Letters
Gun History Disarmed
Thanks to Joyce Lee Malcolm for her well-written and well-presented piece on Michael Bellesiles' Arming America ("Disarming History," March). I've read a few other articles and criticisms of the issue, but Malcolm's was the most complete and understandable. It's amazing to me, a nonacademic, how easily some folks are deluded by a "scholarly" book because it supports their position. It appears that's what happened here, and Bellesiles should be ashamed of himself for attempting to delude the public.
W. B. Clark
Evansville, IN
As a Columbia grad, I have wondered why none of the articles that I have read on Bellesiles mentions the names of the Bancroft Prize jurists. It seems to me they should be held accountable or at least be cited for their foolishness.
I am no historian, but I have also wondered why probate records, particularly those from cities, would be considered essential evidence of gun ownership. I grew up during the 1950s and '60s in the poor, rural South, where every house contained a gun or several and where a will was as rare as a diamond. Guns were frequently handed on to children as parents aged. People died and property was divided by children, without the use of wills or the involvement of government in any form. I cannot imagine that there was better record keeping regarding gun ownership in the 18th or 19th centuries.
Bill McLane
San Diego, CA
Malcolm quotes Haverford College historian Roger Lane, a gun control supporter who gave Arming America a laudatory review: "I'm mad at the guy. He suckered me. It's entirely clear to me that he's made up a lot of these records. He's betrayed us. He's betrayed the cause."
The cause? Would that cause be maintaining the integrity of historical research—or the political effort toward more gun control? One really would think that in the wake of this mess historians would be more circumspect about making such comments. If Lane is known as a gun control activist, it also raises a question about why he was selected to review the book.
Second, I wanted to point out that the book is now being sold as a remainder, complete with its "Bancroft Prize Winner" banner and no indication of any problems with its contents. At $9.98, it will likely now get wider distribution than if it had been allowed to languish at the original price.
Byron Matthews
Sandia Park, NM
Creation Myths
Douglas Clement's "Creation Myths" (March) provides an interesting presentation of the economic debate surrounding economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's call for reduced intellectual property rights. Their argument, as I understand it, is that we somehow will create more innovation and progress by reducing or restricting the individual ownership and associated individual economic rewards of innovation and progress.
As a noneconomist, I'd thought we'd learned via the collectivist failures of the 20th century that reducing or limiting the right of individuals to hold, retain, and benefit from private property (whatever its nature) is a prescription that inevitably impoverishes us all. Economic rationale and theory aside, what Boldrin and Levine advocate is the use of state power to take property from its rightful owners.
In economics lingo, the government is giving creators a "monopoly" over a work by registering a patent or copyright. But to this layman, there is no real-world comparison between a patent or copyright to a very specific invention or creative work and a genuine governmentally granted or sanctioned "monopoly," such as AT&T prior to its breakup, the U.S. Postal Service, or the government-controlled air traffic control system.
Government-issued patents or copyrights affecting recordings, software, or drugs simply establish the property rights of the owners in the same manner as government-recorded deeds on real property or government-issued titles on motor vehicles. These governmental acts do not "grant economic monopolies." Instead they provide a (relatively) efficient means for property owners to assure that the economic (and other) rights inherent in their ownership of specific property are protected under the law.
The Founders were perceptive enough to grant Congress, among a limited number of powers, the ability to protect the property rights of authors and inventors. Intellectual property is a wonderfully abstract concept, but it's still property, pure and simple. Property belongs to the rightful owner, to lawfully use as he or she sees fit.
Richard T. Mikus
Newark, DE
As a former CD store owner I found Boldrin and Levine's ideas very interesting. I think that the way the music industry operates is inefficient at best and that there has to be a better way. File sharing is not going to go away.
I do have a problem with their solution for how to pay writers. If it were easy to predict which songs will generate the most future earnings, the music industry would be a lot better off now. A lot of money is spent developing and marketing acts that go nowhere, and many hits come from completely unexpected sources. So it would be impossible to set a fair market value of a song before the market has a chance to listen to it. Many times it takes months for a song to catch on.
What if I get paid $1,000 for a song that ultimately goes multi-platinum, and then I am never able to repeat that success (a one-hit wonder), whereas Britney gets paid $600,000 for a song that tanks. Does that seem fair? This would place even more power in the hands of music executives. The only way to rectify this would be to ensure somehow that artists/writers get at least a portion of all future sales or use of their work. The "somehow" is the difficult point.
Kirk Miller
Weed, CA
I am somewhat dismayed by the debate chronicled in "Creation Myths." It gives the field of economics an importance that it does not deserve. Like most other social sciences, many schools of economics have fallen into the trap of using unrealistically narrow research and artificially constrained assumptions to generate publishable material.
