The Paul’s Technology Revolution: The Message Lacks Clarity

The internet is the most powerful tool for the advancement of liberty discovered and utilized in the last 50 years.  In fact, it would not be too reckless to claim that the internet is the most important mechanism for the promotion of freedom that any living human being has witnessed.  Left alone and spared from the intrusive, meddling hands of government the future of the internet accommodates potentially limitless capacity to innovate.  No man can predict how the internet will transform in the coming years or what products and services it could generate.Years from now we will look back on beginning decades of this millennium and come to judge the incredibly important policy decisions of our current time.  Hopefully, we are not reviewing policies that stifled growth and caused opportunities to vanish due to regulations and intervention by the heavy hand of government.  When we look back on these decisive years, it is my wish and desire that we are able to definitively claim that embracing the ideals of liberty led to the greatest global, positive societal change in the history of mankind.As you can probably gather from the tone of this post I would categorize securing freedom on the internet as the most important battle we will fight for the preservation of liberty.  The internet has been a game changer for the liberty movement and if Al Gore hadn’t invented it, I would probably still be a neoconservative statist.  Of course the Al Gore reference is a joke, but most likely without exposure to the abundance of resources available on the internet today, most of my news and opinions would be filtered through the mouth of the main stream media.  Without YouTube and easy access to all of the great libertarian websites today I most likely would not have been introduced to the ideals of liberty via the most popular and effective messenger, Congressman Ron Paul.It is for these reasons that I understand the importance of Campaign for Liberty’s release of their Technology Revolution Manifesto.  Without a free internet, Dr. Paul surely would not have been able to expose the Federal Reserve as a cartel.  Surely, without the effective use of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs Ron Paul’s supporters would not have been able to overcome the media blackout surrounding the Fed and miraculously influence a majority of the populace to support a full audit of the Federal Reserve.Brian wrote yesterday how he believes that this Technology Revolution signals the passing of the torch from Ron to Rand.  It is not a secret that Rand has made internet freedom one of his most important priorities, and this manifesto from the C4L appears to be his way of extending an olive branch between Rand and his father’s supporters.  Unfortunately for Campaign for Liberty, many in the libertarian community are dissatisfied with the C4L manifesto because it does not clearly state the proper position that libertarians should take regarding intellectual property.  The document also contains other bizarre assertions, including praising Microsoft and Apple as examples of companies that have utilized the technology sector’s free market opportunities to prosper.  The quoted excerpt is quoted from C4L’s Technology Manifesto.

And it is driven by the Internet, the single greatest catalyst in history for individual liberty and free markets.The true technology revolutionaries have little need for big government and never have. Microsoft ignored the government for years and changed the world by leading the PC revolution.Today, companies like Apple - which has created several completely new markets out of whole cloth (iPhone, iPad, iTunes, and iPod) - are changing the world again, successfully adopting visionary new revenue models for movies, songs, and games, and launching an “app economy” responsible for creating almost half a million jobs in the United States since the iPhone was introduced…

What the heck is Campaign for Liberty thinking using these two companies as examples to highlight the benefits of individual liberty and free markets on the internet.  Either the author is on the payroll of these two corporations or is simply a clueless buffoon.  I’m not sure which is worse.  Apple is quickly gaining an unfavorable reputation for their despicable behavior as patent trolls.  They are involved in an astounding 60% of Mobile Patent Lawsuits.  Additionally, Microsoft cannot claim to be anything close to a proponent of free enterprise in the technology sector.  Microsoft has a consistent pattern of using the force of government to extract money from competitors.  In their most recent heist, Microsoft is receiving $444 Million annually from Android patent licenses.If that wasn’t bad enough, it appears that Campaign for Liberty goes on to strongly support the idea of intellectual property in this manifesto.  Hopefully I am completely misunderstanding their intentions, but I fear the author of this document might be a statist in libertarian clothing

Internet collectivism takes many forms, all of them pernicious.Among the most insidious are government attempts to control and regulate competition, infrastructure, privacy, and intellectual property. According to them:

• Successful companies in brand new frontier industries that didn’t even exist as recently as five years ago should be penalized and intimidated with antitrust actions in the name of “fairness” and “competition.”
• Privately owned broadband high-speed infrastructure must be subject to collective rule via public ownership and government regulations that require “sharing” with other competitors.
• Internet infrastructure must be treated as a commons subject to centralized government control through a variety of foolish “public interest” and “fairness” regulations.
• Wireless, the lifeblood of the mobile Internet revolution, must be micromanaged as a government-controlled commons, with limited exclusive property rights.
• Private property rights on the Internet should exist in limited fashion or not at all, and what is considered to be in the public domain should be greatly expanded.
• Private sector data collection practices must be scrutinized and tightly regulated in the name of “protecting consumers,” all while government’s warrantless surveillance and collection of private citizens’ Internet data dramatically increases.

I had to reread this section to ensure that there was no confusion.  It seems that C4L is taking a pro intellectual property stance based on the comment at the beginning of the quoted text and their proposed opposition to expansion of what is considered to be public domain.  Rather than explain the proper libertarian views regarding intellectual property.  Instead, I will defer to an excerpt below taken from a speech Stephen Kinsella (registered patent attorney and Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute) gave on the topic of intellectual property, which is posted at libertarianalliance.wordpress.com.

….. intellectual property, which is nothing but a redistribution of rights. It is a redistribution of property rights from the original owner of a thing, to someone who applied at a state agency for some kind of monopoly certificate that gives them the right to go to government courts to ask the court to point their guns at the original owner and tell them “you have to share your property with this guy, or you can’t use it in this way without this guy’s permission.” It is a way of redistributing property rights. The idea that you can just add IP rights to the set of property rights in scarce resources is a pernicious one that leads to redistribution of control that owners have over their property, to other people.Here is what’s perverse about it. As I’ve already pointed out, the free market is working to let humans overcome scarcity. Yet, you have people who advocate intellectual property rights in the name of the market. What’s going on here? They’re actually imposing an artificial scarcity on things that are non-scarce by their nature.22 The free market is trying to overcome the problem of scarcity. These people are saying, “let’s make something that is already free and not scarce artificially scarce just like real things are.” Why would we want to do this?

It is shocking that Campaign for liberty, an organization founded by Congressman Ron Paul, has not come out in opposition to the initiation of government force against individuals.  That is what IP rights encourage and reward.  It is understandable why Ron Paul would want to pass the torch to his son by granting internet freedom greater visibility and focus within his political organizations.  What I cannot conceive is the reason why Ron Paul would sign off on a document that goes against his principles.  According to the manifesto, there are more details forthcoming regarding Campaign for Liberty’s Technology Revolution.  Hopefully, they amend their stance toward intellectual property and embrace the libertarian ideals which have helped to deliver them such a large audience and powerful influence in libertarian politics.Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!