Insane the capitalism world we living in. Now you can sit down for hours and rightfully argue with someone whether big pharma company is saving more live than killing.
Patents are government-granted monopolies. Nothing further from free markets.
Looking at it another why: why are patents on land, which grant people property rights over land that they did not create, somehow fundamental to capitalism, while patents on new drugs, which grant people property rights over formulas they did create, are anathema to capitalism?
Looking at things through in your "propertizing things" manner, why can't laws and regulations be "propertized" too, bought and sold to create bizarro capitalism?
Why do we only have to propertize "things"? That is to say, why should the motivating principles that lead us to allow propertization of land not be generalized to the propertization of drug formula or MP3s?
Looking at whether something is a "thing" or "not" is not a particularly useful basis for deciding what kinds of things should be turned into property. The rational thing to do is look at the economic properties of various kinds of things, and grant property rights based on economic phenomena.
Why do we grant patents in land? We do so to order economic activity--allow people to develop land without others free-riding on their efforts. We create incentives for people to say clear a plot of land and sell it to a farmer, a market transaction which is not possible without a patent on the land. The same principles generalize easily to many other scenarios in which it is possible to gain the benefits of someone's work without engaging in a market transaction with them.
But that is not the criterion now. The criterion is resource. That's why bandwidth is a property, and can be bought, sold or utilized just like a piece of land.
> The rational thing to do is look at the economic properties of various kinds of things, and grant property rights based on economic phenomena.
That is one of the many approaches. "Rational" has nothing to do with it. It depends on what principles you are deriving your rationality from. Starting with my own principles, what you proposed is not rational. Quite apart from that, you do agree that laws and regulations have economic properties too, right? Why can't we buy and sell those?
I'm fairly confident the Kinsella article that @icebraining linked to covers the basis of rights and patents. I can't confirm it because the document is not loading at the moment.
I'm not sure if you get my point. It's not the fact that patentable subject matter has economic properties that warrants protection, it's what those properties happen to be. Things like drug design are susceptible to the free-rider problem, an propertization is a legal tool that can address that problem. Vast swaths of the law can be seen as basically existing to address various economic problems that undermine markets, and the free-rider problem is a common one and propertization is a typical solution.
There are economic issues created by laws and regulations (regulatory capture, etc), but they are not the kind of problems amenable to being solved by propertization.
But it doesn't really matter. What matters is: Does it work?.
Private land works. Mostly. With a few caveats. There are a few awful stories about this also. Usually "goverments and friend monopolists" are to blame, too.
Do patents work? Not sure. Sometimes maybe. In mathematics (software patents) they don't. In medicine we see this problem, and many others.
Are they the best system we could conceive? Hardly.
Tell that to all the people who could easily live on the vast swaths of property suburbanites have set aside for doing absolutely nothing with (lawns).
> Usually "governments and friend monopolists" are to blame, too.
I assume you let homeless people pitch camps in your yard, and are thus not part of the problem?
> Do patents work? Not sure. Sometimes maybe.
The U.S. is the most technologically productive society in the history of the world, and we have had patents since our founding. Much of the valuable technology around us was funded either by: 1) patent monopolies; 2) natural or government-sanctioned monopolies; 3) government research funding. Much of what wasn't was funded by other mechanisms for reducing competition (for example, Intel's trade secrets to keep its manufacturing edge).
Ultimately, there is no money in highly competitive markets. Competition drives prices towards the marginal costs of production, which not only saps R&D budgets in capital-intensive fields, but without IP protection reduces any incentive to engage in capital-intensive R&D when the results can be easily copied by competitors.
Look at one company we consider innovative today: Google. Google benefits from several features of its industry that tend to undermine perfect competition: network effects, a government granted monopoly (over the trademark Google--imagine if Samsung could redirect "Google Searches" to their own search engine), a privately-granted monopoly (domain names), government-monopolies over their copyrighted-software, etc. And of course, the half-trillion dollar advertising industry from which it derives nearly all its revenue would collapse if trademark monopolies didn't prevent companies from free-riding on advertising investments. As a result, Google makes a ton of money, and can use it to do cool things like research Google Glass and self-driving cars that don't immediately turn a profit. If Google was trying to eke out an existence in a perfectly-competitive market based purely on the quality of its search results, none of this would happen.
People could not "easily live on the vast swaths of property suburbanites have set aside for doing absolutely nothing with (lawns)." For one, lawns serve a useful purpose (groundwater / aquifer recharge, flood control, etc). For two, https://www.google.com/search?q=kowloon+walled+city
"Post hoc, meet Propter hoc. I'm sure you two will have a lot to talk about."
If the state owns it, then they decide what to do with it. Build a road through the house? No problem! If its a property owned by the individual who lives on it, then no way a road can just be built there.
The person arguing that land is owned by the state then must accept that the state then has ll the right to do what ever they want with the land. Its theirs after all.
I for one object heavily on the idea that the state is the owner of everything. Physical objects I got in my own house is mine. Not the state. However, state privileges, be that the right to carry weapons in public places, sell drugs, manufacture weapons, or export dangerous products to any country that I like is not rights. They are privileges give out by the state.
My car is not a privilege, but a property I own and has rights to. Privilege given by the state is not property. please stop mixing the two concepts up and try to make them look like one and the same. The state do not own my stuff.