WEBVTT NOTE 38. The Socialism of Agri-Patents 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.160 The Socialism of Agri-Patents 2 00:00:05.160 --> 00:00:09.760 I'm watching the movie Unknown, which is about what happens when a man's identity 3 00:00:09.760 --> 00:00:13.720 is stripped away while in a foreign country. 4 00:00:13.720 --> 00:00:19.720 Without a passport or any other proof of identity, he is left to wonder, and then turn to a battle 5 00:00:19.720 --> 00:00:22.160 for recapturing who he is. 6 00:00:22.160 --> 00:00:27.560 It is a thrilling film in every way, one that taps into a deep anxiety we all have. 7 00:00:27.560 --> 00:00:40.280 But as we approach the core of the film, the topic turns, in ways that are unimportant 8 00:00:40.280 --> 00:00:45.820 to this article, toward the problem of agricultural patents. 9 00:00:45.820 --> 00:00:51.540 This is one in a long line of lefty films that seem to turn on this topic. 10 00:00:51.540 --> 00:00:56.100 It was the same with the blockbuster Food, Inc., which, for all its annoying and pointless 11 00:00:56.100 --> 00:01:00.980 This hectoring about the evils of living amidst capitalist plenty did have one compelling 12 00:01:00.980 --> 00:01:08.380 point to make about the injustice and exploitation of agricultural patterns. 13 00:01:08.380 --> 00:01:14.140 Such ridiculous patterns had no part in the whole history of humanity. 14 00:01:14.140 --> 00:01:20.740 As Bontrain and Levine write, Until the early 1970s, animal and plant species 15 00:01:20.740 --> 00:01:25.580 innovation flourished without much in the way of protection from intellectual monopoly. 16 00:01:25.580 --> 00:01:29.700 Farmers would develop a new plant variety, the initial seeds of which were sold to farmers 17 00:01:29.700 --> 00:01:32.380 at relatively high prices. 18 00:01:32.380 --> 00:01:36.660 Farmers were then free to reproduce and resell such seeds on the market and compete with 19 00:01:36.660 --> 00:01:40.740 the initial breeders without the latter bringing them to court. 20 00:01:40.740 --> 00:01:46.340 In fact, some bozo tried to patent a species in 1889, but the patent commissioner rejected 21 00:01:46.340 --> 00:01:51.960 it as unreasonable and impossible, exactly. 22 00:01:51.960 --> 00:01:55.140 But this changed in stages. 23 00:01:55.140 --> 00:02:01.800 The Plant Patent Act of 1930 provided very narrow coverage, which was later extended 24 00:02:01.800 --> 00:02:04.440 in the 1950s. 25 00:02:04.440 --> 00:02:11.800 Then in 1970, the Plant Variety Protection Act extended such protection to plants that 26 00:02:11.800 --> 00:02:15.140 are sexually reproduced. 27 00:02:15.140 --> 00:02:21.060 Then between 1980 and 1987, patent protection was for the first time extended to the products 28 00:02:21.060 --> 00:02:23.360 of biotechnology. 29 00:02:23.360 --> 00:02:30.520 When all hell broke loose, as seeds and species and even genetic codes came to be monopolized 30 00:02:30.520 --> 00:02:35.240 by private parties holding government privileges. 31 00:02:35.240 --> 00:02:40.920 The tragedy for defenders of the free market is that these monopolies have handed socialists 32 00:02:40.920 --> 00:02:47.400 the best case they've ever had to rail against capitalistic exploitation. 33 00:02:47.400 --> 00:02:52.840 After all, we are dealing with the staff of life, the very core of the human problem, 34 00:02:52.840 --> 00:03:00.400 How to Feed Ourselves, and this has hit the sweet spot of socialistic bias. 35 00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:05.680 We have something here that has always been universally available, a free good for all, 36 00:03:05.680 --> 00:03:11.400 that has been transformed by private lobbying into a scarce commodity that has led to countless 37 00:03:11.400 --> 00:03:19.000 billions in profits for a handful of monopolists like Monsanto and DuPont, who spend their 38 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:24.920 Their billions lobbying to keep their privileges, and fighting those who would dare trespass 39 00:03:24.920 --> 00:03:29.800 on their proprietary ownership of knowledge. 40 00:03:29.800 --> 00:03:34.880 It sounds like a nightmare that only a socialist could invent to feed his or her paranoia about 41 00:03:34.880 --> 00:03:37.640 private producers. 42 00:03:37.640 --> 00:03:41.840 Think of it this way – let's say you go to a restaurant and have a lemon cheesecake 43 00:03:41.840 --> 00:03:47.320 – you love it, so you reverse-engineer it in your mind and make it at home to serve 44 00:03:47.320 --> 00:03:49.700 at a Tupperware Party. 45 00:03:49.700 --> 00:03:54.780 As soon as the party starts, jack-booted thugs arrive wielding guns and drag you away as 46 00:03:54.780 --> 00:03:57.680 a criminal for stealing a recipe. 47 00:03:57.680 --> 00:04:04.520 The cook is dragged away, same as a real thief or murderer. 48 00:04:04.520 --> 00:04:09.140 That is the short version of what has happened to the food and agriculture industry over 49 00:04:09.140 --> 00:04:11.560 the last thirty or so years. 50 00:04:11.560 --> 00:04:17.200 Again, this is after a whole history of humanity somehow getting by, without central planners 51 00:04:17.200 --> 00:04:35.120 In the movie in question, the monopolists are pictured as thugs and killers who will 52 00:04:35.120 --> 00:04:40.960 stop at nothing to prevent a new method for growing corn from becoming part of the commons. 