I Miss My Troubled, Unwell Norwegian Friend

Stuart K. Hayashi

 

I still worry about my troubled, unwell Norwegian friend, the one I wrote about previously. I mean my troubled friend who was obsessed with child molesters: the one who kept bringing up, out of nowhere, her fascination with child molesters, only for it to turn out later that her paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all credibly accused of sexually abusing girls over whom they were tasked with watching over.

I dearly wish for reconciliation, but that is not to happen absent of her returning to regular psychiatric care and ending contact with those who were, and likely still are, reinforcing her morbid gestures. I know that that is a prerequisite, and I know it because of what already happened years ago.

Soon before returning to Norway for the summer, she promised me unsolicitedly that when she returned to Norway, she would resume seeing a mental health professional. I did not initiate asking her about it. She took the initiative to make that promise, unprompted by anyone else. When she was back in Norway, I asked her about it, and she claimed not to remember. Then she said she doesn’t need a mental health professional anyway. Soon after, she became mostly uncommunicative. But in one of the few times in that duration when she did communicate again, she said she was having panic attacks daily. Then when she returned to O‘ahu, she was uploading onto social media the photoshops that an internet-famous Norwegian artist did of her where she was photoshopped to have a chalky-white face like a corpse’s.

After two years of that, and after returning to Norway for the long term, she stopped uploading the dead-body photos. But then Corpse Artist started uploading pretentiously photoshopped images of himself up in the mountains with his mountain bike. Then my friend followed with photos of herself — no longer with the dead-body face — always hiking on mountain tops. Corpse Artist doesn’t do the corpse art anymore, but his influence is still very much in the picture (sometimes literally). 

And my friend made a big show of legally changing her last name to match her father’s, a last name that was also the maiden name of her paternal grandmother who feigned ignorance about the child sexual abuse inflicted by her husband (my friend’s paternal grandfather). (Previously, my friend’s legal last name was her mother’s.) With my now knowing the history of what happened on her father’s side of the family, I think that though it is much more subtle than the chalky-white-face dead-body photos, the legal name change looks like another morbid gesture. It seems a very try-hard attempt to convey that her relationship with her father is fine; even great.

If I resume contact with my friend, and she’s not angry but instead welcomes reconciliation but doesn’t return to mental-health treatment and stay with it, I know what is going to happen. It will be a repeat of what happened before. She might return to treatment for a little while. But eventually she will stop with it and, when I ask about it, she will feign memory loss about it as she did before. And then all of our interactions will become a repeat of what happened that summer. At first it will again seem be a happy situation. But then my friend will resume making morbid gestures with the expectation that I play along and act as if they are safe and fine. And playing along and acting as if that is safe and fine is tacit reinforcement of the morbid gestures.

My friend first establishing regular psychiatric treatment is necessarily a prerequisite to any attempt at reconciliation.

If my friend sees this: legally remove the name of those who facilitated abuse: the last name of a father who facilitated abuse and the maiden name of a paternal grandmother who “looked the other way” to maintain plausible deniability about abuse that she knew had happened. Cut out of your life and social media those, such as Corpse Artist and his sister-in-law and brother, who reinforce your morbid tendencies. Rather than thanking them for their morbid images, they always should have been blocked, just as they should be now. Return to regular psychiatric care and have the borderline/ emosjonelt ustabil personlighetsforstyrrelse diagnosed properly. Make this known publicly. With the danger you have consistently imposed on self and others, even people outside of the inner circle have a right to know about your psychiatric condition and the risks of it. Such important steps would not be for me, but for your own happiness, well-being, and peace. But just as it was in our last phone conversation, you already know that.

Online AI Image-Repackagers and the Libertarian Apologists for Their Art Theft

Such Libertarians Whitewash Regurgitative AI’s Copyright Infringements Not Because They Like the AI But Because They Wish to Erode Copyright Protections Further


Stuart K. Hayashi

There are tremendous issues with what is called “generative AI.” The issue is not with the technology as such, but with the unethical way in which it is being used — a use that the companies behind “generative AI” demand go unpunished by law. And that is a dilemma because it involves the violation of intellectual property rights (IPRs). And on account of their party line from the 1970s being one of undue hostility to IPRs, it is all too common for self-proclaimed libertarians to whitewash the harms being inflicted by the “generative AI” as it currently stands.

The usual people who make use of “generative AI” to produce images, which they call art, supply their own rationalizations for the theft. Artists on social media, such as on the Facebook/Meta Company’s platform Threads, frequently get into arguments with those users, whom they call “AI bros.” Yet such artists are unfamiliar with the rationalizations and motivations by IP-hating libertarians. Thus, when artists on social media come across IP-hating libertarians trying to whitewash “generative AI,” those artists mistake those IP-hating libertarians for the usual AI bros. However, in the context of their propaganda for “generative” AI’s copyright violations, both the motivations and some specific specious arguments of IP-hating libertarians are notably distinct from the AI bros’.

In this essay I shall explain the motivation behind the IP-hating libertarians’ insistence on shoving themselves into this controversy, and how it differs from the AI bros’ intentions. After that, I shall explain a particular specious argument from two IP-hating libertarian journalists who, unlike most IP-hating libertarians, are generally respected among more-mainstream people, such as those on the political center-Left. Then I shall expose the fallacy of that rationalization from the two IP-hating libertarian journalists.

“Generative” AI As Anything But
We begin with an explanation of how “generative AI” trashes intellectual property rights — and how the generative part of that name is a misnomer. Essentially, what happens is this. The user types in what sort of image he wants — an image that we are initially misled to believe comes fully formed out of nowhere. What the user types in is called a “prompt.” And then the image appears.

The truth is that the image does not come from nothing. Rather, what happens is this. The AI sends out “bots” or “crawlers” to crawl the World Wide Web to scrape for data. Upon finding data, such as a copyrighted visual image, the AI produces an exact copy of that image. This is misleadingly referred to as “training” of the AI. Human consumers of this product send prompts to the AI to deliver a new image. Upon this, the AI takes the data it stored and, through use of statistical probabilities, assembles an image derived from that data. This is highly commercialized. Users pay money to the AI companies for this service. Yet the artists who created the actual copyrighted visual images upon which this technology depends, receive no financial remuneration for the economic value that the AI company took from them, the value for which the AI company’s consumers pay to the AI company instead. The AI company did not even ask first for the copyright holders’ permission.

It is thus misleading to say that this technology is “generative.” Nay, it is derived nonconsensually from the economic value that other parties have created. As observed by novelist Maggie North, a more accurate term for this is “regurgitative AI.”

Nor are these, as they have been called, AI image-“generators.” They are image-repackagers. The digital artist Reid Southen notes at the 21-minute, 1-second timestamp, that it is misleading to say that with regurgitative AI, online artists are being expected to compete against a machine. Rather, online artists are expected to compete against “their own work” that has been stolen from them.

A false comparison here in response, made both by AI bros and by IP-hating libertarians, is that the regurgitative AI is just doing what copyright-respecting artists have always done in creating new works inspired by other parties’ artworks that preceded them.

As I have written before, there is a vital distinction between copyright infringement versus one artwork being inspired by other parties’ artworks. IP-hating libertarians note the importance of artists having the freedom to make works greatly influenced by others’. But then those IP-hating libertarians do conflate artistic inspiration with copyright infringement. They do this to rationalize that copyright infringement is actually not bad after all. At the conclusion of this essay I will return to spelling out exactly what is wrong with that equivocation on the IP-hating libertarians’ part.

Here I will point out a crucial difference, though further explanation will have to wait until the end of this essay. For now, it will suffice to remember that when artists produce commercial artworks that still other, preceding artworks have inspired, the artists of the new commercial works do not rely on the production of exact copies of the older works against the consent of older works’ creators. By contrast, it is inherent to the commercial production of new images by the AI that it produces exact copies of the works from which the new images are assembled.

As long as this is done absent of the explicit consent of the owners of the copyrights on the original works the AI is using, the AI companies are indeed directly benefiting financially from the nonconsensual copying and pirating of copyrighted artwork. There are two important values that AI companies owe to copyright holders — first, the revenue accrued from the use of copies made in the data-scraping of the copyrighted artwork and, second and far more important, the ethical acquisition of permission from the copyright holders that should have been sought from the outset.

However, two well-respected, IP-hating libertarian journalists have a reply to this. They say that what the regurgitative AI is doing actually is the same, in principle, as artists making new artworks inspired by other artworks. The two IP-hating libertarian journalists say this is so because, if Artist Bob produces his own commercial work inspired by that of Artist Angela, Artist Bob does necessarily rely on making and storing an exact copy of Artist Angela’s artwork. You are justified in wondering how this possibly could be so. The two IP-hating libertarian journalists continue that the exact copy is stored in Artist Bob’s memory, in his brain. That claim is so asinine that it baffled me initially. That argument departs so substantially from even a remote understanding of memory and human psychology, that I was baffled how two men who are seemingly intelligent could make it.

