WHAT IF PATENTS DID NOT EXIST? Can you imagine? You invent something, or develop a great idea for a product which you are certain will be extremely popular, and profitable. But there is no protection for your idea. The minute it enters your head, the drawing board, and comes into existence, anyone who finds out about it can perfectly legally steal the idea from you, copy it, market it, and profit from it, before you do. Your only recourse is to keep the idea a complete secret until launch day, then hit the market on the run, and hope you get enough of a head start to thwart and leave behind any potential imitators.
What if bankruptcy laws did not exist? No matter how much debt you incurred, or how you incurred it, you were liable for it, with no chapter seven or chapter eleven options, no way to ever get back on your financial feet, until and unless the debt is fully satisfied.
What if there were no such animal, no such legal fiction, as a "corporation? Big businesses, yes. Huge companies, yes. But no corporations, no incorporations within the court, within the legal system. No invisible corp, body , given to a business enterprise, making it a separate legal individual. That would mean that every individual, every owner of said business, or anyone having anything to do with it in any manner, would be entirely responsible for all financial invovlement, to the complete extent of involvement; there would be no separate entity known as a "corporation" to use as an avoidance of liability (responsibility) for flesh and blood humans. Whatever debt, however enormous, owed by the company, the owners of the compay, every investor, would be responsible for the satisfaction of said debt, no matter how enormous.
the term "free market" is deceiving. A truly free market, one without any government involvment, control, or regulation whatsoever, would be one without incorporated businesses, bankruptcy laws, or patents, or copyrights. You write a song, any body can sing it, record it, perform it, profit from it, right from the git go. A "free" market, rather than a market overseen by government to protect business enterprise from the big bad, natural predatory world around it.
Such an economic system would strangle on its own competitive brutality, dragging down so many people, stifling so much investment, that it could never function. Thus we invented the three completely artificial, government mandated and backed, economic devices described above; incorporation, patents, bankruptcy. Artificial ecomonic institutions, government instituted, cooperatively maintained by society at large, socially accepted and utilized. Socialism.
Socialism is what keeps capitalism afloat, and without socialism, there is no capitalism. Predictably, every hard nosed conservative capitalist in america or anywhere else would argue to the death that incorporation, bankruptcy, and patenting are not socialism, but are merely features to protect fair business practices. But what is "fair" business practice, if not made fair by universal rules, by society itself? Cutthroat competition, that's what fair business is, that's what fair living is; cut throat competition. All's fair in love and war, and everything else, in a truly "free" enterprise system. What we have is a mitigated, regulated enterprise systm, capitalism founded upoon socialist principles, to prevent economic collapse. Thank the powers that be for their kind socialistic assistance!
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