This Week: Theft, Knowledge, Property

"Quote" of the Week: "We each have two ideas"

"A Theft is a Theft is A Theft"

Is Taxation Theft?

Greetings,

Much of our public discussion in this country in recent years is the result of long-term planning and strategizing on the part of the so-called "right," or conservative, sector. Well-versed in the practice of Public Relations, the "right" continues to use what should be very controversial premises to form the foundations of the policy arguments that we see on the front pages. Deficits, health care, taxes, and so forth, all are framed as battle fronts in the struggle to control the hearts and minds of the general public, the goal being to win them over to a sympathetic response to—if not an embrace of—the Individualistic and Competitive ideology that justifies the ongoing class war that my side, I fear, is currently losing.

This series on Social Wealth—which I consider to be still underway, although I'm not labeling it very clearly—is really exploring some of the premises that are increasingly accepted by many, but that are rarely acknowledged. I often talk about the power of assumptions that remain below the level of consciousness, and this series is all about that.

I can hardly wait for the next installment! Hope to see you there.

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week: "We each have two ideas"

"If I have a dollar, and you have a dollar and you give me your dollar and I give you my dollar, we each have one dollar. If I have an idea and you have an idea and you give me your idea and I give you my idea, we each have two ideas."

This quote has been attributed to the impossible-to-categorize R. Buckminster Fuller. I don't know if he really said it, but it sounds like something he would say. Whoever said it, it's the "Quote" of the Week.

"A Theft is a Theft is A Theft"

We finished the last issue of Nygaard Notes with a piece on Internet Neutrality. Very closely related to that issue is the issue of patents and copyrights. Those are the words regular people use to talk about what economists and policy-makers call "Intellectual Property," or IP. The World Intellectual Property Organization of the United Nations explains that "Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce."

Can someone "own" creations of the mind? Many people think they can, obviously, since that's the idea that gives meaning to things like patents and copyrights. Yet reports have it that more than 40 billion music tracks are "pirated"—that's the industry's preferred term—every year, so either the new technology has transformed millions of honest people into thieves, or there is wide disagreement on the subject of the "owning" of ideas.

The Toronto Globe and Mail, in an article headlined "Music Firms Seek Names in Internet Piracy Battle," quoted the vice president of a large telecommunications company who told the newspaper, "We've been saying publicly there's no difference in our mind between stealing a pair of shoes in a shoe store and stealing music on-line. A theft is a theft is a theft." When he says "our mind" I don't know if he's referring to some single corporate "mind" that they all share, but whatever the mind in which this idea resides, it's a strange idea, indeed.

The obvious difference between the thefts mentioned here is that when I steal your shoes, the result is that I have shoes and you do not. With internet "piracy" that's not the case: We both end up with the song. Or the document, or whatever it is that we "stole." So it's different right off the bat. The question is: Is it possible to have something stolen yet still possess it? It is possible in the world of Intellectual Property, where one has all the rights of ownership, even when the thing owned is an idea. But there's more than that at stake when we talk about Intellectual Property. Sometimes what is a "right" to one is a death sentence to another.

"Simply Deciding to Stop" Saving Lives

A largely unreported story in recent months is the critical shortage in the U.S. of prescription drugs, including cancer drugs. A December 12th Philadelphia Inquirer story (in the "Business" section) was headlined, "Critical U.S. Drug Shortage Worsening." The shortage extends "From cancer treatments to surgical sedatives to standard emergency-room remedies," adding that "there are critical shortages of chemotherapy drugs and even morphine."

The Inquirer discussed the problem with John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of the Pulmonary, Allergy & Critical Care Division at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. He pointed out, in the Inquirer's words, that "Almost all the shortages are generic drugs, . . . an apparent reflection of the fact that there are fewer manufacturers of such medications, which generate less profit than do brand-name drugs."

A December 29th story in my local paper the Star Tribune made the same point, noting that "In the past few weeks, hospitals and clinics in Minnesota and around the country have had to scramble for adequate supplies of key medications." Adds the Star Trib, "The shortages have been blamed, in part, on production problems as well as decisions by drug manufacturers to stop making inexpensive generic drugs."

"Darcy Malard-Johnson, a pharmacist at the University of Minnesota's cancer clinic, said 13 of the 150 drugs on the current shortage list are cancer drugs. Most have been around for years, she said, and that may be one of the problems. Because they're generic, they're not as profitable to make or sell as newer drugs. And there's no way of knowing when a company will simply decide to stop making it."

So here we have a case of corporations "owning" the means of producing medicines, and reserving for themselves the "right" to not produce them. That is, they have the right to endanger untold lives for whatever reason they choose, including the desire to increase their profits. But how about withholding one's knowledge for the same reason?

In this regard I'll quote myself, from Nygaard Notes #402, "'A Victory Lap For Bush' in Africa?" In that article I quoted a 2006 report from the World Health Organization:

"Several newer AIDS drugs and formulations of existing drugs are urgently needed in developing countries but are not available because pharmaceutical companies are choosing not to sell them, and no generic versions of these are available."

So here's a case where life-saving drugs are unavailable not simply because those who have the facilities choose not to produce them, but simply because the people who "own" the knowledge needed to produce them refuse to use that knowledge to save lives. In the first case, if someone else decided to build a factory and fill the gap, they could do so. In the case of the AIDS drugs, no one else knows how to do it, since the knowledge is the "property" of the corporations who "choose not to sell them."

Now we come across another question: Is people's right to live to be sacrificed in favor of the patent-holders' right to "choose not to sell" the things that only they know how to produce? The people who would answer "yes" to this question are kin to the people—maybe they ARE the people—who say that Taxation is Theft. So let's have a look at taxation.