But now I understand. The desire for IP-hating libertarians to rationalize their desire to undermine IP protection is so ingrained that they will engage in such mental gymnastics. These are two libertarians who claim to have advanced beyond the point of toeing the party line of Murray Rothbard and the other Rothbardians of the 1970s. But in their being latched onto the anti-IP talking points of the 1970s, these two well-respected libertarian journalists are indeed stuck in the party line.

As I said earlier, when artists trying to protect their own artwork come across IP-hating libertarians’ apologetics for regurgitative AI’s copyright theft, those artists usually mistake those IP-hating libertarians for the usual AI bros. I want to rectify that. The IP-hating libertarians pose a specific danger to artists that the usual AI bros do not. The IP-hating libertarians are horrifyingly influential among legal theorists at George Mason University, and I fear that they may even have influence over legal theorists at the University of Chicago. As I have written in previous essays (1, 2), the libertarians’ case against intellectual property relies primarily on a straw-man argument most influentially delivered by a Chicago-school economist. And, as mentioned at the 36-minute, 44-second timestamp, the IP-hating libertarians even have a strong influence over Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The vast majority of people in the industrialized world — even ones who have their own complaints about copyright enforcement on websites like YouTube — know better than to swallow the rationalizations of IP-hating libertarians. But as long as they have the ear of legal theorists at George Mason University and a U.S. Supreme Court justice, such IP-hating libertarians still have the power to inflict serious damage upon artists. And these IP-hating libertarians exert influence upon academic legal theorists and jurists in a manner that the run-of-the-mill AI bro does not.

That is why I give special attention to IP-hating libertarians. It is also why, when IP-hating libertarians weigh in on the issue of regurgitative AI’s copyright violations, I implore all artists protective of their work to learn what separates the IP-hating libertarians from the AI bros. (By conventional “AI bros,” I mean the customers of AI companies. I concede that, with his copying up to Donald Trump, billionaire OpenAI executive Sam Altman also maintains a lot of clout.)

I am writing this essay to explain how the whitewashing of regurgitative AI’s copyright desecrations by IP-hating libertarians is motivated by a particular ideological passive-mindedness — even bigotry — that is uncommon among the rationalizations of the AI brows. I intend to explain its origins and how this has led to the shockingly bizarre rationalizations of two respected libertarian journalists who, at first glance, seem to be the sort who should know better.

The Motives and Tactics of Those Who Actually Use Regurgitative AI — The “AI Bros” 

When it comes to AI bros who, on social media, very defensively rationalize their use of regurgitative AI and accuse objecting real artists of “gatekeeping,” the motivation and rationalizations are much simpler. These are people who once had a vague desire to create beautiful images from their own hands. However, they found such attempts too frustrating and discouraging, and they quit at it.

But when they first used regurgitative AI, it gave them the feeling that this was the closest they would get to knowing what it would be like for the implementation of their own aesthetic choices to result in a new visual image. Having given up on real visual art, this is the nearest that such people have felt to having come to acquire that sort of empowerment. But then real artists came and ruined that feeling by reproaching these AI bros’ use of the regurgitative AI. Hence, the AI bros have offered a plethora of rationalizations.

One of those rationalizations is that regurgitative AI “democratizes” the creation of visual art. By that standard, real artists who object to regurgitative AI are snooty elitists guilty of “gatekeeping.” But compared to many other pastimes, it’s relatively inexpensive to buy a pencil and paper and start drawing. Other than that the materials are usually purchased by their parents, this is something that is done by literally most four-year-olds. It’s difficult to name a pastime that has fewer and less obtrusive barriers to entry.

The fine arts are considered snooty and elitist in that, among those who use their hands to produce visual art, only a tiny minority have reached the point where the visual art can be called photorealistic. But the reason why this small number of people have reached that elite status is that they put in the effort to earn it. That is snooty and elitist only in the same way that anti-capitalists consider it snooty and elitist that, under free enterprise, the party that satisfies the marketplace demand of willing customers more successfully than others is the party that gets the richest.

Another rationalization is that regurgitative AI allows for disabled people to do art in a way that they could not have done in the more traditional methods. Actually, there are plenty of successful people in the fine arts who are disabled. And the AI bros who consistently make this argument, predictably enough, are people who are conventionally able-bodied.

And another favorite rationalization is one I have tackled before. It is that there is no such thing as artistic originality anyway, which makes art theft okay. In one of her “speed-paint storytime” YouTube videos, the online illustratrix “LavenderTowne” goes over this. Someone told her, “The fact remains that originality doesn’t exist. It’s something every type of artist knows and has known for a century.”

To that, LavenderTowne quips, “Dude, I missed that part in history class where 1920s flappers discovered that originality doesn’t exist.”

Following that quip, LavenderTowne does proceed to provide an argument that is more serious. With respect to the thought-terminating cliché that “All art makes use of already-established conventions, and therefore artistic originality has never existed,” you can also read my own refutation of it.

In her video, LavenderTowne also goes over tand refutes several other AI bro rationalizations as well. I recommend it.

In the case of AI bros, the rationalizations are about trying to justify morally an action they have already become accustomed to engaging in. By contrast, I would not be surprised if the IP-hating libertarians who are apologists for regurgitative AI do not even use it. Instead of defending an action they already practice, the IP-hating libertarians who defend regurgitative AI are acting out of a desire to to adhere to an ideological doctrine and dogma to which they have already pledged allegiance and are reluctant to let go of. In the case of the two IP-hating libertarian journalists I intend to single out, they pride themselves on veering away from much of the dogma from the 1970s, but the obsession with denouncing IP is something they still insist on holding onto.

The Half-Century-Old Party Line That IP-Hating Libertarians Will Not Give Up On
Here is a brief history on the IP-hating libertarians from the late twentieth century onward.

As usual, the most fanatical positions taken by self-described libertarians can be traced in the late twentieth century to an economist named Murray N. Rothbard. When the Libertarian Party formed in the 1970s, and Rothbard was still a part of it, he made known his opposition to patent rights. He vocalized, though did not originate, the falsehood that a U.S. utility patent is a government-enforced monopoly on an industry, claiming to hold exclusive ownership over a general idea for a whole category of product. The libertarian writer Roy A. Childs, Jr., too, is complicit in this.

Soon after, Wendy McElroy and Samuel Edward Conkin III — self-proclaimed “anarchists” like Rothbard — extended that denunciation and misconception to copyrighted artwork. They conflate an artwork — being a fleshed-out and fully rendered culmination of thousands of creative decisions — as a mere “idea,” as though it is the same in principle as a vague and hazy general idea not given a form by which it can be experienced through the senses.

They then put together the straw man that for an artist to claim ownership over the art she created — the art that is concretely experienced through interfacing with the senses — is to claim ownership over “ideas” in general, including vague hazy ideas of other people that are similar to the general premise of the artwork. As further stitches to their straw man, these IP-hating libertarians pronounce that for you to expect copyright protection over your original artwork is for you to attempt to use the government to police other people’s thoughts. In all seriousness, these IP-hating libertarians propound that copyrights are a form of censorship. One who embraced that standard would have to conclude that plagiarism is the exercise of free speech.

I have rebutted those falsehoods in essays here and here.

There have been two main strategies by which libertarians have tried to undermine intellectual property rights. The first is the blunter approach from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), and Liberty International (formerly the International Society for Individual Liberty). It consists of declaring outright that intellectual property rights are abhorrent and ought to be abolished altogether.

Frighteningly, this fanatical approach has been becoming more mainstream in recent years. We see this with two billionaires, Elon Musk and Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey. Both of those men have stakes in regurgitative AI and have been hit with well-deserved copyright infringement lawsuits over it.

In response, Jack Dorsey bleated on Twitter, “Delete all IP law.”

To that, Elon Musk replied, “I agree.”

The folly of that tantrum is explained well by Raymond Van Dyke on the blog IP Watchdog, a blog I recommend highly.

Despite the cries for abolition of IP rights now being endorsed by famous billionaires, such fanaticism is, thankfully, still not entertained seriously by most people. For that reason, the libertarian think-tanks that are more sophisticated about the law and public policy exercise a strategy that is more subtle. This is what they do. They have lawyers keep tabs on court cases pertaining to IP enforcement, especially ones that have potential for setting new precedents on how far and how strictly IP enforcement can be applied in future cases. Then they come out with policy briefs and opinion pieces arguing that the court should deliver a ruling that sets a precedent to weaken the ability to enforce IP.

That is the modus operandi of the libertarian think tanks of Washington, D.C., especially visible (1, 2) from the Reason Foundation.

