RoR: Forum

This is an obscenity in and of itself but the only way to counter that statement to the pragmatist masses is to argue that the strategy would stifle innovations.

Sam

Post 2

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 9:20am

With some irony...he is sometimes attributed with coining the phrase "history is just one damned thing after the other..." but it looks like, in fact, he was complaining about that as 'dogma' and quoting this man

"Elbert Green Hubbard (19 June 1856 � 7 May 1915) was an American writer, publisher, artist, businessman, anarchist and libertarian socialist philosopher. He was an influential exponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, founding the Roycroft enterprises. He and his wife Alice Moore Hubbard died in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania."

...who, given the period and times he was from, was remarkable. These two men were clearly polar opposites. COnsider the times that Hubbard lived in, and read carefully his statements of faith below.

"Libertarian socialist philosopher?" Now that's an interesting term of art.

I believe in the Motherhood of God.
I believe in the Blessed Trinity of Father, Mother and Child.
I believe that God is here, and that we are as near Him now as ever we shall be.
I do not believe He started this world a-going and went away and left it to run by itself.
I believe in the sacredness of the human body, this transient dwelling place of a living soul, And so I deem it the duty of every man and every woman to keep his or her body beautiful through right thinking and right living.
I believe that the love of man for woman, and the love of woman for man is holy; And that this love in all its promptings is as much an emanation of the Divine Spirit as man's love for God, or the most daring hazards of the human mind.
I believe in salvation through economic, social, and spiritual freedom.

Hubbard: He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.

Toynbee: Man�s true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.

Hubbard is a very interesting read; and yet, he was part of what has been regarded as an "anti-industrial movement."

But not so fast; the same could be said of Rand, in some regards, as being "anti-business/anti-industrial"...of a certain flavor of business and industry. The villians in her books were larely businessmen of a certain bent...

Toynbee is clearly just a tool. But Hubbard is an interesting read...

regards,
Fred

Post 3

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 9:48am

Hubbard:

The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms.
Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist.

A Socialist odd exceeding:

If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?

The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs.

If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it.

Would you make men better � set them an example. The millenium will never come until governments cease from governing, and the meddler is at rest.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds � the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off" nor has to go on a strike for higher wages.
Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals.

Hubbard was apparently an enigma for a 'socialist...'

regards,
Fred

Post 4

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 10:09am

The Author of the quote is failing to understand trade.

Educators don't demand they get a piece of all future profits in exchange for the knowledge they teach. Most knowledge like this is common and public/not patented, and the price someone is willing to pay to hear it is very low.

Patents are kind of like this: The inventor comes up with a new idea. He says to the world: I will tell you this idea, but only if you agree to pay me when you use it commercially.

Now... the only problem in my mind with patents is:

1. For many ideas, if the first inventor didn't patent it nor share it with anyone when he came up with the idea, then someone else would at timespan after that come up with the same exact idea. So a given patent should have an expiration timespan that is dependent on how unlikely another person would have came up with the idea. But this is hard to guess in reality.

2. Most people in the world don't agree to the patent deal. Its shoved down their throats by the deal between the government and the inventor. There I'm sure are commonly others in the world who would reject the deal and rather have the chance to independently think of the idea, or maybe they already thought of the idea but they have no proof, or maybe in the country "first to file" is enforced. So in this case, its initiation of force.

Honestly, I'd lean towards patents being a bad thing due to the problems above. As more and more people work on inventing, the timespan in #1 becomes very short. As more people work on inventing, the number of people who would consider the patent agreement a "forced trade" (#2).

So I prefer instead that people just use trade secrets, and then when they trade, limit trade to only be with friends who respect their secrets if they are concerned with someone learning & copying their idea. I don't think it should be the federal government's job to protect everyone's ideas from being copied. I think its more practical that idea creators protect their own ideas.

Theft is the wrong word to use in the case of intellectual property/ideas. Theft is when a thing is removed from one owner without consent and given to a new owner. Instead of theft, its copyright infringement, which is a form of privacy invasion. When a person makes a copy of an inventor's idea, they are using the inventor's property without his permission... as observation always has some interaction with what is being observed, and this interaction is a "use". Commonly in copyright infringement, such observational "use" in itself has very little or no harmful effect on the inventor's goal attainment.

Its only when the copyright infringer starts using the idea that the harmful-to-goal-attainment effects materialize. Unpopular private information (like that a person had sex with ?) can be very damaging to a person's ability to trade (see Tiger Woods). Ok, Tiger Woods might have lied to his wife, if so, then he did deserve the public fall out. A competing product that was made using another inventor's idea can reduce the inventor's ability to make profits with his product.

But then you could argue in the invention case: the people who copied his idea and put it in their produce, and the people who bought that product instead of the inventor's product... clearly they didn't agree with the patent deal, the patent instead is shoved down their throat.

If the copied idea was still in development, and not yet released to the public (espionage), then the inventor has a case that his idea was observed without his permission. But after patented, that case has evaporated.

So... we agree that using someone's property without permission, such as reading/observing without first agreeing to copyright... is an initiation of force. Now... what kind of restitution, retaliation, and incapacitation is justified?

Post 5

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 1:25pm

Mo' Hubbard

There have always existed three ways of keeping the people loving and loyal. One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to interfere. This plan, however, has very seldom been practised, because the politicians regard the public as a cow to be milked, and something must be done to make it stand quiet.

So they try Plan Number Two, which consists in hypnotizing the public by means of shows, festivals, parades, prizes and many paid speeches, sermons and editorials, wherein and whereby the public is told how much is being done for it, and how fortunate it is in being protected and wisely cared for by its divinely appointed guardians. Then the band strikes up, the flags are waved, three passes are made, one to the right and two to the left; and we, being completely under the hypnosis, hurrah ourselves hoarse.

