Let’s say you go to a restaurant and have a lemon cheesecake. You love it, so you reverse engineer it in your mind and make it at home to serve a Tupperware party. As soon as the party starts, jack-booted thugs arrive wielding guns and drag you away as a criminal for stealing a recipe. The cook is dragged away, same as a real thief or murderer.
That is the short version of what has happened to the food and agriculture industry over the last 30 or so years
Jeffrey A. Tucker, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explains “agri-patents”.
Not exactly how I would describe the way things stand, but then, I haven’t had to tussle with the jack-booted thugs of the intellectual property rights owners. Not even in a movie. 1 Nor, I suspect, has the author of the piece, whose logic, I have to confess, I found somewhat hard to follow. Plant patents etc. are “not an evil of the market; they are an evil of government intervention,” and as such “have handed socialists the best case they’ve ever had to rail against capitalistic exploitation”. Maybe there’s another way of looking at these things?
