[lbo-talk] Intellectual property rights, free trade, and free markets

[Carrol Cox]

No social system is a game with rules established beforehand. Society simply
is, and it is erroneous to speak of it as either logical or illogical. In
the last few millennia humans have become more conscious  of their condition
but spontaneously we all see social relations as simply _given_, not
generated by some recipe that we can criticize. Competition and monopoly are
not at all contradictory because they are not propositions but merely what
is. 

And we have real difficulty in arriving at an understanding of what is,
either in human history or in the cosmos. Our difficulties in arriving at a
coherent valikd theory are no evidence for incoherence in reality.
Capitalism is/was not the result of a blueprint made out in advance, and
whining about its contradictions would only be valid if it were the result
of such a blueprint.

Carrol