As they know better than to expect any immediate repeal of IP rights, their strategy is to weaken IP little by little.

The Rothbardians of the Mises Institute revile the Reason Foundation and the other D.C. think tanks for having lost interest in a number of Rothbard’s favorite talking points. Reason and the D.C. think tanks are not apologists for the Confederacy of the Civil War. Murray Rothbard, the Mises Institute, and Liberty International propagate the lie that the Confederation had the moral high ground over the Union. Reason and the D.C. think tanks are also not reflexively inclined to proclaim that every Third-World terrorist’s attack on the U.S. military is merely the innocent terrorist striking back against the U.S. military for being an evil empire. Worse to the Rothbardians, Reason and the D.C. think tanks are not full-throated in extolling the glories of anarcho-“capitalism” and “market” anarchy, an illogical and unjust model of society I refuted here.

And the Rothbardians of the Mises Institute fault Reason and the other D.C. think tanks for not calling for immediate destruction of IPRs. To the Mises Institute, the piecemeal approach of Reason and the other D.C. think tanks is a mealy-mouthed milquetoast position. Yet the approach of Reason and the other think tanks has made much more headway. As these think tanks’ adherents are strategically placed in the law and economics departments of George Mason University, it is the situation that Reason and the D.C. think tanks always have the ear of this college’s legal scholars.

As one of the most-cited straw-man arguments of these IP-hating libertarians also comes from a twentieth-century Chicago-school economist, I fear that the IP-hating libertarians’ rationalizations might have influence over the legal scholars of the University of Chicago as well. And intellectual property lawyer Adam Mossoff has pointed out that on account of GMU libertarians in general having an influence over U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, the rationalizations against IP rights have correspondingly influenced him. (Admittedly, with Clarence Thomas receiving undisclosed gifts from billionaires, I cannot rule out that Sam Altman and other AI executives might be a devil on his shoulder as well.)

The latest court cases that these IP-hating legal theorists have their eyes on are the copyright suits over regurgitative AI. That is why IP-hating libertarians have inserted themselves into arguments on Threads that online artists have been having against AI bros. Again, online artists too often mistake these IP-hating libertarians for AI bros. But many of these IP-hating libertarians do not use the regurgitative AI; their motives are different. And, again, the danger is that whereas internet-arguers who are customers to AI companies do not have sway over actual influential legal scholars, many IP-hating libertarians do.

Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 Sounding Sane at First
That brings me to two libertarian journalists who come from the Reason Foundation sort of tradition. These two libertarian journalists are relatively well-respected, even by leftwing laymen who follow the news regularly. I will call them Journalist No. 1 and Journalist No. 2.

Journalist No. 1 ran a rather well-known website for philosophic essays pertaining to the libertarian movement and he now hosts a podcast for one of the more-benign remaining libertarian online periodicals, at which he serves a big editorial role. Unlike Reason magazine, this more-benign libertarian online periodical doesn’t plaster around Robby Soave’s smug smirk as he spreads COVID denialism and makes excuses for MAGA’s pathology and paranoia.

Journalist No. 2 once regularly wrote for Reason magazine. But, wisely, in 2024 on Threads he publicly condemned Reason magazine for its foolish whitewashing of MAGA. Journalist No. 2 noticed the psychological evasion on the part of Reason magazine’s editors in pretending that Kamala Harris’s fallacies on political economy and dunder-headed proposed government regulations were somehow at least as bad as — or somehow worse than — Donald Trump’s flagrant rejection of liberal republican Due Process and the rule of law.

There are big areas where both Journalists No. 1 and 2 have distanced themselves from many of the favorite public-policy positions of the Mises Institute and other worshipers of Murray Rothbard. Unlike most Rothbardians — including the vice president of international relations at Liberty International — these two do not whitewash the Confederation as having the moral high ground over Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. They abhor the white supremacism of the Mises Institute. They criticize the Mises Institute’s bigotry concerning dark-skinned immigrants. And they take positions that most self-avowed libertarians — including those now running Reason magazine — detest as “Woke.”

It is to the credit of Journalist No. 1 that he dissents from transphobia. In attempt to ingratiate themselves to the Intellectual Dark Web that serves as apologist to Donald Trump, it has become near-uniform for libertarians to affirm agreement with all of the most popular denunciations of transgender people and their desire for equal treatment. Journalist No. 1, by contrast, has done podcast episodes where he has conducted interviews dispelling the misconceptions about transgender people that other libertarians have contributed to perpetuating.

Considering the many fanatical positions of the Rothbardians that Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 have shied away from, it may be tempting to assume that Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 are not fanatical themselves. Tragically, such an assumption would be wrong. The two remain devoted to the party line that the libertarian movement formed in the 1970s against intellectual property rights. They have bound themselves to the obligatory hostility to legitimate copyright enforcement. And they take the more gradualist position — rather than demand immediately the abolition of IP, they comment on the latest controversy over IP enforcement and then urge the weakening of that enforcement. Toeing that party line, Journalists No. 1 and 2 interject on the topic of regurgitative AI’s copyright infringements. And the argument they provide on it is astonishing in how ludicrous it is.

Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 Bizarrely Misunderstanding Human Memory in Particular and Human Beings in General
First, Libertarian Journalists 1 and 2 make note of how, in scraping data of online images, the regurgitative AI will make and store an exact copy of the copyrighted image against the copyright holder’s consent. Then, in a very specious obscuring of context, Libertarian Journalists 1 and 2 say that that is exactly what every copyright-holding human artist does. They say that in learning to do fine art, the artist saw other copyrighted images and that her memory produced exact copies of the copyrighted images that she stored in her memory. Then, continue Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2, the artist’s own original works are simply a similar statistics-based reconstituting of other artists’ copyrighted works in the same manner that the regurgitative AI’s regurgitative image is a reconstituting of the images that the AI scraped.

Therefore, conclude Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2, artists who complain about their copyrights being infringed are hypocrites: the AI is doing exactly what those artists do. The implication is that all art is an unoriginal derivative of someone else’s, and therefore actual copyrighted art by human beings is not any less of a copyright infringement than is the output of regurgitative AI. That is not so much to defend regurgitative AI than it is to demean and undermine confidence in the recognition that any artwork deserves strict copyright enforcement at all. Again, the goal is not to call for the abolition of copyrights right away but instead to set a precedent that weakens confidence in, and the ability to enforce, copyrights in the future.

Libertarian Journalist No. 1 has made these assertions repeatedly on his blog and on Threads. Here is one example on the latter. He begins with the insincere hook — which all of his other online writings on this topic belie — “I’m sympathetic to the concern that there is something wrong with the way AI models are trained.” Then he gets to what he actually wants to convey.

But I’ve yet to see a persuasive case that (1) training them specifically constitutes theft of the training materials in a way that (2) doesn’t also entail that a human watching a bunch of movies, internalizing what they’ve learned, and creating new work inspired by them isn’t theft.

Many plainly convincing cases had already been made to Libertarian Journalist No. 1. He just wrote off those convincing cases immediately and arbitrarily because they did not match the conclusion to which he is already married. We can be diplomatic and say that his criteria for what does and doesn’t constitute something “convincing” are . . . idiosyncratic.

To his comrade, Libertarian Journalist No. 2 chimes in, 

My brain contains copies of many, many copyrighted works at a sufficient level of fidelity that they’d be infringing if I could somehow telepathically beam them to a hard drive. We just very reasonably choose not to apply copyright to brains.

Note the far-fetched boast on the part of Libertarian Journalist No. 2 that his own conscious autobiographical memory of a copyrighted artwork is exact to the same degree — or, as he says, “at a sufficient level of fidelity” — as a perfect digital copy of it. The dubious nature of Libertarian Journalist No. 2’s braggadocio, and that Libertarian Journalist No. 1 is not taken aback by a claim so stark in how it defies credulity, surprised me. Upon my initial reading of that exchange, I felt vicarious embarrassment for them both.

This argument from Journalists No. 1 and 2 is so out of touch with even the most rudimentary understanding of human psychology, artistic ability, and the body’s motor functions inhering in art-making, that it makes Journalists No. 1 and 2 themselves sound not like humans but like an AI — and an AI of an already-obsolete model, ready for the junk heap, at that.

