I was discussing the patent system with a right-wing penpal. At one point, he questioned the necessity of patents and copyrights and, because I believe that a properly-moderated patent/copyright system is a good healthy thing, I wondered how I ended up to the right of him on this issue. But...is it more conservative to believe there should be a patent system, or to believe ideas should multiply as freely as the 'free market' will let them?
Why does the patent system exist? To correct a deficiency in the free market. It turns out that people need incentives to create ideas and art just like they need incentives to create guns and butter. But once an idea has been thought up, it is not a scarce resource. You can't control its distribution unless you keep it all to yourself. The free market doesn't care about your idea--it only cares about how well you can turn it into something scarce (and therefore sellable). Your invention is worth nothing unless you can actually produce it--and produce it faster and cheaper than your competitors, who have free access to your idea because you can't lock it up.
In this system, would-be inventors throw up their hands. "I'm a smart guy. I came up with a great idea that deserves to make me a lot of money. You're telling me that's not enough? You're saying I need to be an expert businessman in addition to an expert engineer if I'm to profit off my skills? Forget you." And innovation stagnates.
The patent system is a human construction, run by the government, which corrects this deficiency. Everyone is glad it exists, and even critics of its current structure don't think it should be abolished. And yet, patents and copyrights constrain the things someone can naturally do with someone else's ideas. Right now, there's a market for cartoons. Anyone is free to make a cartoon, because the techniques for making cartoons are in the public domain. However, every cartoon has to be different. Steven Hillenberg owns SpongeBob Squarepants, so I can't use SpongeBob in my cartoons any more than Steven Hillenberg can use my toaster when I'm not around. If no one owned SpongeBob, there would be a whole other competitive, innovative market of SpongeBob cartoons. Same goes for Beatles remixes, or fan-made Star Wars movies. No one would have incentive to create those new works, but if those works were somehow created, everyone could improve on them . That's the way things are in a free market.
Thinking about this has led me to make a distinction between free markets and capitalism. The free market is that entropic, Darwinian system in which anything goes. The amoral laws of supply and demand are the only laws in a free market.
Capitalism is another thing altogether: it puts a controlling framework around a free market to guide its energies toward innovation and societal progress. Capitalist markets have to be constructed on top of free markets, but they are constructed. Capitalism could be conceptualized as the art of constructing market and government policies that foster as much innovation as possible, given the laws of the free market. But capitalism is not the same as the free market. Capitalism's cool, the free market sucks.
It's the difference between evolution and animal husbandry. Evolution is a natural system that works well for creating a planet teeming with diverse life. It's not so good at giving those various life forms the traits that are the most useful for people. For instance, sheep are great, but if their wool were fluffier, that would be better for humans. By intentionally mating their fluffiest livestock, farmers harness the forces of evolution and genetics. They put energy into the system and rules onto the chaos to eliminate inconvenient properties of evolution -- whereby it takes millions of years, and trial and error on a cosmic scale, and you might end up with sheep that are fluffy but carniverous.
Of course, capitalism goes awry when it's structured in a way that commoditizes things too much and stifles innovation. Our current system of de facto indefinite copyrights is such a system, because ideas are treated too much like real objects. My toaster will always be mine unless I say otherwise. Should the plays I write have that property? Disney never has to relinquish the rights to Mickey Mouse, so has no incentive to innovate its Mickey Mouse cartoons or create new cartoon characters.
When we agree that the "benevolent free market" is a distraction, and that any market worth fighting for necessarily structures the range of economic options with some moral end in mind, then we can have productive conversations about those glitchy commodities where the free market laws clash with human endeavors: drugs, algorithms, cartoon characters, etc.