Meanwhile, the very gene pool we share with all life is being divided up into patentable tranches, like the corporate seeds that have drawn the ire of both small farmers and consumer groups.
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We scarcely discuss the injustice and inutility of large corporations taking what we all own and doing whatever they want with it, without compensating us. Consider the Earth's atmosphere...
a prolific source of value that protects us from ultraviolet rays, keeps temperatures stable, delivers oxygen, and replenishes fresh water. No human-made product comes close in terms of usefulness. Yet corporations have been using the atmosphere as an unlimited waste dump, and the damages consequently accrued are both enormous and ignored.
It really is remarkable when you think about it (alas, most of us don't think about it) -- this corporate seizure, cannibalization, despoliation of things that we all own communally. Such takeovers are blessed by a government that corporations increasingly own. Yet if we take the time to look more closely, we can see a state of affairs that violates the most basic principles of the social contract. Jonas Salk, the discoverer of the first polio vaccine, understood this. When asked who would own the drug, he replied: "There is no patent. ... Could you patent the sun?"
Well, six decades later...almost.
"Corporations now claim ownership of everything under the sun, if not the sun itself: body parts, business practices, DNA. They even claim ownership of the English language. McDonald's has asserted trademark claims to 131 common words and phrases, such as 'Always Fun' and 'Made For You.'"
The Cost of Market Mania
The Internet has promised something different -- information abundant and free. It has spawned an atmosphere of exuberant creativity and generosity. In the early days of the Web, a fellow named Jimmy Wales had an idea that probably sounded crazy to many at the time: create knowledge online for free, using volunteers who got paid nothing at all. Today, that idea is called Wikipedia. It is the ultimate commons -- and how many of us would want to do without it?
But if the Web presents new opportunities for sharing, it also presents opportunities for corporations to fence off profitable chunks of cyberspace. These days, corporations are trying to block municipalities from offering their citizens universal free wi-fi. The reason? The corporations can't make a buck off it. So they employ an army of influencers to convince us that something as innocuous as this is somehow harmful.
Jon Rowe was outraged by this power play...
"Municipal wi-fi isn't a step toward socialism any more than free sidewalks are. Free sidewalks mean more business, not less, for enterprises that connect to them. Just so, city-provided wi-fi is good for enterprises that do business via the Web, as opposed to those that sell connections. The argument that municipal wi-fi is bad for free enterprise is totally specious."When FDR's co-ops extended wires to isolated farms, private enterprise did not suffer. To the contrary, it had new customers for light bulbs and refrigerators and many other things. Even markets benefit from a world in which some things aren't run for private profit."
The alternative is to put everything on the market. Yet the market is not quite so wonderful and majestic in all its aspects as we are constantly told. Jon Rowe was particularly struck by the enormous burden placed on befuddled consumers to sort through the endless and deliberately confusing "options" offered by health insurance providers, cell phone services, banks and the like, making it punishingly difficult to figure out what is in our interests and what is a rip-off.
Indeed, part of Jon Rowe's brilliance was to see our "market mania" as itself largely the creation of marketing -- and to see that the commons could use a little of the pixie dust.
"A few centuries ago, people looked at economic life and saw many seemingly unrelated things. They saw factories and farms, shipping firms and theaters, and so on. Then, in 1776, Adam Smith came along and said, 'These aren't separate things. They are different aspects of the same thing -- the market.' His insight gave mental shape to the whole, and the idea of the market with its beneficent 'invisible hand' has dominated public imagination ever since."It has certainly made life easy for the Wall Street Journal. Without the market to cast a devotional glow upon private transactions, the Journal would be left with just a welter of deals to report. The market ties those mundane transactions into a larger narrative of uplift and grace. The editorial writers do not have to articulate this, of course; it is embedded in the magical word market.
"We need to do something similar with the commons -- to embed it not with myth but with truth, possibility, and morality. The true part is, The commons is real, huge, and invaluable, and it belongs to all of us. It's also being destroyed -- not by itself, but by too much privatization. The possibility part is, We have the capacity to save the commons, though time is short. The moral part is, It's our right and duty to save the commons."
For the growing number of militant and outspoken Libertarians, for whom "Austrian economics" is the Kool-Aid of choice, Rowe has a cautionary note. For this, he relies on no less an authority than Wilhelm Ropke, an Austrian economist greatly influenced by Ludwig von Mises.
Ropke, according to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, "devoted his career to combating collectivism in economic, social and political theory." Yet in a book he wrote called A Humane Economy, Ropke confessed that his beloved market was not to be entirely trusted. "The highest interests of the community and the indispensable things of life have no exchange value and are neglected if supply and demand are allowed to dominate the field," he wrote. "The supporters of the market economy do it the worst service by not observing its limits and conditions."
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