I have been reading a lot of John Gray this week, for a Guardian profile; and I’m glad of it. He’s a fierce, large-jawed writer, forever taking bites at people, and he gets his teeth into flab and folly with gratifying frequency.
One of his great themes is that the free market is deeply unnatural, and short-lived, too, since its demands become unacceptable in a democratic, or even partially democratic nation. So he claims it only really existed in Britain for about fifty years in the middle of the 19th century. This happened because Britain alone had a culture of individualism which regarded individual property ownership as the natural state for everything — and it was governed by an oligarchy of property owners.
This had implications for intellectual property too. So far as intellectual property is concerned, America is governed by an oligarchy of enormously rich property owners. The law is written entirely for the convenience of the holders of digital property, and they keep passing fresh enclusures acts. The consequence, of course, is a free market which impoverishes the poor. That means you and me. Eventually, as in all markets, everything will be tradeable. It’s just that it won’t be the property of the poor sods who make it. I don’t care how little Goggle is evil — very little, so far as I can tell — I would still rather have my main mail on my own server.
What’s Goggle?
“Britain alone had a culture of individualism which regarded individual property ownership as the natural state for everything”
Read recently that early Islamic culture apparently had much the same attitude — it would be interesting to find out (a) just how true that was, and (b) what happened to it.
Goggle is a well-known search engine, named after the two goggling eyes in its logo.
As for Islam and intellectual property. I think you’ll find that in the Pushtun country on the borders of Aghanistan and Pakistan, everything (and most of the people) are considered individual property. But this is a necessary, not a sufficient cause. You also need a government willing and able to arbitrate in disputes over property; not just a rule that says it belongs to the strongest.
SRW –
I don’t know how true a) is, but as regards b) wasn’t there a Muslim empire that touched three continents? Financial architectures sophisticated enough that meant that a cheque written in (what is now) Spain could be cashed in (what is now) Iraq…
And little england a mere backwater at the time.