Schulman: Kinsella is “the foremost enemy of property rights”

On Facebook, pro-IP advocate J. Neil Schulman tells me: “You’re the foremost enemy of property rights because you masquerade as a defender of them while putting forward the proposition that the unique thing which an author or composer creates is the one thing that cannot be owned because of your misplaced test for non-rivalrousness. You’ve turned property rights on its head by stating that only stuff that is NOT created can be owned.”

Wow, the foremost, no less! Aw, shucks, I can’t claim credit for this–it was all there implicitly already in Hoppe, Rothbard, and Mises.

Schulman’s approach is basically Randian-creationist. Yet as noted in Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and “Rearranging”, in her more rational moments, Rand recognized:

The power to rearrange the combinations of natural elements is the only creative power man possesses. It is an enormous and glorious power—and it is the only meaning of the concept “creative.” “Creation” does not (and metaphysically cannot) mean the power to bring something into existence out of nothing. “Creation” means the power to bring into existence an arrangement (or combination or integration) of natural elements that had not existed before.

(For more with Schulman, see Kinsella v. Schulman on Logorights and IP; Query for Schulman on Patents and Logorights; Renaming Intellectual Property; The Worst Argument for IP Ever?.)