How Human Memory Actually Works, and How That Makes It a Less Effective Tool for Copyright Infringement Than Does Regurgitative AI 

A strong and relatively vivid memory of a particular sight, sound, or other sensation is part of what is called autobiographic memory. If you have committed to heart the plot and dialogue from a beloved movie, that is autobiographic memory at work. More specifically, that involves semantic memory, which is general knowledge, and episodic memory, which is memory of events and the sensations relating to such experiences. But much of those, especially the latter, are subsumed into the larger category of autobiographic memory. With exceptions that are freakishly rare — and I will address that later — even the people with the strongest autobiographic, semantic, and episodic memories cannot produce in their minds a replica of someone else’s art to the exactitude that Libertarian Journalist No. 2 blithely assumes. That is the reason why there is such a psychological phenomenon as the Mandela Effect, where people think they remember a detail of the past so strongly and yet that detail turns out inaccurate. A famous example is that they strongly remember the children’s books being titled The Berenstein Bears instead of The Berenstain Bears with an a in the -stain where they expected an e to be. Even real artists with very strong autobiographic, semantic, and episodic memories are often bedeviled by the Mandela Effect, giving the lie to Libertarian Journalist No. 2’s conceit that his “brain contains copies of many, many copyrighted works at a sufficient level of fidelity that they’d be infringing” on copyright if he could “telepathically beam” those memories “to a hard drive.”

As I will explain soon, even the extremely rare people with memories as strong as what Libertarian Journalist No. 2 claims to have are people who cannot reproduce other people’s artworks manually with their own paint brushes and other art supplies if they have not practiced, for years, the same artistic medium as any work that they could possibly intend to copy. That is because for an actual artist to reproduce another’s work with the same degree of fidelity as the regurgitative AI is capable, the would-be copycat artist must fulfill an additional requirement. For the would-be copycat artist to succeed at being a copycat, she must employ another form of memory that Libertarian Journalists No. 1 and 2 have not mentioned, and which they are apparently trying to conflate with autobiographic memory.

There is an extremely small number of people on Earth — fewer than one-hundred documented — that do have perfect autobiographic, semantic, and episodic memories. And at least one very high-profile one even is an artist. That is the actress Marilu Henner. She has proven to psychologists that she is able to remember the exact and minute details of events she observed from decades past. She has given details of memories of a particular day’s events from years earlier and, when psychologists have investigated those details, they always check out.

I doubt, however, that Libertarian Journalist No. 2 is among one of those one-hundred people with perfect autobiographic, semantic, and episodic memories. The chances of that are less than 1 in 80 million.

And even with her perfect autobiographic memory, if Marilu Henner tried to produce a perfect copy of a work she observed that involved artistic media other than acting, and which she had not been practicing for years, she would not succeed. That is on account of the fact that artists who have strong autobiographic, semantic, and episodic memories still rely on another form of memory both in their original works and in imitations — another form of memory, one that that Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 have ignored, and which regurgitative AI bypasses in its own imitations of copyrighted works.

That other form of memory is “muscle memory.” Autobiographic, semantic, and episodic memory are held on the conscious level, and that is not enough for an artist to reproduce manually the work of another. That, and all professional-level real art, requires the acquisition and exercise of muscle memory not through conscious memorizing with one’s cerebrum but subconsciously through consistent practice as the artist moves other parts of her body.

Consider the “Get What You Deserve” speech that Joaquim Phoenix delivers in the movie Joker. Many of the movie’s fans felt inspired by that speech and committed it to memory — their autobiographic, semenatic, and episodic memories. If I committed that speech to memory and video-recorded myself reciting it, it would not duplicate Joaquim Phoenix’s performance in such a manner that Warner Brothers would identify it as infringement on the movie studio’s copyright. Even aside from my inborn physical differences from Joachin Phoenix, such as my nose being shaped differently from his, my reciting the speech would result in my using a different tone, in my vocal inflections being different, and the gestures of my upper body being dissimilar.

Comparing, side by side, Joachim Phoenix’s performance against my verbatim recitation of his speech, you would notice that Phoenix is a pro whereas I am worse than an amateur. All of those nuances, which eventually add up to a powerful effect, are part of the muscle memory for which Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 have neglected to account.

If, through his own muscle memory and use of traditional art supplies like paintbrushes, Professional Artist No. 2 did successfully produce an exact copy of Professional Artist No. 1’s copyrighted work against her consent, then Artist No. 1 would be right to sue him. But the costly demands of an actual artist building up muscle memory to that point has made it relatively unusual for real artists to infringe upon one another so blatantly. Hence, while this sort of unauthorized duplication has always been a problem and worry, it was something that, relatively speaking, real artists have not had to worry as much about. Note that with both her perfect autobiographic memory and acting experience, Marilu Henner is one of the handful of people on Earth who could reproduce Joachim Phoenix’s body language perfectly if she delivered her own rendition of his “Get What You Deserve” speech. And note that even she does not infringe on copyright in the way that Libertarian Journalist No. 2 insinuates that all artists do in practice.

By contrast, regurgitative AI bypasses the limitations of muscle memory in humans. For that reason, regurgitative AI makes it cheaper to infringe on copyrighted works through accurate duplications, making it likelier that these forms of piracy will occur on a much larger scale than before. As a consequence, real artists — whom Libertarian Journalist No. 1 tries to gaslight for being “arrogant” gatekeepers — are, in fact, entirely reasonable in worrying about abuses from this new threat.

IP-Hating Libertarians Getting Something They Deserve
Fortunately the tech journalist Brian Penny, whom I think is politically center-Left, gives Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 the ridicule they have rightfully earned. In reply he posts,

Absolutely nobody in the history of humanity ever once learned anything by consuming billions to trillions of hours of anything and then magically becoming an instant expert. That is a myth, and it’s a dumb one. You’ve surely read at least one book or heard one interview in your life talking about people practicing and getting better over time by doing, not by sitting still and binging billions to trillions of hours. . . . You can’t be serious.

As for stealing, go into Walmart right now and start reading every book or watching every DVD. Report back how many you get through before they approach you for theft. Your perspective is too derpy...even [to] be believable.🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

To reinforce the point further, Brian Penny had some visual aid. On the right for a Threads post he had a professional artist’s illustration of the Marvel Comics character Wolverine. On the left was Mr. Penny’s own amateurish and crude drawing of the same character — the sort he would have done at age four. With that illustration, Mr. Penny calls attention,

If watching a bunch of X-Men movies and the animated series and reading their comics and playing with their action figures growing up made me an artist, then why does my Wolverine look like an underdeveloped child drew it?

Mine is the head on the left 😹😹😹 the one on the right was what AI bros keep telling me I need to stare at to learn like a human.

Mr. Penny was correct in all of that except for his assumption that Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 are conventional AI bros rather than ideologues who don’t even use regurgitative AI and are instead still trapping themselves in this part of Rothbardian dogma from the 1970s. When I first read the works of Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2, I thought they were too smart to believe in something as absurd as what they have stated seriously on this topic. But rationalizations so absurd are what allegedly intelligent people fall into when they will not release themselves from this dogma that does nothing but begrudge our intellectual property rights.

Libertarian Journalist No. 1 has also repeatedly said that regurgitative AI imagery is the same, in principle, as search engines sending out bots and crawlers over websites to gather data on them, all without the permission of those websites. That, too, is false. When owners of websites withhold permission from search engines to obtain particular data, the websites’ codes contain what are called robots.txt exclusion protocols. When a website possesses a robots.txt protocol, the search engine abides by it. By contrast, as shown in this NPR piece, the regurgitative AI’s bots flagrantly disregard and bypass the robots.txt protocol. This indicates that the businessmen who own the regurgitative AI are aware that they do not have permission to scrape data, and then they do it anyway. No, Libertarian Journalist No. 1, contrary to your assumptions, it is not the same in principle at all.

Again, one of the AI bros’ favorite rationalizations is that “AI democratizes art.” It definitely has not, but that word does describe something related that is far more important and far more interesting. Digital technology truly has enabled a human being of relatively modest financial means to create and upload digital content. On account of such technology, the number of people creating their own genuinely original videos, and uploading those videos, has increased substantially since the year 2005. To the degree that the digital technology enabled that person to be the party making most of the creative choices directly, that technology has truly has helped to democratize content-creation. First dibs on ownership of such a piece of content must rightfully go to its creator. Hence, insofar as it has helped regular people — not only corporation-backed professionals — produce and distribute content, the technology has helped democratize copyrights themselves, the same copyrights that AI firms are now trying to deny.

In short, digital technology — AI and all the rest — has not democratized artistic skill. Artistic skill remains the exclusive province of those who put in the years of practice. Digital technology has, however, democratized intellectual property rights themselves, the very property rights that AI bros and libertarians wish to erase.

Use of this regurgitative AI will not be ethical until the data on which it “trains” come exclusively from copyright holders who offer explicit permission in an opt-in system. That is, absent of the explicit permission, the data are not to be used. Until such time, we can only hope that, in defiance of Libertarian Journalists Nos. 1 and 2 and the Reason Foundation’s essays urging otherwise, actual reason prevails and the artists win their civil suits against the corporate owners of the regurgitative AI.

