The premise of his article is that the legitimacy of professional licensing is well-established and the practice should be expanded to parents.

While one could argue that it doesn’t follow from professional licensing being applied to various professions that it should be expanded to parents, this article is really illustrative of why libertarians should oppose professional licensure outright.

It’s a slippery slope from licensing florists to licensing parents.² Once you concede the legitimacy of some licensing, then more outrageous nonsense inevitably follows.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

1. Anytime you see the words “applied philosophy” or “applied ethics” together and the article isn’t written by a libertarian, it is safe to assume it contains some nonsense like environmental socialism, Big Brother or nanny statist stuff like this or national health care or other social-welfare programs, calls for government to make businesses more socially responsible, and so on. ↩

2. No offense, my home state of Louisiana. Why we need to be protected from bad floral arrangements is beyond me. What professional licensing is really about is restricting competition in order to protect existing players in the market; which, not incidentally, is what the state-granted monopoly privilege called intellectual property is about too. ↩

As the Left is wont to do in lieu of sound argument, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently related what is meant to be a heartrending story:

Recently, I’ve had a chance to read letters from award winning writers and artists whose livelihoods have been destroyed by music piracy. One letter that stuck out for me was a guy who said the songwriting royalties he had depended on to ‘be a golden parachute to fund his retirement had turned out to be a lead balloon.’ This just isn’t right.

My first immediate thought was why isn’t it right? Shouldn’t a progressive egalitarian’s own values lead him to be against intellectual property?

“What,” the progressive egalitarian should say, “you do a little work maybe once in your life, work which would be impossible if not for the shared cultural traditions from which it is derived and re-mixed, and get lucky (unearned talent, fortuitously good timing, etc.)…and you think you shouldn’t have to work for society again!?! That’s hardly fair, now is it? To paraphrase Proudhon, intellectual ‘property’ is theft!”

Lest the reader get the wrong impression, I am not as insensitive to the artist’s plight as this hypothetical progressive egalitarian. And I do not share his collectivist values. We come to similar conclusions via different reasons. I do not think that merely having an idea entitles one, legally-speaking, to be monetarily compensated by others or to have the power to prevent others from using their own property as they wish. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It is implementing them effectively, and in such a way as to earn a profit, that is hard. Accomplishing this is praiseworthy, but one should not rest on one’s laurels. Life, to say nothing of a flourishing life, requires productive work in order to be maintained and improved. Intellectual property is an attempt to use the coercive power of the state via granted monopoly-privilege to defy this reality as well as economic law and moral principle. The artist Secretary Locke mentioned could have saved (more) for his retirement and/or kept producing art instead of relying upon royalties to see him through his old age.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

This is just one aspect of the Mises Institute’s effort to be completely open source. All of the intellectual eggs of the Austro-Libertarian movement are no longer being kept in one basket. The more people who seed those torrents, the easier the burden on the Mises Institute.

But more importantly, should statist or natural disaster strike, the world won’t lose the vast wealth of information hosted by the Mises Institute. Indeed, not only will the information not be lost, but there will be no downtime in its worldwide online distribution. Should states decide to actively move against us, they’ll be in for one hell of a game of ‘whack-a-mole’. They’ll face the same problems the RIAA, Hollywood, and others are facing in their War on Piracy Copying.

Austro-Libertarianism has gone viral, folks.

All this is to set the context for another example of open source anti-state resistance that I recently discovered. WordPress is an open source website and blogging platform. It’s an easy to use, yet powerful, tool for getting our ideas online where people around the world can access them. It’s free, as in speech and beer. This site is powered by it. The Libertarian Standard is powered by it. The Mises Institute’s site is powered by it.

But some countries like China and Australia censor the internet, blocking access to unapproved sites like YouTube and Twitter, filtering or blocking or shutting down or otherwise regulating websites and blogs.

There are ways to get around this censorship, however. Here’s one: The good folks at Global Voices Advocacy, an organization defending free speech online, have heroically created a guide to mirroring a censored WordPress blog. It’s covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, just like this site and The Libertarian Standard. Get it. Share it. Even if you don’t need it yet, someday you might. Others already do.

In the spirit of the Mises Institute’s torrented online library, I’m hosting the guide here as well.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

“For some reason folks think it’s okay to say to a creator of intellectual property that the product of our labors should be free; yet they never convincingly press that argument at a farmer’s market.”

This is because intellectual property is not legitimate property, whereas a farmer’s produce is. You might check out the following:

• Stephan Kinsella, “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (Sept. 4, 2009).
• Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, Mises Institute (2008).
• Roderick T. Long, “The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights,” Formulations Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1995).
• Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge University Press (2008).