Category: Two Cents

Call yourself whatever you want but as long as you grant greater rights to original appropriators of scarce (rivalrous) resources relative to latecomers then we are allies.

Ideas are not ownable. Ownability requires scarcity (rivalrousness). There is exactly zero possibility of physical conflict over the use of ideas because everybody in the universe can use an idea simultaneously without physically interfering with anybody else’s use.

It is my understanding that American progressives (and liberals) have it as one of their highest ideals to fight for the interests of the most marginalized and downtrodden of groups. For that reason they fight for the right for women to abort their unborn babies without fear of legal reprisal by governments.

The Non-Aggression Principle of libertarianism is simple, but it begs the question. How do we know if an act is aggressive? That depends entirely on who owns the scarce resource on which the act is being perpetrated.

I was reminded recently of the silly notion called cultural appropriation. It’s silly for two reasons: 1) every culture on Earth is a result of the mixing of previous cultures, and 2) cultural practices are ideas, and ideas cannot be owned.

The “Who had it first?” property rights convention solves the artificially created conflicts surrounding so-called “intellectual property” eg. copyrights and patents. Ideas only exist embedded in real, physical items, starting with our brains.

Property rights aren’t a difficult concept to grasp. All it comes down to is, “Who had it first?” It’s the very same question we ask children when they’re fighting over a toy.