Complexity of the Human Mind Allows for Reality and Ethics to Be Rendered Simple Enough to Be Understood

Yet Those Who Deny Free Will and the Human Capacity for Intellectual Originality Try to Reverse That Fact



Stuart K. Hayashi

On this blog I have previously written of two fallacies. In this essay, I will say how I think the two are related. I will also discuss the manner in which I think they are connected to a third fallacy that I have also addressed. And I will conclude with an iteration of how I think my rejection of the third fallacy is the result of my having a conclusion that is the perfect inverse of the implicit premise of advocates of the first two fallacies.

These are the first two fallacies:

1. the denial that humans possess free will, and 
2. the denial that humans are capable of originality in art and invention.

There are deniers of free will who deny it on the basis of supernatural claims. They pronounce that God, gods, prophecies, or the “movements” of stars directly determine the entire courses of our lives. But here I am thinking of those who deny free will on an allegedly secular basis. Following in the tradition of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, they purport to show that Aristotle’s Laws of Identity and Causality themselves preclude free will. I have refuted the argument in more detail over here, here, here, and here. 

For the purpose of this new essay, I will say that the deniers presume that because the human brain can be reduced to flesh and chemical reactions, it follows that there is no free will. And they continue that if your decision-making is influenced by any preexisting context, then that precludes free will. They say that in what you mistake for decision-making on your part, you are really a machine that is made out of meat and is ultimately running on the programming of chemical reactions and conditioning from environmental stimuli.

There are also those who deny that anything in artwork or invention is truly original. They propound that any artwork or invention that is initially praised for being original turns out not to be. They say that their reason for concluding as much is that every allegedly-original artwork or invention was at least partially inspired by other, preexisting artworks or inventions. The mere existence of any influences prior to the new artwork or invention, they assert, precludes any originality to be found in the new artwork or invention. They say that the idea of “originality” is misleading at best and quite illusory. As a substitute, they continue in their rhetoric, we should concede that any artwork or invention that we value should be praised simply as a competent “re-mix” and nothing beyond that. They would prefer that we settle for the belief that every innovation we value is nothing more than a “re-mixing” of long-established conventions, and they say that resigning ourselves to that conclusion is the best we can do. I have refuted that fallacy over here.

It is not unusual for deniers of originality to be, at least implicitly, deniers of free will as well. I have noticed this pattern over the years in philosophically-utilitarian Libertarians on Facebook. This has been especially a pattern in utilitarian Libertarians who stitch together very trite straw-man arguments against the validity of intellectual property rights. Now I think I know the connection.

Intellectual originality is something that requires the deliberate taking of initiative. The capacity for producing something original is incumbent upon someone being proactive in willingly choosing to venture into areas of thought that do not have well-established precedent. And the secular denial of free will is something that denigrates, from the outset, any acknowledgment of the very same proactivity. When a man downplays and denigrates acknowledgment of the necessity of free will in producing works of originality, that man encounters cognitive dissonance insofar as he celebrates artworks or inventions that he senses, at least implicitly, to demonstrate a sizable degree of novelty.

The attempted solution to that cognitive dissonance is to denigrate these praised-as-original works as a fortuitous result of people still doing something that, when it comes to how they use their nervous systems, is much more passive than what proactive originality would entail. In this interpretation, people passively “re-mix” the same conventional practices in art and engineering that have always have been “re-mixed,” and the works that stand out the most are the most serendipitously beneficial “re-mixes.” In lieu of acknowledging the proactiveness — the free will — in originality, the deniers of free will and originality pronounce that our favorite artworks and inventions came about as the most-fortuitous effects of relatively psychologically-passive “re-mixing” of traditions that humans have always practiced. Hence, the explicit denial of originality is the logical corollary to the irrational presumption that an adult’s actions cannot be attributed accurately to the proactively volitional choice-making of the adult herself.

Now we come to the third fallacy, the fallacy I most want to address in this essay. Many of the same deniers of free will and originality have another favorite stock-conclusion. They tell me, “You Objectivists want to believe that reality — even ethics — can be understood in terms of relatively simple principles. Yet reality itself is too messy and complex for your nice-and-neat logic. And that means reality is, in turn, too messy and complex for your simplistic principles.” 

You may note that part of the third fallacy is largely a simpler restatement of Immanuel Kant’s fallacious “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” I have already refuted the “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” over here. That is the part that says that the material reality you experience is too chaotic for Nice-and-Neat Logic to apply to it. Rather than refute that fallacy again, I here want to address how I think it relates to the other two fallacies, the denials of free will and originality. I find it ironic when the deniers of free will and originality say that reality is so complex that to live by principles is to try to oversimplify life. It is ironic, as the deniers’ pseudo-definitions of “free will” and “originality” are the actual oversimplifications. 

As a faculty of the human mind, free will is complex enough that it is not precluded if decision-making is influenced by factors external to the decision-making consciousness. Likewise as an important function of the human mind, intellectual originality is complex enough that the originality within an artwork or invention can still be recognized and appreciated even as that artwork or invention was inspired by previous works. Yet in their proclaiming reality as too complex for logic, the deniers’ implicit message is that logic and rationality themselves are too existentially simple even to begin to become applicable in the face of the complexities of reality and ethics.  

As an example, the fallacy in presuming the human mind as too simple in the face of reality’s complexity and messiness is visible in an otherwise-correct takedown of pseudoscientific health-advice “wellness” podcaster Andrew Huberman. In his more-professional capacity, Huberman is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford’s medical school. But as a science podcaster, Huberman takes the role of sciolist and ultracrepidarian who issues superficial pronouncements on scientific subjects where he holds no expertise or proper understanding. Pointing out the inaccuracies of Huberman’s podcast pronouncements should be sufficient, but one cardiologist on the social media website Threads faults Huberman for something else.

This medical-doctor detractor of Huberman’s pontificates that the true danger is that Huberman’s approach “gives the impression...that biology is exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” We are to believe that any such approach is false, as biological principles are not as consistent as are “computers,” for there is too much “complexity.”

But the reality is that upon validating properly the principles of nature, one does find that applying such principles enables an understanding of physiology that is, at least on a general scale, “exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” For instance, if you as a biologist study a particular ecosystem where members of a particular vertebrate species suffer a high mortality rate, the complexity of the process through which mutations occur will make it futile for you to predict exactly when a beneficent mutation might occur in that species that enables a reduction in the mortality rate. However, what does remain “exact, mechanistically simple, logical” is the fact that you know that in this and every other ecosystem, the principles of natural selection do still apply.

Even if you cannot predict exactly when a beneficent mutation will occur, it is the case that if you are able to identify the main environmental factors that wipe out most members of that species prior to their being able to reproduce, then you know that, provided those environmental conditions stay the same, you can make plausible predictions on what sort of mutations would enable future generations of that species to be better-adapted and to thrive with a reduced mortality rate. For a person — scientist or not — to presume that our species is forever doomed to ignorance and existential helplessness on account of the complexity of man’s environment is for him to underestimate the complexity of man’s mind and its capabilities. Such a commentator presumes that a proper understanding of nature cannot be made simple because that commentator presumes that it is the human mind that is too simple.

Regarding Dr. Huberman versus his cardiologist detractor, the falsehood in question is this. Dr. Huberman says that just as exercising a muscle makes it bigger, it follows that if you “do anything” mentally “that you don’t want to do,” a part of your brain likewise “gets bigger” physiologically. Even with Huberman being a neuroscientist, he is venturing into a specific area where he is not so knowledgeable. The cardiologist detractor faults Huberman’s falsehood on Huberman expecting that there are principles in biology that are “exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” In saying this, the cardiologist detractor is presuming that the context is the same in both trying to exercise a muscle and in trying to exercise the brain. In reality, the reason why the general principle in the first scenario does not apply to the second is that each scenario is a different context. Insofar as we are dealing in the same context, an understanding of that context does allow for the application of principles that are relatively “exact, mechanistically simple, logical.” And the human mind is complex enough to understand that a relatively simple principle that holds consistently in one context will not apply in another context that is wholly dissimilar.

Hence, people who accuse Objectivism and me of oversimplification in my trying to make sense of reality and ethics are the ones doing the actual oversimplification. They are trying to push an interpretation of human volitional consciousness that is oversimplified to the point that it cannot countenance the factual existence of free will or originality. I find that when public commentators like Sam Harris try to portray the mind as so simple that free will and originality are presumed not to exist, those commentators can conclude that human behavior is explained not by complex internal psychological phenomena but instead simpler and more-predictable unconscious bodily functions and environmental stimuli. That is, when a man denies the complexity of the mind and its volition, that man can “explain” (pseudo-explain) human actions as though they are relatively simple and predictable. But that oversimplified interpretation of human behavior does not leave room for addressing the seeming nuances of ethics. That leads these people to write off the discipline of ethics as too complicated to be understood in terms of principles anyway. (Of course, that is an internal contradiction: if science “proved” that the chemical processes of the mind are too simple for the mind to possess free will and understand reality in terms of consistent principles, then the mind would not be capable of knowing that science “proved” as much!)