Paul Romer, for example, in his distinction between rivalrous and nonrivalrous goods, completely ignores the real and well-known additional costs—over and above the production costs—incurred by anyone seeking to capitalize on an invention. For example, the cost to produce a copy of software is negligible. But the software is not what customers buy; we buy the support behind it and many other extended attributes of the good over and above the good itself (as any competent marketer knows). Supplying these extras means very real and extensive costs that the seller must bear. Romer likewise ignores the transaction costs associated with any economic exchange. Thus his distinction is both naive and completely unrealistic—yet it is treated as some kind of breakthrough.
Likewise, Romer's objection to Boldrin and Levine's thesis, in which he points out that their proposed first-sale rights would be an empty promise, is entirely correct and is certainly a fatal flaw in their work—one that was completely and immediately obvious to me (a noneconomist) early on in the article. Why then spill any more ink to pursue their fatally flawed "model"?
Economics is not a science in the same way that physics is a science. Economics, rather, is applied science, in the same way that electrical engineering is applied physics but not physics itself. Science is held to the standard of truth, while engineering is held to the standard of relevance and usefulness. The mental masturbation of many modern economists and other social "scientists" fails both tests.
More important, the entire debate is about the wrong subject. The article discussed whether or not inventions should be protected. Instead, the debate should be about whether or not that protection should ever be revoked! Libertarians stand for nothing if not for property rights. Likewise they stand for the belief that the fruits of one's labor belong to one…period!
Ralph Mroz
Greenfield, MA
I was glad to read about Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's work on an economic model without the distortion of copyrights and patents. I find it unfortunate that one method successful in the past at providing a substantial financial incentive for invention and technological application has virtually disappeared: the prize.
In 1714 the British Board of Longitude offered the very substantial sum of ?20,000 to the individual who devised a way to determine longitude accurately. Result: John Harrison produced the first marine chronometer. His enormous improvement in timekeeping had very wide-ranging benefits.
In 1908 Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail newspaper offered a ?1,000 prize to the first pilot to fly an airplane across the English Channel. In 1909 Louis Blériot claimed that prize. The improvements in aviation and engine technology that were the direct result of the Daily Mail competition were highly beneficial to all early aviators and aircraft makers, and not coincidentally to newspapers.
In 1959 British engineer and industrialist Henry Kremer funded a ?50,000 prize for the first human-powered aircraft to fly a half-mile figure-eight course. In 1977 Paul MacReady and Peter Lissaman, engineers, and Brian Allen, cyclist/pilot, successfully claimed the prize. Less than three years later, MacReady and Allen won a second, larger Kremer prize for the first human-powered flight across the English Channel. MacReady's company AeroVironment has used some of the innovations from these two extremely light-weight aircraft in a surprising variety of high-tech products that also happen to be very cost-effective and environmentally friendly.
Alas, this system seems to have metamorphosed into government grants and contracts (Kafka reference intended).
George Alan Esworthy
Apex, NC
I appreciated that Douglas Clement presented arguments both for and against patent protection. It was a wake-up call to me and surely to many. As a patent author myself, I've had to do painstaking research into the U.S. patent office database and can attest to the following: Somewhere between 90 percent and 99 percent of existing U.S. patents are totally useless, either because the invention does not work or has no useful purpose, or because the patent grantees do not have the resources to defend it in court. Try fighting a patent infringement for less than $10 million.
John Cossar
Calgary, Alberta
Liking the Long, Strange Trip
I am a fairly longtime Deadhead (since 1975), and I have to say that Brian Doherty's "Come Hear Uncle Sam's Band" (March) was one of the best mainstream explanations of the Grateful Dead that I have ever read.
The ways in which Doherty identifies the Dead as uniquely American were exactly right. Finding their roots in the Beats is critical, as is realizing that their fierce independence and almost crackpot business machinery is just as important to understanding them as anything else they did.
I can't say that I had ever thought of them as capitalists in the sense that Doherty suggests. But after reading the article, I can't disagree. Anyway, I just wanted to write a note of thanks for such a thoughtful piece on something many of us hold dear and want to share with others.
Rick Ober
West Collingswood, NJ
Great article! As an old musician/writer/fan going back to the 1960s who even had the privilege of hanging with Jerry Garcia a few times (30-plus years ago), I'd say Brian Doherty's review is probably the best snapshot of their career I've seen, and one of the few bits of writing about the Dead I've ever read that never made me want to jump up and shout, "Objection! That's not right!"
Rick Lieberman
New York, NY
As a longtime reason reader, advocate of individual liberty, and "bored kid of the Reagan years" who saw close to 100 Dead shows, I agree wholeheartedly with Doherty's take on the Dead. I always felt that the phenomenon could have happened only here in America.
I have often asked myself: How could people who revel in free-form musical experimentation and the great unknown vastness that is emblematic of the psychedelic experience, and who are generally mistrustful of authority, become so enamored of static, centrally managed socialist or left-wing politics? If there was ever a group that would be open to libertarian thought, I figured it would be Deadheads and other jam band fans.
Michael A. Abbate
Whitestone, NY