Re: Re: Notes on a talk I will give on Wed. (fwd)

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Xxxx,

Yes, I didn't mean to endorse Hayek.

Charles

>>> <xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 04/03/00 03:44PM >>>

Hello Charles. I totally agree with your interpretation of Rand, but, hey
look Hayek is no less bourgeois than Rand. Since I did not know enough
about Rand, I was commenting on Hayek. Hayekian postulates about free
market economy are totally inconsistent with socialism or any form of
social democracy even (just a note).

thanks,

Xxxx


>>>> Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 04/02/00 09:34PM >>>
Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx wrote:

>> michael, i thought intellectual property rights were central to the
>> principles of the free market.

>Not really.  People, such as Hayek, were against intellectual property
>rights,
>since they granted a monopoly to the supposed owner.  Although here is
>Ayn Rand

>125: "Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the
   base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his
   mind."?
>128: "Today, patents are the special target of the collectivists'
   attacks -- directly and indirectly, through such issues as the
   proposed abolition of trademarks, brand names, etc.  While the so-
   called "conservatives" look at those attacks indifferently or, at
   times, approvingly, the collectivists seem to realize that patents
   are the heart and core of property rights, and that once they are
   destroyed, the destruction of all ocher rights will follow
   automatically, as a brief postscript."?

Charles wrote:
__________

>CB: Seems to me that these quotes from Rand make clear how bourgeois
>ideology is necessarily idealist ( and working class ideology
>materialist).  By making predominantly mental labor which result in
>designs, ideas, the "heart and core of (private) property rights, and
>impliedly the main source of value, as opposed to predominantly physical
>labor , the bourgeoisie ideologist Rand has prepared the ground for
>claiming that the capitalist, the CEO, the Lee Iacocca or Bill Gates'
>work is infinitely more valuable than that of the mass of individual
>workers, thus justifying the gargantuan differential in pays,. This is
>the diametrical opposite of Marx's theory , which does differentiate
>between the rate of value produced by different levels of skill, but
>makes no special differentiation between mental and physical labor. In
>general , an hour's worth of thinking is worth the same as an hour's
>worth of hammering in Marx's scheme.