So the notion that the individual inventor, just because she applies human knowledge and effort, has a full right to her invention, seems one-sided. Presumably, she has a partial right, perhaps even a large one, to her "property" in the invention; but other people, including her culture (not to mention her teachers, the authors of the books she has read, etc.), might legitimately have some property right in her invention, too.
b. Although it is true, that which exists in nature is only the potential, and the space through which broadcasting waves must travel, it does not follow that therefore; the person who first discovers them should own these waves. We could perhaps contend that if private property must exist, one good way of deciding ownership is to award the property to the individual who first discovers it. But we could also say, "Oh, no! The individual who first settles on the discovered land; or who first develops it properly; or who finds some outstanding use for it--he should be the one who owns it." Or we could say that the individual who is the fifth owner of a piece of land would therefore own it forever and be able to will it to his heirs; while the first four owners should only temporarily own it.
All property "rights," in other words, are arbitrarily given the owner, by some definition--by some agreement among people. A single individual, as Ayn Rand and her followers see things, may relate this agreement, to the application of human knowledge and effort; or it can, according to the way others see it, be related to other criteria. It is also possible for people to agree, at any given time and place, that there be no private ownership of property. This kind of collectivism, where the community alone owns property and individuals do not, may prove to be inefficient for many purposes; but that does not prove that it is an evil or immoral system of property ownership, since for some important purposes such as water supplies, parks, and army bases, it has been proven superior. That Rand can see only one possible method of "justly" or "rightly" assigning property rights is, once again, an indication of her monolithic, absolutist-oriented views.
Just as Rand and other objectivists see that individuals who apply themselves to discovering and developing property should "rightfully" own it, so do they insist that patents and copyrights are the legal implementation and basis of all property rights: a person's right to the product of his mind (Rand, 1966b). Here again, they forget that the man whose mind works out a patented or copyrighted idea invariably leans on innumerable other men, from the past and in the present, from whose efforts he partially derived this idea; and that even if he completely got it out of his own head--which is almost inconceivable--his society would still have the "right" to insist that part or all of the property rights in this idea belong to the community.
This, in fact, is what normally happens under capitalism. An individual who works for a large company invents a machine or a process, and the firm she works for insists that, because she is paid a salary by it, all or some of the property rights in this invention should go to the company. By the same token, society could insist--and, mind you, I am not saying that it should--that just because it nurtures a human for all of her life, and then enables her to exist by some kind of activity, she owes all or part of the property rights in her inventions to it.
Rand's absolute thinking that people have a complete right to the product of their mind, only makes sense by definition: because she insists that it makes sense. It may be, on pragmatic grounds, possible to prove that both the individual and society will benefit more by awarding inventors property rights in their inventions than by awarding such rights to others. But even if this were proved--which, as yet, has definitely not been--a community could still legitimately (though perhaps not too sanely) agree that property rights in inventions are to be shared rather than solely given to the inventor. In contradiction, Rand advocates force so people will not use inventions or copyrights. In a truly laissez-faire system, no businessperson could enforce his patent rights.
20. Rand, when she faces the fact that laissez-faire or pure capitalism does not exist and most probably never will, refuses to face the true reasons for its failure to flourish. She rationalizes as follows: Why has capitalism been destroyed in spite of its incomparably beneficent record? She answers: Cultures have a dominant philosophy and capitalism never had a philosophical base. It was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence. Its moral nature and its political principles have never been fully understood or defined. Even its defenders think it compatible with government controls, ignoring the (sacred!) meaning and implications of "laissez-faire." Only mixed capitalist economies have existed since the nineteenth century, and its controls necessitated and bred further controls. The statist element of this mixture wrecked pure capitalism, and its free, capitalist element took the blame, (Rand, 1966b). This statement is misleading in several respects:
a. The capitalism that Rand says was destroyed in spite of its beneficent record apparently never existed. Even early capitalism was far from laissez-faire; and, as we noted previously in this chapter, Rand and the objectivists themselves freely admit that pure capitalism never existed.
b. Rand's "incomparably beneficent record" of early capitalism is another myth. Not that it did not have a reasonably good record in some respects, it did. But, as Karl Marx and many other critics, including pro-capitalist critics, have shown, early capitalism had many, many abuses, in terms of its exploitation of labor, its turning out of poor products, its unethical practices, its destruction of the environment, its encouragement of wars, and other deficiencies.
c. Virtually any system of economics or politics has a philosophical base; people make certain rules because they believe, on some basis, that x is good and y is bad.
Capitalism arose, fairly obviously, because people believed that an individual was capable of running a business, of determining whether he would make a profit or loss, of taking risks, of helping the general system through helping him, etc. If everyone had believed that people were incapable of doing anything on their own and that they had to make collective judgments about everything, it is hard to imagine capitalism arising. Adam Smith was the first "worldly" philosopher to support capitalism. It is ironic that Smith was, in reality, a pragmatic socialist. He decried the conditions of his day but accepted the reality that, for his times, capitalism was the lesser of evils available. So capitalism always has had some kind of philosophical base, even though capitalists and their antagonists may not have been quite aware what this base was.
Money is the real philosophical base of capitalism. Without money there can be no capitalism. Money, however, is not real--it is merely a symbol--of a debt owed to the possessor for labor, goods, and/or materials. The actual functions of capitalism are the lending or investing of money in hopes of receiving more money. Capitalism's unwritten philosophical base is that individuals do the gathering of fruits, vegetables, etc. or the actual killing of game. However, the individual, his family, and his tribe were better off when they worked as a group. So the collectivist state (family, tribe, and hunting party) and the capitalist state (you get to eat first if you kill it or find it first) have always been inextricably intertwined. Capitalism also arose from the observation that the tribe as a group did not have the time or the ability to manage every individual. The group had the obvious disadvantage that the tribe's leaders would frequently make mistakes or abuse their power to better themselves at the expense of the group. Hence, the mistrust of power and the state arose early, Moreover, since some people thrived in the lending and investing of money, they and their family were conspicuously alive and well and people tended to copy what they saw as success. Thus, Ayn Rand's real philosophical base and its opponent philosophy were endemic to human nature and social structures.
d. According to Ayn Rand and her group "a resurgent tide of mysticism engulfed philosophy in the 19th century" (Rand, 1966b), but this is a peculiar view. Actually, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw the rise of logical positivism, empiricism, pragmatism, and other highly non-mystical (or less mystical) philosophies than had previously existed. Only Rand and the objectivists see these views--because they disagree with them--as "mysticism."
e. Assuming that the moral nature and political principles of capitalism had never been fully understood or defined, there is no evidence that it therefore declined. It is much more likely that the philosophy of capitalism--that the individual, through a laissez-faire economy, could make maximum profit and help humanity most--was found wanting in practice; that it did not work; and that consequently a freer kind of capitalism declined into a more controlled variety.
Rand insists that government controls necessitate and breed further controls, and she may be right. But she fails to see that "pure" capitalism soon will probably become so chaotic and one-sided that it will breed controls, including government controls; and this seems to be an almost inevitable consequence of just about any kind of capitalism. It was not necessarily, as she alleges, "the statist element." Rather, it was probably the free, capitalist element that led to the statist element, and eventually caused what she considers to be the holocaust of mixed economies.
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