You, Don Brayton, wrote:

>One last comment more to your point, with which I believe I agree; "fair"
>coercion is used in the defense of intellectual property where such laws
>exist.  It is the expression of the community in favor of genius and
>initiative and makes sense in promoting stability within the community.
>If individual ownership of property of any nature (found, purchased or
>created) is not recognized, there is only chaos, i.e. ownership by
>strength.
Don:

In agreeing with me you are tacitly conceding the main problem with your
theory of justice, which is that property rights cannot be ascertained
merely be determining whether "coercion" was involved or not. Note that
intellectual property laws are a form of legalized monopoly. If two
inventors develop the same invention simultaneously, one will get a legal
monopoly on it for 25 years (the one who patents it first) while the
other will be S.O.L. Note, too, that the duration of the monopoly has
nothing to do with the amount of work that went into developing the
invention, so two inventions may have wildly different values on the
market depending on the underlying costs. In other words, intellectual
property laws theoretically violate at least two axioms of free trade,
the right to the fruits of one's labor and letting the market set the
value of a commodity. In short, IP laws are coercive in at least two
senses. I hasten to add that IP laws are coercive IN DEFENSE of free
trade and society, which is a paradox, not a contradiction.

Your argument takes two tracks: one is theoretical (coercion is bad per
se) and the other practical (it weakens society). They aren't mutually
supportive, as the above example demonstrates. Sometimes intervention in
the distribution of property strengthens society, even as it works
arguably unjust effects on an individual. When that tradeoff is fair and
when it is unfair is what politics is largely about.

Moreover, your theoretical argument begs the question, which is, when is
property obtained coercively? Progressive taxation, the bete noir of
libertarians, is justified by its proponents as a form of, let's call it
"restorative" coercion: the wealthy owe their wealth in some measure to
the disproportionate benefits that they derive from society and should
therefore be required contribute more to society in return; i.e., what
you take out should match what you put in. Plus there's a practical
macroeconomic argument as well, also applicable to minimum wage laws,
which is that extreme disparities in wealth undermine social
stability--look at El Salvador for proof--which is in no one's interest
(except perhaps some anarchists <g>).

Perhaps many of these thorny issues would be moot in the anarchist
utopia, where all exchanges of property and labor somehow take place on
an equal footing and therefore presumptively noncoercively (although I
would love to hear how IP laws would wither away under such a system).
The libertarian utopia, OTOH, sounds like a Darwinian nightmare. In any
event, my life experience has taught me to expect that nothing is all yin
or all yang, so until I am presented with a thoroughly developed argument
(such as Chomsky presents in his works), I view sweeping,
one-size-fits-all theories with skepticism.

_________________
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA
"The responsibility for a news media that can't report accurately how the
world works, rests on those who pay for it, and that's the advertisers."
--Newt Gingrich