Question: where do copyrights come from? Roger Lowenstein at the NYT tells us that copyrights come from the market, as in "If Bono sells a lot of CDs [and thereby gets very rich] ... It’s simply the market." Okay, wash Lowenstein's computer out with soap. It is not the market that allows Bono to get very rich by selling CDs, it is the government which tells people that it will arrest them and throw them in jail if they make copies of Bono's music without his permission. This is not the only whale size misrepresentation in Lowenstein's piece on inequality. He tells readers that "when it comes to raising the bottom in the short term, Washington basically has two choices: it can try to change market outcomes or it can redistribute after the market results are in. The first method is more intrusive. It includes limiting trade, regulating the workweek or restricting access to certain jobs..." This is about as wrong as you can be without burning a hole in the paper. You can restructure the market in all sorts of ways that reduce inefficiency and lead to greater equality. Adopting more efficient mechanisms than copyrights to support creative work is one obvious example. But, there is an endless list. Instead of restricting trade, we can remove the protectionist barriers that lead to high salaries for doctors, lawyers, economists, and reporters. My book, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer [the download is free] details a long list of ways in which the wealthy have rigged the rules to redistribute income upward. Altering these rules is not intruding into the market, in many cases it is removing barriers put in place to benefit the wealthy. The line being pushed in this article -- that the mechanisms that have redistributed income upward over the last quarter century are somehow natural and that they are efficient -- is simply not true. Such an assertion should not appear in a serious newspaper, except on the opinion page.
--Dean Baker
