Mossoff vs. Holt: The Bizarre Regulatory Idolatry of the Patent Lobby

See Mytheos Holt, The Bizarre Regulatory Idolatry of the Patent Lobby, TownHall (March 8, 2017), which has some good criticisms of the patent system, although it’s not clear the author is for abolishing the patent system; and the weak response by perennial IP advocate and Randian Adam Mossoff, Patents Are Property Rights, Not A “Bizarre Regulatory Lobby,” TownHall (March 13, 2017).

E.g., Mossoff writes:

To take but one example of this American approach, a Supreme Court Justice said in 1845 that “we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, . . . as much a man’s own, and as much the fruit of his honest industry, as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.”

On the basis of this classic moral justification for all property rights — that people should have the fruits of their productive labors secured to them as their property — early American legislators and judges secured stable and effective property rights to innovators and creators.

Here we go with the ridiculous and amorphous–and Marxian–dessert-based, “fruits of one’s labor” argument. You don’t own wheat you cultivate because of labor. You own the wheat because you own the land and your labor transforms it into wheat. The labor creates wealth but not property rights. Creation is not a source of property rights, but of wealth. See, e.g., the section “Creation of Wealth versus Creation of Property” in Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright; also Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property; Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’; Succinct Criticism of Utilitarianism and Libertarian Creationism; Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors.