IP, Innovation, Impedance, and the Schlaraffenland

by Stephan Kinsella on January 22, 2026

I often rail against IP because it impedes innovation.¹ As I wrote in one post,

Patent law distorts and impedes innovation. It makes us all poorer. There is no evidence that it does what the retarded Founders thought it would do—promote the progress of the useful arts (inventions)

… Patent law reduces innovation and impoverishes the human race. As I wrote elsewhere:

It is obscene to undermine the glorious operation of the market in producing wealth and abundance by imposing artificial scarcity on human knowledge and learning…. Learning, emulation, and information are good. It is good that information can be reproduced, retained, spread, and taught and learned and communicated so easily. Granted, we cannot say that it is bad that the world of physical resources is one of scarcity—this is the way reality is, after all—but it is certainly a challenge, and it makes life a struggle. It is suicidal and foolish to try to hamper one of our most important tools—learning, emulation, knowledge—by imposing scarcity on it. Intellectual property is theft. Intellectual property is statism. Intellectual property is death. Give us intellectual freedom instead!

… unfortunately patent law does nothing but impede, reduce, and distort innovation, all at a staggering cost.² Get rid of it, don’t make it worse, you fools! (( The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, quoting “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” in Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part IV.E. ))

During a couple hours in the dentist’s chair this morning, I was thinking about IP and innovation, as I am wont to do, and my use of the term impedance. I was reminded of a term we used in electrical engineering for electrical circuits, the term impedance, the complex form of resistance. A normal, linear circuit has elements like voltage and current sources and things that resist the current, aptly named resistors. A term coined by George Ohm—of Ohm’s Law fame—A resistor “resists” the flow of electric current, similar to how a narrow pipe restricts water flow. (I remember once, at LSU studying electrical engineering, as I walked through a crowded, narrow opening, and told my girlfriend (now wife), also a EE, that this was similar to how electrical resistance works, because just as we are getting jostled together because we are crowded, that’s what happens to electrons in a resistor; she rolled her eyes.) A lightbulb for example is a resistor: when you apply voltage across it, a current is pushed throw it and the filament resists the current (the electrons heat up the filament and cause it to emit photons), and there is a voltage drop across the resister R in accordance with Kirchoff’s Current Law.

When the voltage source is not DC (say, 9 V battery) but is AC (say, a 120V AC power supply) and the components are not always linear, like a resistor is, like capacitors and inductors, which have a reactive impedance. Impedance of a circuit element impedes current flow, based on both its magnitude and also its phase. (Similar terms in other fields, such as magnetic flux, is the term reluctance; and so on.)

IP, such as patents, slow down innovation and invention (by reducing the incentive of the patentee to innovate and by reducing the incentive of competitors to innovate improvements since they would be prevented from selling the improved product by the patent on the base innovation). This can be thought of as analogous to electrical resistance. But not only does IP slow down innovation, it also distorts it.³ For example, if patents or IP cover a given field but not a second field (such as abstract ideas, math, fundamental research, and so on), this will tend to push R&D dollars from the latter into the former (or, more accurately, will negatively impede one more than the other). This, as people such as Rothbard and Milton Friedman recognized, patents have a distorting or skewing effect. This is more analogous to the complex form of resistance, namely impedance. Thus, I was right all along to say that IP impedes innovation. Heh.

(I was always interested in connections between the hard and softer sciences.⁴ In a Sociology class I took as an elective at LSU, I wrote a paper the teacher loved (which miffed my girlfriend who found the class difficult; I knew the teacher would be pleased I was treating sociology like a real science), “A Study of the Similarity Between Engineering and Sociology: The Use of Engineering Methodology to Understand Sociological Phenomenon,” SOCL 3601 (Dec. 1986). I was somewhat naive and not as steeped then in Misesian dualism etc. as I am now,⁵ but… anyway. From the introduction:

In this paper several examples are presented which demonstrate how engineering and sociology are closely related, in order to help show the validity of the multiple theses of this report. One of these suggests that many of the methodological ideas behind engineering (indeed, in science and technology in general) are not really different in kind from those of sociology, but only in degree. Assuming the validity of the first thesis, another asserts that this point of view can be used to help bridge the gap between the “hard-” and “soft-” scientists’ points of view. Also, the idea is put forth that certain people of the engineering discipline may use some of their methodological framework to help them understand sociological theories from a different perspective than sociologists do. Additionally, the perspectives presented herein may be viewed as useful, or, at the least, as nontrivial, fresh ways to look at sociological phenomena, by sociologists themselves.)

By the way the thing that connects the voltage source to the load (resistor) is a conductor, e.g. a copper wire, which is modeled in ideal terms as having zero resistance. In reality conductors have a non-zero resistance, which is why there is loss when power is transmitted from the power plant to homes over long power lines. This is actually one of the reasons people are interested in superconductivity: you could have zero-loss power transmission (in addition to other benefits). Just as IP is analogous to impedance, innovation in a free society is analogous to a power source connected via a conductor and a zero or very low (IP law) resistance/impedance. And the world of superabundance imagined in a post-scarcity society is similar to a circuit in which the conductor itself has zero resistance, i.e. a superconductor. And a libertarian, state- and IP-free world, is one of maximum innovation, man, and, like, tending towards superabundance, man, you know, the Schlaraffenland, man!⁶

It’s all connected, man.