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by contravariant
2054 days ago
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I don't think 'state granted monopoly' is a good way to phrase it. If you go by the quoted excerpt (which I largely agree with) then it's not so much a monopoly but more of a captive market, and it's not so much granted as merely 'allowed'. And sure you could set up your own competing ride-sharing market, though you'd have to convince people to share and buy rides through your market and not the well known one, so eventually a free or mostly free market may come into existence but until that happens we'll have to deal with markets held captive by apps and webpages. |
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"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?" [1]
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"The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that in many cases are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.” [2]
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/the-precariat-populis...