Plan Number Three is a very ancient one and is always held back to be used in case Number Two fails. It is for the benefit of the people who do not pass readily under hypnotic control. If there are too many of these, they have been known to pluck up courage and answer back to the speeches, sermons and editorials. Sometimes they refuse to hurrah when the bass-drum plays, in which case they have occasionally been arrested for contumacy and contravention by stocky men, in wide-awake hats, who lead the strenuous life. This Plan Number Three provides for an armed force that shall overawe, if necessary, all who are not hypnotized. The army is used for two purposes � to coerce disturbers at home, and to get up a war at a distance, and thus distract attention from the troubles near at hand. Napoleon used to say that the only sure cure for internal dissension was a foreign war: this would draw the disturbers away, on the plea of patriotism, so they would win enough outside loot to satisfy them, or else they would all get killed, it really didn't matter much; and as for loot, if it was taken from foreigners, there was no sin.

A careful analyst might here say that Plan Number Three is only a variation of Plan Number Two � the end being gained by hypnotic effects in either event, for the army is conscripted from the people to use against the people, just as you turn steam from a boiler into the fire-box to increase the draft. ...

Vol. XIV: Great Musicians, Chapter 8: "Ludwig van Beethoven," pp. 228-230: as quoed in http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elbert_Hubbard

Post 6

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 1:32pm

Dean:

Especially since, in modern times, the role of patents has become simply to act as mutual defensive shielding from other large companies claiming infringement.

Large companies maintain a folder of patents, purely to whip out and beat on other companies with, either to attack a smaller company with fewer resources, or to defend itself from some other predator company with products.

Software patents have been totally ruined by a government patent office that handed out patents willy-nilly for the most ridiculously obvious concepts imaginable. It is thus impossible these days to write any code which isn't in technical violation of some patent issued to somebody somehere. Every bit of code ever deployed is exposed to this nonsense.

Did you place text inside a box somewhere? You violated a software patent for that innovative idea.

This control I'm typing in right now is stepping on a patent somewhere.

Post 7

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 2:24pm

More than a century ago Merwin and Webster, authors of Calumet K, Rand's favorite novel, wrote another, Comrade John, which parodies Hubbard as a charlatan and his followers as saps. In the book Hubbard becomes Herman Stein and Roycroft becomes Beechcroft. I suspect that this is where she got the idea of architectural ghosting that figures in The Fountainhead. The first few pages at the link above will give the reader a good idea of what M & W thought of Hubbard, but the whole thing is an entertaining read.
(Edited by Peter Reidy on 10/24, 2:32pm)

Post 8

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 4:10pm

Interesting. Also, reassurring to see that smear, innuendo, and ridicule-- as opposed to direct criticism -- was alive and kicking a hundred years ago, and nothing new. It's the kind of indirect political hatchet job that would make the snark masters on MSNBC giggle with glee.

I wonder what specific quote or position by Hubbard set off the author of "Calumet K"...Rands favorite childhood book? Were they competitors of some type? (My favorite childhood book was "A Wrinkle In Time" by a Socialist from France.)

Or were one or both of these folks involved in the kind of muddy the water, knock over the chessboard kind of ratcake politics that goes on even today? It's hard to divine that looking back 100 hundred years. It's hard enough to suss it out in real time...

Or, is it an example of going nowhere fast blue-on-blue fire, eating-their-own, back during the salad days of Progressive infestation? (No wonder it got a foothold, if there was no coherent counter-argument. Sort of like what is going on today. Whatever is left of a conservative-libertarian axis is relying almost exclusively on the incompetence of the left to save the day, because that axis is too busy devouring itself.)

Hubbard participated in some kind of 'back to craftsmanship' movement that was considered 'anti-industrial' at the time.

But the same could be said of Rand,(that she was 'anti-business/anti-industrial) as many of her villians were businessmen/industrialists, and she was certainly critical of businessmen and industrialistsa of a certain bent.

Will folks be reading current snarky criticisms of "Rand the charlatan" in a hundred years and inferring significance?

Read Hubbard's quotes; his actual words. That is what remains after a hundred years, not his toe fungus or turf wars or neighborly squabbles or pissing contest ribbons; which of those, if any, do you think an AS thumping Randian would find offensive, or inconsistent with her philosophy, and why?

regards,
Fred

Post 9

Thursday, October 24, 2013 - 6:09pm

Taking a tip from William of Ockham, I suspect that the explanation is much simpler: Merwin and Webster didn't care (perhaps didn't even know) about Hubbard's politics, and that's why the novel doesn't mention this; they simply found his public image, as story material, too good to pass up; their readers didn't know or care either, and most of them didn't even know who Hubbard was.

Rand is another who used � clef characters. We don�t need to know about Louis Sullivan�s or Greta Garbo�s politics (nor did Rand), or even who they were, to enjoy the stories in which their lookalikes appear.

Post 10

Friday, October 25, 2013 - 10:31am

It goes without saying that Arnold J. Toynbee didn't produce any "fruits of technology" for us to share. In other words his calls for sharing were for an area where he didn't have any skin in the game.

Would he have objected to the world's poor fully sharing in whatever he did have? Maybe a homeless person or two could have shared his home, maybe the poor could have divvied up his paycheck so they he and they had equal shares. Would he have objected to not receiving any royalty checks for his publications since the fruits of his writing should have been shared? How about the homeless people sharing his home also sharing his wardrobe, and meals?

Hey, what about his opinions? He shouldn't have been selfishly allowed to express only his opinions - after all there are less fortunate souls who hadn't been given his word skills, so he should have shared the fruit of his wordsmithing and devoted half of his time to giving voice to opinions he didn't share.

He is talking about using force - that's not "sharing" it's stealing.

Post 11

Friday, October 25, 2013 - 10:51am