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

[andie_nachgeborenen]

Yeah, I don't think that Hayek or Mises spent a day In business, and I don't think there is any reason to think that people who have business experience are better economic theorists that those who haven't. Casting my mind back I can't think of of of the great economists who had any such experience in business. Business management and theory are just different skill sets. Hayek, who was usually far more sensible than the quote about reference works indicates, and who had a sense of empirical institutional economics, unlike who, like the NCEs, worked from a set of a priori assumptions, should have known better. No one makes references books or in fact does does scholarly work, primarily to make money. Anyone who goes into scholarship with that end in mind is obviously a fool. The occasional lightning strike is not a counter example. The odds that you will create a best selling scholarly reference work are infinitesimal. Nor would any publisher finance such a venture to maximize profit. It was even less likely in Hayek's day than ours, when there at least a robust textbook market. But textbooks are not reference works. Hayek ignored his own experience of what he himself knew as a writer of scholarship. Since I am a big fan of Hayek's ordinarily, I'm a bit embarrassed for him to have created two silly arguments, granted decades apart, that, put together, are pragmatically self-refuting.

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On Aug 26, 2012, at 5:52 PM, michael perelman <michael.perelman3 at gmail.com> wrote:


> Jim, Wouldn't Hayek qualify as one of the intellectuals he despised?
> 
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>> That is certainly true.  One example of this is the strange case of
>> Friedrich Hayek.   In 1949 in a vituperative criticism of intellectuals,
>> who Hayek maintained are without “that experience of the working of the
>> economic system which the administration of property gives” and thus
>> without “direct responsibility for practical affairs,” he lamented that
>> “the growth of this class [of despicable people] has been artificially
>> stimulated by the law of copyright.”  (see: Hayek, “The Intellectuals and
>> Socialism,” The University of Chicago Law Review, XVI (1949) , 420.)   On
>> the other hand, years later he would declare that “encyclopedias,
>> dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be
>> produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.” (Hayek,
>> ed. W. W. Bartley III, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988),
>> 36-37.) By that logic things like Wikipedia, MIT OpenCourseWare,
>> healthfinder.gov, pubmed.gov, should not flourish.
>> 
>> 
>> Jim Farmelant
>> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
>> www.foxymath.com
>> Learn or Review Basic Math
>> 
>> 
>>>> It is absolute freedom and protections for haves and competition
>>> and
>>>> market discipline for have-nots, stupid.  Intellectual property
>>> rights
>>>> are good because they protect the former from the encroachments by
>>> the
>>>> latter.  By the same logic - social welfare is bad and against
>>> free
>>>> market, but bank bailouts and corporate subsidies are good and
>>>> perfectly compatible with free market.
>>>> 
>>>> Pointing logical contradictions in what these people say is a
>>> waste of
>>>> time.  A better way is to chop off the heads that hold these ideas
>>> -
>>>> as good old revolutionaries did.  All crowned heads deserve a
>>>> guillotine.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Woj, I am not sure I agree with the above. AFAIK, for Adam Smith and
>>> Enlightenment liberals the free market and capitalism were a means
>>> to an end that included general welfare and common good. They were
>>> convinced from their “understanding” of “human nature” that a free
>>> market was the way to get there, but they also called for explicit
>>> attention to moral goals/outcomes. Modern
>>> conservatives/libertarians, from what I can tell, proceed rather
>>> from a goal of purely individual rights point of view. The goal is
>>> the preservation of an individual’s rights, which is to say, his
>>> ability to just about do anything as long as it does not directly and
>>> demonstrably harm another individual. Free market and capitalism as
>>> a means, to them, are expressions of this goal and make sense only
>>> insofar as they preserve/enhance individual liberties and prevent
>>> expropriation of his/her effort. The way I see it, for a Smithian or
>>> old-school capitalist or free-marketeer IP rights are problematic
>>> because they make the market inefficient. They face this and other
>>> paradoxes and invent ad hoc fixes (e.g: trust busting) rather than
>>> examine their assumptions. For the modern conservative/libertarian,
>>> OTOH, the goal of the free market is not about the “spread of ideas”
>>> or “competition”, but the safeguarding of individual rights in the
>>> marketplace. The market remains “free” as long as it does not
>>> trample the rights of the individual to participate in his own terms
>>> (including the choice of non-participation). There is no conflict
>>> since general welfare is *not* a goal (that’s under the purview of
>>> religion and charity).
>>> 
>>> At least that’s how I see it,
>>> 
>>>        —ravi
>>> 
>>> 
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> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
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