“Your failed business model is not my problem”

(from BoingBoing). From Conza’s tumblr:

Intellectual Property: Muh Income

Accidental: Could you explain how a current fiction writer would make money?

Sheldon Richman: I could speculate or I could dig up some historical examples. But why should I? Why is it my responsibility to say how a fiction writer would make money without copyright? I am not being flip. Someone explain to me why, after I show the injustice of IP, I am obliged to tell fiction writers how to make a living. Seriously. Should I answer a taxi driver’s similar question after I show that government licensing of taxis is unjust? Figure it out. Don’t look to me for career advice. Who says I’m qualified to give it?

(Source: facebook.com; IP Debate Breaks Out at FEE)

I am reminded a bit of my comments in “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society“:¹

It is fairly straightforward to explain what is wrong with IP: patent and copyright are artificial state-granted monopoly privileges that undercut and invade property rights, as elaborated above. But the consequentialist and utilitarian mindset is so entrenched that even people who see the ethical problems with IP law sometimes demand that the IP opponent explain how innovation would be funded in an IP-free world. How would authors make money? How would blockbuster movies be funded? Why would anyone invent if they could not get a patent? How could companies afford to develop pharmaceuticals if they had to face competition?

When I see such demands and questions, I am reminded of John Hasnas’s comments in his classic article “The Myth of the Rule of Law.”²

After arguing against the state and for anarchy, Hasnas observes:

What would a free market in legal services be like?

I am always tempted to give the honest and accurate response to this challenge, which is that to ask the question is to miss the point. If human beings had the wisdom and knowledge-generating capacity to be able to describe how a free market would work, that would be the strongest possible argument for central planning. One advocates a free market not because of some moral imprimatur written across the heavens, but because it is impossible for human beings to amass the knowledge of local conditions and the predictive capacity necessary to effectively organize economic relationships among millions of individuals. It is possible to describe what a free market in shoes would be like because we have one. But such a description is merely an observation of the current state of a functioning market, not a projection of how human beings would organize themselves to supply a currently non-marketed good. To demand that an advocate of free market law (or Socrates of Monosizea, for that matter) describe in advance how markets would supply legal services (or shoes) is to issue an impossible challenge. Further, for an advocate of free market law (or Socrates) to even accept this challenge would be to engage in self-defeating activity since the more successfully he or she could describe how the law (or shoe) market would function, the more he or she would prove that it could be run by state planners. Free markets supply human wants better than state monopolies precisely because they allow an unlimited number of suppliers to attempt to do so. By patronizing those who most effectively meet their particular needs and causing those who do not to fail, consumers determine the optimal method of supply. If it were possible to specify in advance what the outcome of this process of selection would be, there would be no need for the process itself.

In other words: the answer such a challenge might be, as Leonard Read said, “I don’t know.”³

1. Also quoted in “Funding for Creation and Innovation in an IP-Free World” and “The Creator-Endorsed Mark as an Alternative to Copyright.” [↩]
2. John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” Wis. L. Rev. 1995, no. 1 (1995): 199–234. [↩]
3. Leonard Read, “I Don’t Know,” Mises Daily (Nov. 2, 2011 [1965]).  [↩]