[Langy]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

You have discovered for yourself the first problem with this fantasy, which is that economics is about scarcity and these things aren't scarce. The price (and marginal value) of a commodity in competitive equilibrium is equal to the marginal cost of its production, and the marginal cost of production of copies of abstract designs and compositions is very low. You need to create artificial scarcity to make these pseudo-commodities valuable, and that is working against the grain of nature.

The second problem is this: if IP is the only valuable commodity, what do the consumers pay for it with? What do the IP owners screw out of the consumers to make it all worth their while? If real, material products are available very cheaply even to people who have nothing to sell except their worthless labour, then why not give away your IP?

If something other than IP is important and scarce, then it makes sense for the IP owners to pervert the government into making IP pseudo-scarce so that they can use that scarcity to get a big share of X. But if IP is the only significant valuable commodity, why bother? Everyone would be better off to just give up.

I'd assume the thing other than IP that is important and scarce is labor.