Topic: Read this before having an opinion on economics - page 14. (Read 25946 times)

You cannot steal anything you cannot exclude.

I don't see anywhere that he mentioned using force to recoup his expenses and profit. His point was that he can't profit from his creation if you steal it and give it away. Amazing how you turn that around to him using force. 

Also, comparing losses due to theft of a product to an unmarketable product doesn't make any sense.

When I said 'relative,' I meant to imply all other things being equal as opposed to implying an 'absolute' outcome if that happens.  If the word 'relative' did not suffice for that, I apologize.

Yawn. So be it but don't blame me for your intellectual laziness. You aren't even trying to make an argument. You're just presenting your conclusions as fact and hurling thinly veiled insults.


That's not my problem any more than if you were to invest in a business based on a dying market. So you started a buggy whip company and now you need to recoup those expenses plus make some profit. Good luck with that. I guess you want to enforce that with guns too?

Higher production volume often results in lower price (as you mention in your next argument...)
Unless for instance the higher production volume creates a strain on neccessary resources.

1. If lots of people want something, the price goes up relative to what it would be if fewer people wanted said product (and vice-versa)

2. If lots of people have and/or produce something, the price goes down relative to what it would be if fewer people supplied said product (and vice-versa).

3. Incentives matter.

Most everything follows from there (if applied rigorously), and point 3 is the most important point in most cases.

Just because it is not complicated, does not mean it is not hard.  However, most of the 'hardness' comes from having to undo all the mental gymnastics that you're put through to explain why, all of a sudden, the opposite of core economic principles apply in this special case.

Economics is no more common sense than math is, and probably even less so.

Economics is 99% common sense applied rigorously.

However, just because it is not complicated, does not mean it cannot be hard.

Property requires exclusion.

Unfortunately that would most likely be as useless as trying to change the mind of a communist or a deeply religious person.

If i write a book, I spend time, effort and resources on this process. I need to recoup those expenses + profit. If you copy the book, I get no return on investment. If you copy the book and sell it for profit, I can't compete against your price, because you didn't participate in the original expenses so you can reduce your margins. Think about it with a movie. Lots of money spent on it, jobs to pay, places to book, stories to write, film to edit and god knows what else. If you take it for free, I am losing money in the process, and I certainly didn't make that movie to lose money. If you steal my movie, I can't pay for food or rent anymore, how's that?


A good thief usually makes sure no interactions will ever occur between you and him. He's only after your property after all. You are confusing physical violence with the concept of violence, which is to take actions with consequences to external parties with no care for such parties' stance on the matter. And once again, you take the point of view of the aggressor. You are taking something from me while you refuse to aknowledge it as something that can be taken. You need to look at it from the author's stand point. If you think you aren't taking something from me you are profoundly wrong.

But let's discuss the fundamentals: do you think intellect can consist in property?

There is no 'aggression' in copying, as it is independent of the primary party (the author).  No interaction between the 'author' and the 'copier' needs to occur.  If no interaction, no violence can have taken place.

Yes. Why not? If you steal my bicycle, I can't use it anymore. If I steal your idea, you can still use the idea. Only one of us can use the same oven to bake a cake but an infinite number of people can use the same cake recipe.


If that were the case, the last 200 years would look extremely different. Economics is not common sense precisely because people tend to consider only the things they can see but fail to take into account the things they don't see because their idiotic economic polices prevent those things from coming into existence.


There's nothing I can say to that. It's like saying that I beat my wife but of course I will deny it because that's what wife-beaters do. It's not a fair argument. Maybe I am delusional, brainwashed or simply mistaken but asserting that it is the case won't convince me of it. You'll have to dig deeper.

That "debunk" is redundant. You assume intellect cannot be a property so that to copy without consent does not consist in theft. To debunk it, you need to start from the assumption that it consist in property and prove that at some point it contradicts itself or makes no sense. In this case your attempt fails, since you have to assume it stands as a property, in which case the copy is theft, which is aggression.

If you were a communist you would say exactly the same about the arguments made in the books communists like. And of course you're now thinking "but the difference is that I'm right", just like anybody who's chosen an ideology would.

IP can more easily be debunked from this prospective:

An non-violent act (copying information), needs a violent act (the enforcement of IP rights) to be stopped.

Now that is plain arrogant!

Economics is rational and common scene. What you are saying is that unless people have worked out the right 'words' they stupid.

I like laissez-faire capitalism, not because I have read up extensively on the subject.  But because it is EASY to understand.  Economics isn't hard, it is just applying rational logic to real life.

It is the people who make economics into a super complex science who have got us into all this mess.

On a rational view, inflation is theft, leading to mal-investment. However once it has been covered up with 100 layers of complexity the logical fallacy (inflation is good) can more easily be hidden.

So if I come up with something smart and profitable you should be allowed to copy it without my consent and profit out of it too?

Yes, it's incompatible with Libertarianism. Why? Because it makes you a partial owner of my property against my will. That's theft, if only partial theft.

I own paper. I own a printer. I should be able to do whatever I want with them, including printing out copies of the latest bestseller and hocking them on the street.

Lemme rephrase. Do you have anything against the concept of intellectual property?