I think I know how to phrase it now: in its necessarily volitional nature, the human mind is complex. And it is the complexity of that volitional nature that allows the mind to induce relatively simplified principles by which Nature and even ethics can be understood accurately. But the deniers of free will and originality try to reverse that: they presume the mind to be too simple even to possess the capacity for original thinking and the free will that intellectual original thinking requires. And the corollary to that presumption is the conclusion that reality and ethics must be too complicated for that same overly-simple mind to comprehend in the form of consistent principles.

For Sam Harris-type deniers of free will and utilitarian Libertarian economists who deny originality, it is the mind that is simple — too simple to exercise free will and originality — and the mind being simple makes material reality and ethics too complex to be understood in the form of principles. By contrast, my interpretation is that the human mind is complex, and that complexity allows for the mind to study the complexities of material reality and ethics to the point where they can be understood in terms that can be made relatively simple. Those relatively-simple terms are the valid principles.

On Monday, October 6, 2025, I added the quotation about the simplicity in the approach of pseudoscientific grifter Andrew Huberman.

The Real Mountain to Climb Is the One Whose Peak Is Mental Health

Stuart K. Hayashi

Unironic trigger warning: discusses child sexual abuse and someone’s suicidal ideation.

After many years, this still haunts me. Years ago I would, on a daily basis, talk in person with someone who, out of nowhere, would bring up the topic of adults sexually abusing prepubescent children. She didn’t directly tell me the reason for this fascination. But now I have a strong suspicion for the reason. At first it started as a joke. She said that her favorite signature on internet message boards was “The internet is where men are men, women are men, and small children turn out to be undercover FBI agents.” The last part refers to the police’s sting operations to catch child molesters.

Later she said that I reminded her of an ex-boyfriend back in her native northern Europe. She said, “He was very sweet.” Then she stared into space, giggled, and said, “He would always joke that he was a pedophile trying to trick little kids into having sex with him.” Suffice it to say, I don’t appreciate being compared to that guy.

Then one night she said to me, “When a convicted sex offender moves into a neighborhood, why do Americans get so irrational about it?” My eyebrows raised. I stammered, “Wh– What do you mean?” She replied, “When a man who had sex with a little girl moves into their neighborhood, Americans want to run him out. They should learn to accept that she consented to it.” I was so flummoxed that I could not respond other than by staring with my mouth gaping open. She changed the subject.

She also mentioned that she had a long history of wanting to be dead literally. She blamed much of this on an incident when she was thirteen. She was mistreated by a boy who was also thirteen at the time. I don’t doubt that this happened. Even then, I thought that this didn’t explain completely why she was so fixated on full-grown adult men in particular preying upon prepubescent children in particular. Then my friend said to me, “Promise me that you will always protect me.” I replied that I would.

When she was not in Hawai‘i with me but was in her native northern Europe for the summer, she got mostly uncommunicative. But during a short interruption from that uncommunicativeness, she told me that she was having a panic attack every day. Greatly concerned, I made contact with her paternal aunt in the USA. Her paternal aunt soon started telling me about other topics, such as that, as a small girl, the paternal aunt was sexually abused both by my friend’s paternal grandfather and one of his brothers, the latter of whom killed himself later. She also said that when she told her mother (my friend’s paternal grandmother) about this, her mother denounced her and feigned ignorance about it. She also mentioned that she finds it doubtful that my friend’s father knew nothing of this.

My friend then had an “internet-famous” artist go through the effort of photoshopping her pictures to make her look like a recently-deceased corpse with a chalky-white face. That was his specialty: he would take photos of himself and photoshop himself to look like a dead body with chalky-white skin. To this very day, many people across the world enthusiastically re-upload his corpse photoshops on their social-media accounts. Everyone around my friend found her corpse photoshops concerning. But it was of especial worry to me because she had previously told me of her long history of wanting to be dead literally.

Corpse Artist said he wished she would dye her hair a particular different color. When she returned to Hawai‘i, her hair was dyed that color.

It turned out later that my friend has another relative who is a celebrity among Ralph Nader/Noam Chomsky-type Socialist activists. Her son and daughter-in-law were supporting actors in very famous movies; her daughter-in-law was even the main supporting actress in an Oscar-winning drama. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist even wrote an entire mainstream book about this socialist activist. In the book, she is quoted saying that, as a small child, she was sexually abused by her stepfather. On my own, having read some important obituaries online, I learned that the stepfather is my friend’s grandfather’s other brother.

That means: My friend’s paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all accused of sexually abusing small girls whom they were supposed to be watching over. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to face that this consideration might be connected to my friend’s insistence on repeatedly bringing up the topic of grown men molesting prepubescent girls. The aunt gave me the impression that my friend probably didn’t know of these accusations from her aunts and other relative. If my friend’s fascination with child molesters came from her family, it was something she learned about, not from her aunts and other relative, but horrifyingly more directly.

One day my friend stopped uploading the Corpse Artist’s pictures of her photoshopped as a dead body with a chalky-white face. She looked alive again and wasn’t dyeing her hair the color that Corpse Artist said. She was instead touting herself as a businesswoman and uploading photos of herself on the peaks of mountains. But then she did something else. Up until that point, my friend’s legal last name was not her father’s. There is an odd story about that, which relates to further trauma on her father’s side I haven’t mentioned. And now, with great fanfare, she legally changed her last name to that of her father. That’s much more subtle than uploading photos of oneself photoshopped as a dead body. But it looks to me to be a try-too-hard attempt to convey to everyone that her relationship with her father is just fine; great even.

When in Hawai‘i, she was especially manipulative in that she expected me to play along with her morbid gestures. I was to act as if everything with her was just fine and safe. I remembered what an immigrant from Russia had advised: “Do not help them to fake reality.” On my birthday, of all days, I summoned enough courage to confront my friend about these matters. I told her that I cannot, in good conscience, see her face-to-face and help her feign normality when she’s refusing to return to seeing a mental health professional on a regular basis. She told me that my saying this to her was more intimidating, threatening, and evil than all the times that men had assaulted her — sexually and otherwise — and threatened to murder her.

Minutes later, she feigned memory loss. She acted as if she didn’t remember anything said previously in that conversation, and casually asked me about my day. That’s when I learned the hard way: it might be fun to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but it’s the opposite of fun to live through one.

I have often considered trying to reestablish contact with her and reconcile. But if she greets me warmly — not with hostility — and still refuses to return to regular psychiatric care, then this entire cycle is going to repeat. Absent of returning to regular psychiatric care and a proper diagnosis — likely emosjonelt ustabil/borderline personlighetsforstyrrelse — the following will happen. At first it will seem that everything is happy again. But then my friend will go back to making the morbid gestures and expecting that I tacitly reinforce them by pretending that they are safe and acceptable.

Recently I let my curiosity get the better of me, and I looked at Corpse Artist’s social media again. Corpse Artist actually stopped making the dead-body photoshops, but he uploaded other really pretentious photoshops where his self-image is literally distorted. His sister-in-law and especially brother also make art portraying people — apparently modeled on themselves — in a grotesque, morbid fashion. I feel sorry for those who see themselves, and even humanity, that way. (Their father is a genuinely competent portrait painter.) That my friend still makes a big show of using her father’s last name, and continues to enmesh with Corpse Artist, his sister-in-law, and his brother, all remain very bad signs. When I consider an attempted reconciliation with my friend, I remember those bad signs and the danger of what would happen if she welcomes communication only for her to maintain her refusal for the regular professional treatment that is needed.

If my friend sees this: stop embracing the name of someone who facilitated abuse. Cut out of your life and social media those, such as Corpse Artist and his sister-in-law and brother, who reinforce your morbid tendencies. Return to regular psychiatric care and have the emosjonelt ustabil personlighetsforstyrrelse diagnosed properly. This would not be for me, but for your own happiness, well-being, and peace. But just as it was in our last phone conversation, you already know that.

Importance of Rational Philosophy in Validating Private Property Rights Against Force

Mere Opposition to the ‘Initiation of Force,’ Such As From Libertarians, As Necessary But Not Sufficient

Stuart K. Hayashi

In the 1970s, many libertarians rallied around the principle that it is morally wrong for anyone, including any government, to initiate the use of force against a person or his belongings. Murray Rothbard called this the “non-aggression axiom,” even though this principle is derived from other principles and therefore not an actual axiom. And it is indeed an important principle. But many libertarians of the 1970s talked as if agreement on this stated principle was adequate to form and maintain a coalition of likeminded people. They talked about how the principle of non-force was an axiomatic First Principle — initially an arbitrary one, apparently — that later could be rationalized after-the-fact through citing Christianity, Buddhism, Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or any other philosophic framework. As quoted years ago by Objectivist writer Peter Schwartz, Rothbard asserts,

As a political theory, libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner of philosophic (or non-philosophic) positions including emotivism, hedonism, Kantian à-priorism , and many others. My own position grounds libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology and metaphysics. But although those of us taking this position believe that it only provides a satisfactory groundwork and basis for individual liberty, this is an argument within the libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding of libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself.

