{"id":1243,"date":"2004-07-03T13:58:26","date_gmt":"2004-07-03T17:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1243"},"modified":"2004-07-03T13:58:26","modified_gmt":"2004-07-03T17:58:26","slug":"free-market-and-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1243","title":{"rendered":"free market and ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been reading a lot of John Gray this week, for a Guardian<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}