early modern eras there were numerous wars that easily cost the entire revenue of the "state" for the year or sometimes multiple years. These wars were privately financed and involved the use of mercenaries. To me, this doesn't sound so different from the world proposed by libertarians like this, and I much prefer our world.

There are various private court/police structures that end up being socially efficient. You pick a police/court company and they have contracts with other police/court companies that specify how arbitration happens. It doesn't rely on any sort of goodwill or miraculous happenstance. The end result is not that much different from what we have today except you should get more for your money and you have some more flexibility in picking which rules you're subject to. The space of admissible rulesets is determined by the cost of negotiating contracts between your court system and the other court systems you might have to interact with.

Yes. Read X, by Y (943 pages, $84 on Amazon) for why it is necessary.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf is supplied by the author.

And yet,

"We hold that rights to property, including real property, are individual rights and, as such, are entitled to the same protections as all other individual rights. The owners of property have the full right to acquire, trade, control, use, dispose of, rent, collateralize, or enjoy their property in any manner, without interference, unless the exercise of their control infringes upon the valid rights of others."

Does the Libertarian Party of Colorado supply some sort of hierarchy to these platform elements since some of them conflict.

More apologia than primer, yeah?

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