Actually, contrary to Rothbard, “the proper basis and grounding” of the doctrine of the non-initiation-of-force is “the doctrine itself,” or at least necessarily a major component to it. Absent of having the “proper basis and grounding” for the principle of the non-initiation-of-force, there is no “doctrine” at all. 

A conclusion about ethics is only as worthwhile as the justification on which it rests. That is because the justification for a conclusion is the very context that gives the conclusion its meaning. To separate the conclusion from its justification is to remove it from the very context in which it is to be understood and applied. 

 Hence, the mere verbalization about the immorality of force’s initiation, which includes the immorality of using force to despoil the rights of others to their own private property, is necessary but not sufficient. If you want a consistent defense of free enterprise and the right to the wealth you have produced, you must also identify the source of your rightful ownership of wealth. And you must show that your rightful control over the value that you have created is something much more important than merely a method by which efficient use of resources is incentivized and through which courts engage in dispute resolution. It is also important that you can elaborate on how the justification of your rightful control over your wealth is that you can be objectively identified as the primary creator of this very same quantity of economic value. 

When it comes to the matter over why the uninitiated ought to accept the principle that force is wrong, what I have just named are the vital considerations that Murray Rothbard handwaves as inessential to the “doctrine itself.” Accordingly, my conclusion that the non-force principle is necessary but not sufficient is demonstrated by another group of people who claim to oppose the initiation of the use of force. It’s not the group whom many free-enterprisers would expect.




That Laws Are Ultimately Enforced at Gunpoint: These People Agree With Free-Enterprisers About That . . . or Do They?
I often point out that even in an entirely legitimate constitutional-liberal republican Night Watchman State, the threat to escalate violence to penalize ceaseless noncompliance is what underpins the government’s power to enforce any law on what people may or may not do. The same fact applies to any law on what people must or must not do. Even if the initial penalty for breaking a law is a very small fine, persisting in refusal to comply with the law will bring about a ratcheting-up in penalties. If you persist in refraining from discharging the small fine, eventually you will be ruled to be in Criminal Indirect Contempt of Court. And enforcement requires that armed men be dispatched upon you by the State.

Of course, Democrats and Republicans are fond of agitating for new legislation that encroaches upon what peaceful private parties may do with their own belongings and households. Thus, upon being reminded that their favorite legislation initiates violent threats upon peaceful people, these Democrats and Republicans get huffy toward me. At me, they do Rousseau’s Social Contract Song-and-Dance. They recite this big fiction about how, by being born and living among other people, I implicitly consented to a Prime Contract in which I authorize that, for society’s collective benefit, the State may rightfully overrule my peaceful decisions and actual contracts. But in contrast to conventional Democrats and Republicans, there is a group of people — emphatically not fans of large-scale entrepreneurial enterprises — who agree and understand that laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint.

In contrast to conventional Democrats and Republicans, one woman from this other group denounces governmental institutions, implicitly including the welfare state, for “stealing in the form of taxes...” And just like free-enterprisers such as Frédéric Bastiat and Leonard E. Read, this woman recognizes that “all forms of government rest on violence...” That includes democracies, welfare states, and even proper constitutional-liberal republican Night Watchman States. In agreement with this perspective is someone whom I will call Man No. 1, who says that when the State takes action upon you who have done nothing to warrant that, it is for you

to be...inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled,...censored, ordered about... [It] is to be at... every transaction, ... registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped,...licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be...ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, [upon] resistance,...repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, ... imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed...

Also in agreement is Man No. 2. Man No. 2 points out that inhering in the very institution of government is “armed power” carried out by “armed men” and other such “coercive institutions.” Citing Man No. 2 is Man No. 3, who continues that the defining trait of the institution of the State is that it is “power” that “consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.”

The woman I quoted earlier was “Red” Emma Goldman, the anarcho-collectivist mistress to Alexander Berkman. In the late nineteenth century, Berkman tried to assassinate the chairman of Carnegie Steel, and almost succeeded at that. Man No. 1 was Pierre Proudhon, a contemporary and “frienemy” to Karl Marx. Man No. 2 was Marx’s own writing partner, Friedrich Engels. And Man No. 3 was Vladimir Lenin, who would himself become a head of State. And similar to them was Upton Sinclair. In words he attributed inaccurately to George Washington, Sinclair admitted, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.”

Anarcho-collectivists acknowledge the correctness of free-enterprisers in pointing out how laws, taxes, and government regulations are ultimately enforced at gunpoint. Yet these anarcho-collectivists do not agree with free-enterprisers about what constitutes the initiation of the use of force by one person against another to snatch the second person’s resources.




Does a Mansion Owner Initiate the Use of Force By Calling the Cops on Burglars?
Consider the case of Charles Martin Hall who, on account of years of doing his own research-and-development, devised a new efficient method for producing aluminum, and became a multimillionaire from that devising. Nouveau-riche, he dabbled in art collection. Suppose that a gang of burglars break into Hall’s mansion to loot him. And suppose Hall calls the police on them. The police arrive and stop the burglars.

Free-enterprisers would say that the burglars were initiating the use of force upon Charles Hall, who was minding his own business. And they would continue that the police apprehending the burglars was the proper exercise of force in retaliation only against the force that was initiated. But the anarcho-collectivists have an entirely different take on this scenario.

To the anarcho-collectivists, once you have performed manual labor, you have sufficiently earned a share of resources — economic value — that is equal to that of everyone else’s. For anarcho-collectivists — even if they give some lip service to the value of inventors and engineers — it is the case that by owning and controlling a share of economic value in society that dwarfs that of most men, Charles Hall has absconded with a quantity that is not rightfully his. By claiming control over a share of economic value far greater than what other men have, conclude the anarcho-collectivists, it is Charles Hall who has initiated the use of force against everyone else. In the anarcho-collectivists’ estimate, Charles Hall is hoarding an unfair share by means of physical force. Charles Hall’s option to call the police to guard this stash for him is, to the anarcho-collectivists, proof that it is Charles Hall holding the power to call upon armed men to uphold and enforce his wrongdoing.

And, continue the anarcho-collectivists, the burglars have the moral high ground. By trying to burgle Charles Hall, they say, the burglars are merely trying to retrieve and reclaim some of the wealth that is rightfully theirs. On that interpretation, it is the burglars who are using rightful retaliatory force against the party that initiated it.

At root, the area of disagreement is the ethics over Charles Hall expecting the police to guard what Charles Hall insists is his own rightful private property. There are laws against burglarizing someone’s mansion. And, as understood both by free-enterprisers and anarcho-collectivists, laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint. When the police stop the burglars, it is an example of the government using force. 

For free-enterprisers who wince at rent control and minimum-wage legislation, one of the few legitimate uses of force by the State would be for the police to stop the burglarizing of a mansion. Even a constitutional-liberal republican Night Watchman State favored by free-enterprisers like Frédéric Bastiat and Auberon Herbert would have punished burglars for hurting Charles Hall. But for anarcho-collectivists such as “Red” Emma Goldman, the protection of rich people’s private ownership rights is the central evil of the State. For Emma Goldman, police foiling the burglary of a mansion is actually the main case studying proving that the institution of government is the violent enforcer of evil. For anarcho-collectivists, the ability of a multimillionaire like Charles Hall to call the cops to protect his private property from burglars is no better than an intensifying of Hall’s initiation of the use of force against the burglars. The very fact that a mansion owner can call the cops on burglars is the reason why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sniffed in their Communist Manifesto that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” That is exactly what Marx and Engels wanted to be changed.

That is why it is necessary but not sufficient for you as a free-enterpriser to say, “I am opposed to the initiation of the use of force.” “Red” Emma Goldman and Karl Marx’s contemporary and frienemy, Pierre Proudhon, claim to hold that same position. Nor is it even adequate to say that you oppose it when one man tries to take from others what is not rightfully his. Emma Goldman and Pierre Proudhon would say that they hold this position as well, and it is exactly why they believe the burglars are in the right, not Charles Martin Hall. And anarcho-collectivists would interpret the story the same way if the rich man in question was not Charles Hall but instead Henry Bessemer, the nineteenth-century British man who got rich from his own improved method of steelmaking.