Is Taxation Theft?

In the last issue of the Notes I made the case, using the examples of wild rice, clean air, and the Internet, that there are big parts of our world that belong to no one, that are outside of The Market. And I suggested that these things have an inherent value, a value that can neither be measured nor negotiated. In the essay just before this one I talked about knowledge as "property" and wondered where "rights" come in when property is something intangible, like music or ideas. Now I want to talk about the idea of "ownership" in regard to something that is very tangible indeed: Money. Specifically, the money that people pay in taxes. (I know, money is not really tangible—that's another huge issue!—but some forms of it can be held in your hand, anyway. That's what I'm talking about.)

The big debate right now in this country is the debate about deficits. Shall we address them by cutting spending? Or by increasing taxes? The argument of many newly-elected legislators and governors is that we can't have more taxes because taxes are essentially illegitimate. At Tea Party rallies we can see signs that say "My Work, My Money," "Government Steals from Me and Gives to Itself," and the basic "Taxation is Theft."

(Note: The original "Tea Party," you may recall, was the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest not against taxation itself, but rather against "taxation without representation." Having been a tax protestor myself, I am certainly not arguing in favor of all of the taxes that we pay. This essay is about the motivation for taxing and the justification of the idea of taxation itself, leaving aside the ethics and effectiveness of the ends to which tax revenues are addressed.)

Is it true that taxation is theft? One's answer to that question has everything to do with this notion of "ownership" that I've been discussing. Who owns the money that represents the wealth of a society? The "Taxation is Theft" crowd would tell you that the money that you have belongs to you, and you alone, since you have "earned" it. The argument against this position depends on a different conception of ownership, the one I've been talking about for the past couple of issues.

The idea that I've been trying to highlight is the idea that there are large segments of our world that belong to no one, but are the responsibility and endowment of everyone. And if there really are things that are the property of no one—such as wild rice or clean air or the Internet—then the responsibility for the stewardship and preservation of such things belongs to everyone. And, since this responsibility requires resources, then it is the responsibility of everyone to contribute in some way in this effort: that is, to pay taxes. So this part of the pro-taxation argument depends on a rejection of the idea that everything "belongs" to someone, and the accompanying idea that it is only the owner who can decide what to do with it. This absolute right to do whatever one wants with one's property is the essence of what is known as "property rights." And the concept of "property rights" ceases to have meaning when we begin to speak of things that are not "property."

The other part of the argument in favor of taxation is kind of the opposite of the one in the previous paragraph. And that is the idea that some part of the wealth that we can quantify and distribute belongs not to individuals, but to all of us. I'll develop this idea more in the next issue of the Notes, but for now I'll just mention how it justifies taxation, beginning with a quotation. This is cultural critic Lewis Hyde, writing in "Frames from the Framers: How America's Revolutionaries Imagined Intellectual Property":

"You can speak of taxation as a way for groups to empower themselves toward worthy ends (schools, bridges, libraries), or you can speak of taxation as an oppressive tool of Big Government. When you let the debate begin in the Big Government frame, you never get your library funded."

Neither your library nor anything else, I would add. But this idea of "empowering themselves" is the key one. Still, isn't it true that a burglar is "empowering" himself when he steals someone's money? Was Robin Hood "empowering" someone, or was he just a robber? (Another Tea Party sign: "Robin Hood is Dead.") For the counter to this argument, I'll quote Andrew Villeneuve, executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, writing in a January 5th guest column in the Federal Way [Washington] Mirror newspaper:

"There is no businessperson in this state or in this country who has not taken advantage of the many investments made possible by our common wealth to make their money. Businesses use our court system to settle disputes; the patent and copyright office to protect their trademarks, discoveries and creative works; our ports and highways to transport goods to market; and the Internet for communication and electronic commerce. The list goes on."

The list does, indeed, go on, but for now I want to underline the idea of "common wealth," which includes things that we use, but do not own, like courts and ports and other sorts of wealth. Villenueve is saying that what we call "wealth"—including the form of wealth that we call "money"—is generated not only by an individual's hard work and personal effort, but by social, public efforts and resources. And, since society and the public institutions that make up society contribute to the creation of wealth, then it follows that society has a claim on that wealth, at least the difficult-to-quantify portion that is the result of those social decisions and shared efforts.

This is the claim to which I was referring back in Nygaard Notes #468, when I asked, "instead of 'confiscating' wealth, what if taxation were considered a process of re-claiming wealth? That is, of returning wealth to its rightful 'owners,' who would be... all of us." And by "all of us" I mean all of us who, through our individual and collective efforts have created the conditions for the generation of the wealth to which some individual now lays claim.

The public theologian Jim Wallis often reminds us that governmental spending decisions are expressions of the moral values of a society. He says that there are moral arguments—quite separate from market or economic arguments—that not only justify a society's decision to reserve some resources for the purpose of addressing social needs, but demand such decisions. If it is true, as Wallis says, that "budgets are moral documents," then there is a moral argument for raising the funds needed to meet the spending needs in any budget.

Thus, Wallis provides the moral motivation for placing a social, or public, claim on the wealth of our society, the wealth that seems at first glance to be the "property" of individuals. So we're motivated to levy taxes, but can it be justified? The moral justification is the idea that the rights of "ownership" belong not only to the individual whose name is on the receipt, but also to the others who have, singly and collectively, contributed to the generation of that wealth.

The idea of Common Wealth goes far beyond court systems and highways and the Internet, as we'll see in the next issue of Nygaard Notes.