This is my first post at the LvM community board, but I’ve been reading a lot of threads here lately. Keep up the good work!
There’s a question that’s been wandering through my mind for the last few days. It’s about the spread of wealth. If you look at the semi-capitalist society we live in, the richest people are people like Bill Gates, who’ve accumulated tons of wealth with Microsoft. Now obviously, in an ip free society, this wouldn’t be possible. Others would emulate the good things about it and continue to improve it. He wouldn’t be the billionaire he’s know if I’m correct.
So my question is: do you guys think that in an anarcho-capitalist society people wouldn’t be that rich like Bill Gates and instead have a more equal spread of wealth? I’m not saying that’s necessary better. If there are any articles or ebooks on it, I’d be really interested in reading them.
P.s. English is not my first language, so sorry for the spelling and grammar
There is no answer, because you have absolutely no way of knowing who would earn or own how much in such and such arbitrary situation.
It is entirely possible that a bright man like Gates and a solid company could still do well without IP laws, because court cases on IP are normally done over products and ideas already saturated in the consumer market, and brilliant new ideas normally come from lots of small companies (see Notion Ink Adam) and not from large established companies like Microsoft. Microsoft’s work is more on strategy and selling what has already been made.
IP lawsuits are normally pressed for a minor advantage and making a minor dent on the competitor: typical of a greedy and materialistic world (yes, yes, I know). It’s pure pettiness, as embodied by Larry Ellison’s “It’s not enough that I win; everybody else must lose.” It’s unnecessary and won’t make a difference.
I think wealth would be distributed more equally and wealth in general would be much higher. There was a graph somewhere around here that correlated freedom with wealth distribution and other parameters. The more free an economy was, the more equal was the wealth distributed.
@MaikU: What I was asking was how rich Bill Gates would be compared to other people, not compared to the current situation. I agree with you that everybody would probably be richer. People allways complain about their relative wealth instead of their absolute, so an affirmative answer to my question would be useful in discussions.
Ok, I agree with what Metus said. I would speculate too, that he wouldn’t be that much richer than other people like it is today. So yeah. But again, it’s just my amature speculation.
I was going to ask this in a sepate thread, but it seems like this one would be appropriate, and the Gates IP thing reminded me of it. I have not yet read Myth of the Robber Barons, so I’m not sure if this is covered there or not. I know people bring up the robber barons as examples of the perils of laissez faire capitalism, and the standard free-market response is that guys like Rockefeller greatly helped society on net because they kept oil plentiful at cheap prices, and the demonization mostly came from their less-efficient competitors, and that the robber barons were generally beneficial until they began enlisting government to regulate their competitors and help them cartelize.
Many cite a key reason for Rockefeller’s advantage being the many processes his chemists pioneered to maximize the yield and the variety of products he could derive from each barrel of oil. What I was wondering is, does anyone know how heavily he relied on patents of these processes to maintain his advantage? If he did so significantly, couldn’t you then argue that the consumers may have been hurt by the legal monopoly of these processes conferred to Rockefeller, and the denial of access to them of any outsider that might have been able to build upon it more rapidly? I have no idea, though… maybe he didn’t aggressively protect his patents. I did a Google search and didn’t immediately find much, so I was wondering whether anyone here knows.
I’ve been wondering about this recently.We jumped so quickly to praise this guy without considering whether he was state privileged.It worries me.It wouldn’t surprise me if he was.
It’s not new. It’s very old. It’s based on anarchronism. It also confuses libertarianism with egalitarianism.
Comrade, please stop saying “we”. There is no we. There are individuals. Methodological individualism pls.
It’s silly to blame everything on a convenient scapegoat like the state, but the issue isn’t the state, the issue is a lack of property rights. LLs don’t like to talk about property rights, because under a property rights regime, egalitarianism can’t be more than an aesthetic.
Both parties become dependent. Rich and poor are both human beings, who responded similarly to the same incentives. Class theory based on materialism is marxism not libertarianism.
“under a property rights regime, egalitarianism can’t be more than an aesthetic.”
Well, I think that just mathematically, if the poor get poorer or the rich get richer than ultimately there would have to be some intersection between the two wealth rates until they equal one another. On the market, due to equilibrium and competition, profits tend to decrease especially when compared to wages -the laborer will always receive the lion’s share of income as Say recognized. That doesn’t prevent some becoming super rich through entrepreneurship but this tendency towards greater profits and more obvious inequality is not enough to outway the greater tendency towards equilibrium which represents a vast wealth transfer to workers and only a few individuals with a lot of wealth. IMO the market tends to equalize profits across all areas of life.
The world is already anarchic at the largest scale (international), always has been and, I believe, always will be. In this sense, anarchy is more descriptive than prescriptive.
Variation in capital stocks between individuals, families and other organizations is immense because the largest capital stocks are immense. I believe that the size of capital stocks is really just a function of technology. Who’s richer, someone who owned the top-10 largest manufacturing corporations in 1910 or someone who owns the top-10 largest manufacturing corporations in 2010? Obviously, the latter, regardless of any other considerations, simply because the top-10 manufacturing corporations today can produce immensely more goods than the top-10 manufacturing corporations of 1910 could have even dreamed of. Jet planes, computers, cell phones, the internet, robotics and embedded systems, etc. explain why this is the case.
I do not think the sizes of the largest capital stocks would be much different in a natural order society than they are today, if for no other reason than those who hold the largest capital stocks already effectively live in a natural order society, anarchy.
The primary difference that capitalism* makes is in the lives of the little people, the commoners. And the commoners are those who have very small capital stocks. This has always been the case. The less energies which can be taken from the masses and put to the ends of the State (that is, the private ends of those who control the State), the more rational the actions of the individuals which comprise the masses can become and the more productive the whole society will be. In other words, free men are more productive than slaves exactly because they get to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. While that would dramatically reduce the size of capital stocks that shysters and con-artists like the board of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan could build, it would place no natural limit on the size of capital stocks which honest producers of highly demanded products might build.
Clayton -
*Capitalism, in its limit, is anarchy, in my opinion
Most libertarians don’t even realize this. It’s probably the biggest turn off for me:
“What? You’re profiling against someone because of their weight/height/ethnicity/skin color? You’re not a libertarian!”
And the above thinking obviously implies forced association. I had always throught that libertarianism had more to do with property rights and being against the initiation of force. I suppose it really depends on how people define the initiation of force, but I don’t think choosing to not deal with someone based on (seemingly) arbitrary criteria can be said to be “anti-libertarian” or an initiation of force.
Anyways, the LLs can have some decent critiques… but I find that none of their solutions are well throught-out.
I don’t know information specifically about his patents, but I’ve heard that many of the robber barons were slightly in bed with government. Not to say that they weren’t good businessmen, but the smallest push from goverment (i.e. permission to drill in State-monopolized land) can help a company in big ways at the expense of others.
There would definitely still be big companies/organizations even in absence of intellectual property.
But, in terms of the focus on wealth, the question is basically moot/meaningless because wealth isn’t a zero-sum game, as our friends on the left think.