53 00:04:40.960 --> 00:04:46.240 A scientist works with an Arab prince to release the recipe to the world, but the goon squads 54 00:04:46.240 --> 00:04:58.420 It may sound crazy, but there is actually a plausible scenario here, for it is impossible 55 00:04:58.420 --> 00:05:03.120 these days to otherwise release innovative recipes into the Commons. 56 00:05:03.120 --> 00:05:08.180 As soon as they are known, they can be patented, and the patent holder is thereby permitted 57 00:05:08.180 --> 00:05:14.520 to use coercion against any competitor, even the one who first came up with the idea. 58 00:05:14.520 --> 00:05:19.220 In general, it strikes me that the supporters of the free market have underestimated the 59 00:05:19.220 --> 00:05:25.200 extent to which the socialists have made hay from the case of agri-patents. 60 00:05:25.200 --> 00:05:28.220 Here is the thing. 61 00:05:28.220 --> 00:05:32.920 Socialism in real stuff is a nutty idea that leads to disaster, as the whole of modern 62 00:05:32.920 --> 00:05:34.920 experience shows. 63 00:05:34.920 --> 00:05:42.580 But there is one area in which common ownership does make sense, and that is the area of knowledge, 64 00:05:42.580 --> 00:05:49.380 which is not a scarce good, but rather an infinitely copyable good. 65 00:05:49.380 --> 00:05:53.260 Producers are free to try to keep their knowledge under wraps, but the very public nature of 66 00:05:53.260 --> 00:05:56.820 markets mitigates against that. 67 00:05:56.820 --> 00:06:01.860 As Maria Montessori wrote in Education and Peace, 1937, 68 00:06:01.860 --> 00:06:07.860 There is no discovery, not even the most minor intellectual advance in any corner of the 69 00:06:07.860 --> 00:06:12.740 The world that does not soon become known from one end of the earth to the other, like 70 00:06:12.740 --> 00:06:18.140 liquid in connecting vessels that seeks a common level. 71 00:06:18.140 --> 00:06:22.700 Such is the way that free markets provide a kind of Daoist-like balance to the world 72 00:06:22.700 --> 00:06:24.140 order. 73 00:06:24.140 --> 00:06:29.900 Scarce goods are rationed by necessity, the yin, while non-scarce goods like information 74 00:06:29.900 --> 00:06:37.300 are provided as free and held as the common possession of humanity, the yang. 75 00:06:37.300 --> 00:06:42.580 The free goods take the edge off the rationed goods, and working together through voluntary 76 00:06:42.580 --> 00:06:48.900 exchange the market serves the cause of peace and prosperity, giving us the best of all 77 00:06:48.900 --> 00:06:53.080 possible worlds at all times. 78 00:06:53.080 --> 00:06:59.240 Government intervention upsets the balance by using coercion to make free goods artificially 79 00:06:59.240 --> 00:07:05.740 scarce and thereby inflating the scarce goods sector to take on a significance that the 80 00:07:05.740 --> 00:07:09.460 The market would not otherwise support. 81 00:07:09.460 --> 00:07:15.000 The reality becomes grist for the socialistic mill, and the left can point to this as an 82 00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:20.380 incidence of how they believe the whole world works – private owners bashing others to 83 00:07:20.380 --> 00:07:24.580 extract an unfair share of the world's wealth. 84 00:07:24.580 --> 00:07:30.620 Same as they wrongly point to the armaments industry as an example of capitalism. 85 00:07:30.620 --> 00:07:38.140 Many marketeers are under a grave obligation these days to distinguish real from fake examples 86 00:07:38.140 --> 00:07:40.980 of capitalism. 87 00:07:40.980 --> 00:07:44.900 Bailouts are not the market at work. 88 00:07:44.900 --> 00:07:50.580 Bubbles inflated by the Fed are not the market at work. 89 00:07:50.580 --> 00:07:56.220 Military imperialism in foreign lands designed to protect oil stocks is not the market at 90 00:07:56.220 --> 00:07:57.960 work. 91 00:07:57.960 --> 00:08:05.160 And in the same way, agriculture patents are not the market at work. 92 00:08:05.160 --> 00:08:13.360 Each of these cases represents the failure and injustice of the interventionist state. 93 00:08:13.360 --> 00:08:21.120 The core of the Misesian critique of socialism is that scarce goods cannot be held in common, 94 00:08:21.120 --> 00:08:27.200 because the price system that provides rational economization gets destroyed under those conditions, 95 00:08:27.200 --> 00:08:30.140 thereby resulting in chaos. 96 00:08:30.140 --> 00:08:37.160 Mises's argument did not apply to those things like knowledge that need no economization, 97 00:08:37.160 --> 00:08:43.700 so yes, there can be socialism in the formulas that go into making seeds, but the products 98 00:08:43.700 --> 00:08:50.440 of those seeds, and the seeds themselves, need markets to be produced and distributed. 99 00:08:50.440 --> 00:08:57.020 It is the government regulations that conflate all these categories and lead to the ideological 100 00:08:57.020 --> 00:09:06.100 Agricultural patents are indeed an evil, but they are not an evil of the market, they 101 00:09:06.100 --> 00:09:10.040 are an evil of government intervention. 102 00:09:10.040 --> 00:09:16.160 If the movie Unknown were to live up to its title, it would have made some effort to point 103 00:09:16.160 --> 00:09:17.500 this out. 104 00:09:17.500 --> 00:09:24.360 Instead, it ends only in sowing confusion of the same type sown by all government interventions. 105 00:09:24.360 --> 00:09:31.080 We are led to believe that the capitalist order is sustained only by violence and conspiracy, 106 00:09:31.080 --> 00:09:36.800 whereas the truth is that the real energy of the free markets derives from the glorious 107 00:09:36.800 --> 00:09:40.760 and civilized principle of mutual agreement.