from the frontline trenches of the war on patterns

I posted the following comment to a Gothamist post relating a NYPD raid on a Queens-based warehouse containing eight trailer loads of goods which were subsequently plundered.

In a non-Kafkaesque world, the headlines would read:

"Brazen Bandits Make Off with $4.5m Worth of Goods, Kidnap and Take Hostages into Involuntarily Confinement".

The government is the only agency which should be prosecuted for counterfeiting; the crime of defrauding [and coercing] customers into exchanging one good for another good of inferior quality.

For a transaction in which both parties are fully aware of the nature of those items which they exchange, it cannot be justly said that there is a victimized party, i.e. when Ms. Tourist purchases a 'Gucci' purse in Chinatown neither party is harmed by the consensual exchange, and in fact both parties profit in the ex-ante sense.

I know that some of you think that perhaps there are other victims here that should be taken into consideration, perhaps the Gucci corporation, or the NYC Department of Finance which didn't steal, umm, 'collect' a sales tax on the transaction.

For one, the Gucci Co. can only be a victim if they were actively deprived of a physical good, or the use of that which they already own. In this case, fictitious rights to so-called "IP" is exactly that, a scam fostered upon the backs of society to prop up the sales revenue of pattern monopolists.

patterns

Today's Mises.org daily article asks,

"Is Intellectual Property the Key to Success?"

Here was one thought I've posted on the Mises blog a while back in regards to IP:

"Information is an abstraction which describes some arrangement of matter into forms recognizable by the human mind, and apart from the mind of the person discerning it, it is ultimately and universally meaningless.

Those arrangements could be the magnetic polar orientation of an iron atom, dark-colored ink molecules weaved into paper fibers, electrically-charged phosphor molecules in a bed of silicon, etc.

To say you have ownership over such things can only be in a physical term- in that specific arrangement pattern.

To say you can control others from making similar arrangements is making a metaphysical leap from objects of nature, to things our minds think about nature."

pattern tyranny

Like a scene out of Stephan Kinsella's most horrid nightmare, I did a double-take after seeing this written on a bag of pretzels.



And for those of you who want to quickly get to the point: