OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

I want you to steal what the lawyers self-interestedly call "intellectual property": Hoffman's book or my books or E=mc2 or the Alzheimer's drug that the Food and Drug Administration is "testing" in its usual bogus and unethical fashion. I want the Chinese to steal "our" intellectual property, so that consumers worldwide get stuff cheaply. I want everybody to steal every idea, book, chemical formula, Stephen Foster lyric--all of it. Steal, steal, steal. You have my official economic permission.

What?! A liberal (in the classical sense) wants people to steal? You bet. Here's why. An idea, after it is produced, has no opportunity cost. If one more person reads Hamlet, there's no less of it available for the next person. That's not true of, say, your house. If the neighbors treat your house as common property, there's less of it for you to use. George is in the bathroom right now. Sorry.

It's true of your labor, which also has an opportunity cost--an alternate use necessarily forgone--to you. If you become a slave, you can't use your own self. The master in Kentucky gets those hours in the field away from the little cabin floor, yet he doesn't pay you for their opportunity cost.

The correct price for such scarce items is their opportunity cost, because then, as Adam Smith said, "As every individual...endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital [and labor and land and other items with opportunity cost so] that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can."

But ideas have no opportunity cost. So the optimal price, socially speaking, is zero.

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