Should Patents be Abolished? – Scarcity

PRLog (Press Release) - Jun 30, 2009 -
There have been a number of suggestions that patent should be scaled back or outright abolished.  For instance, Stephen Kinsella has written a book, Against Intellectual Property, and Tom Palmer has written and article, “Are Patents and Copyright Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects.”  Many of these critiques suggest that property rights are based on scarcity and intellectual property rights are not subject to scarcity.  

The article “Scarcity – Does it Prove Intellectual Property is Unjustified?” (http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/22/scarcity-%e2%80%93-does...) suggests that property rights are not based on scarcity but on the “labor theory of property” first proposed by John Locke.  The labor theory of property explains criminal law, how property is to be allocated and intellectual property law.  The “scarcity” theory of private property does not explain criminal law and does not explain how property should be allocated.  According to its proponents it does explain why there should not be intellectual property law. Trading scarcity for the labor theory of property is like trading the theory that “what goes up must come down” for Newton’s Law of gravity.  The fact of the matter is that the proponents of scarcity have confused cause with effect.  A system of private property results in efficient allocation of resource, but it is not the reason for private property – it is the effect of private property.