Some English-language translations of Pierre Proudhon superficially resemble, at first glance, statements from Objectivists. Proudhon explicitly rejects rationalizations for government regulations from Democrats and Republicans that rely upon invocations to their precious Rousseauian interpretation of some supreme Social Contract. And in a move that is more seemingly impressive, Proudhon praises what he calls economic “producers” — producer is the word in the English translations of Proudhon. But to Pierre Proudhon, the only economic producers are manual laborers, not CEOs or inventor-engineers. 

Nor does Proudhon sympathize with investors. Investors risk their own resources by providing, to the CEO, control over such resources, hoping those resources will be inputted in such a way that they produce a final product that satisfies customers. Investors do that out of hope for a material return. And those investors have to do without those resources in the meantime even if they do get a return. But to Proudhon, only the manual laborers are the “producers” who contribute to the enterprise’s success.

Anarcho-collectivists, as with other opponents of free enterprise, implicitly presume that the quantity of wealth in an economy — the quantity of all economic value in the world — is fixed. That would mean that any one person getting more wealth spells less of it for everyone else. As Proudhon says it,

The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in... Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these sales multiply, and soon the people...will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright...

On that interpretation, if Charles Martin Hall had a net worth of 5.8 million US dollars, then that deprives everyone else in society of 5.8 million US dollars’ worth of resources. Who is Charles Martin Hall to have so much when the burglars have so much less? That is the mentality behind the presumption that those who would burglarize Charles Hall or Henry Bessemer are the ones who have the moral high ground. That is how Proudhon concludes, “Property is the [false] right of increase claimed by the proprietor over any thing which he has stamped as his own. . . . The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a thief.”




The Philosophic Premise Upon Which the Anarcho-Collectivists Base Their Interpretation Is More Mainstream Than Libertarians Want to Admit
Many libertarians praise the philosopher Immanuel Kant, as can be seen at the Institute for Humane Studies, at the Cato Institute, and at the Mises Institute. Such libertarians honor him for his epistemology opposing inductive reason, and they also say he was an important contributor to free-enterprise advocacy itself. They are correct that Kant popularized the observation that the more two countries liberalize themselves domestically and trade with one another, the more that discourages warfare between them. 

Still, many aspects of Kant’s views actually lend support to anti-capitalists such as Proudhon. In this context, Kant implicitly endorses the notions that there is a fixed quantity of wealth and that you can only give or take wealth but never produce a net increase in the total existing quantity of wealth.

In giving to a person in need of charity, the giver “makes restitution” for an injustice... ...in giving to an unfortunate man we do not give him a gratuity but only help to return to his that of which the general injustice of our [social] system [such as of private property] has deprived him. For if none of us drew to himself a greater share of the world’s wealth than his neighbor, there would be no rich or poor. Even charity therefore is an act of duty imposed upon us by the rights of others and the debt we owe to them.

And this sounds like a repetition of Christianity’s early Church Fathers, as noted by Stephen Hicks. Pope Francis loved to quote John Chrysostom saying, “Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them... It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs.”

St. Gregory likewise propounded, “When we furnish the destitute with any necessity we render them what is theirs, not bestow on them what is ours; we pay the debt of justice rather than perform the works of mercy.”

Basil of Caesarea similarly proclaimed, “The bread in your hoard belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe belongs to the naked; the shoes you let rot belong to the barefoot; the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute.”

And St. Ambrose concurred, “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.” Yes, it is the tradition of the early Church Fathers, Immanuel Kant, and the anarcho-collectivists to presume that the quantity of wealth that can be enjoyed by the human population to be static. On that assumption, someone getting more wealth translates to less for everyone else.

Were Rothbard correct that no one philosophy is necessarily more valid than others in justifying the position that it is wrong to initiate the use of physical force, then it stands to reason that one following Rothbard’s approach should not reject the interpretation of Pierre Proudhon, “Red” Emma Goldman, and other anti-capitalists. After all, Rothbard’s approach does not reject the philosophic position of Immanuel Kant and the Church Fathers. And on the matter of the economics of resources, Immanuel Kant and the Church Fathers start from the premise that everyone is born with an equal claim on all the resources and economic value existing. Hence, if someone has a larger share than others, it follows from that starting premise that this richer person is the one who stole that share — and thus initiated the use of force against — all those who have fewer resources. The anti-capitalists, including big-government Lenin, are merely embracing the position of Kant and the Church Fathers that Rothbard finds tacitly admissible, and then taking that position to its logical conclusion.

The truth is that free-enterprise opposition to the initiation of force does have one best philosophic foundation, a single rational foundation. Philosophers who were not of the Objectivist school have contributed to the rational foundation. The foundational argument is greatly strengthened by insights from John Locke, the French Enlightenment philosophes Jean-Baptiste Say and Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy, and twentieth-century business management scholar Julian L. Simon. The rational philosophic foundation can even cite findings of the twenty-first-century Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer and the science journalist Ronald Bailey. Nonetheless, even with due credit to all of these thinkers from other philosophic schools, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism remains central to the rational foundational argument. With acknowledgments to Locke, Say, Tracy, and Simon, it is time for us to consider what Objectivism has to offer. With that in mind, let us now look at how one gets rich by means other than manual labor.




Multimillionaire Inventor Charles Martin Hall Did Not Steal His Wealth — His Volitional Mind Produced It
First, the usefulness of a quantity of a natural resource — the value it provides economically — is not innate and forever-fixed. That is, it is not a fixed rule that the value you get out of a quantity of units of a particular natural resource will forever correspond exactly to the size of that quantity. Rather, through technological improvements, a single unit of a natural resource can be made more useful than it had been in years past. And that usefulness — that economic value — is the true definition of wealth. If these improvements have been made over the past five years, than a particular quantity of a natural resource can produce more wealth for us today than that same quantity could have five years ago.

The use of electricity in production involves using up natural resources, using up coal and oil and natural gas and biomass. And aluminum is a very useful metal, being strong yet lightweight in comparison to others. But for most of human history, it was difficult to isolate the aluminum from the ore encasing it. That meant you could not get purified aluminum to use it for the best purposes. It was only in 1825 when the scientist Hans Christian Oersted separated a few micrograms of aluminum from ore.

Aluminum was so difficult to separate from ore that, by 1850, aluminum cost more per ounce than gold did. When Louis Napoleon had guests over, he treated them differently according to rank. Somewhat-high-ranking guests got to eat with forks and knives made from gold. But the highest-ranking guests ate with forks and knives made from aluminum.

But after arduous periods of research-and-development, Charles Martin Hall devised a method of using electricity to separate aluminum from the ore encasing it. Whereas it previously took over 74 kilowatts to produce a single kilogram of aluminum — kilowatts that expended natural resources such as coal — by 1886 that same kilogram of aluminum could be produced after the exertion of 40 kilowatts. By 1890, Charles Hall got that down to 15 kilowatts. This means that in 1890, a kilogram of coal that you invested in the aluminum market would avail to people over four times as much aluminum as that same quantity of coal would have in 1825. In the aluminum market between 1825 and 1890, Charles Hall quadrupled the usefulness and economic value of a kilogram of coal. Aluminum’s real price declined by a factor of 200.

Charles Hall making aluminum so widely available, and therefore cheap, had many benefits. To produce the engine of their airplane, the Wright brothers needed a metal that was both lightweight and cost-effective. The metal that suited their purposes was aluminum. Had Charles Hall not made his breakthrough when he did, it likewise would have been much more difficult for the Wright brothers to put together the airplane when they did.

Other industrialists, Henry Bessemer and James Beaumont Neilson, made comparable advancements — Bessemer with steel and Neilson with both iron and steel. The people of Afro-Eurasia had been forging iron as early as 1200 BCE. But it was in the Industrial Revolution that inventor-industrialists such as Neilson had devised cost-effective methods for producing it on a then-unprecedented scale. In the year 1800, it took six to seven tons of purified coal — called “coke” — to produce a single ton of iron. Then in 1828 Neilson introduced to the market his new hot-blast furnace. By 1870, it took only two tons of coke to produce that same ton of iron. In 1900, it was down to a single ton of coke.

As steel is a more purified form of iron, that same century saw similar figures in the manner in which both Neilson and Bessemer improved steel production. Steel production goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire. But, as with aluminum in 1825, it was always difficult to produce steel in large quantities, definitely more difficult than the iron from which it came. 

In the year 1850, steel mills had to burn seven tons of coal to generate the amount of heat necessary to produce a single ton of steel. But, as Charles Hall did years after him, Henry Bessemer expended investors’ valuable resources in a risky duration of research-and-development. Through such R-and-D, Bessemer learned that if you quickly blasted jets of cold air on the chunk of steel as it was newly minted, it removed impurities and resulted in the steel being purer and stronger. 

On account of Neilson’s hot-blast furnaces and the Bessemer converter and Process, by 1862 it took 2.5 tons of coal to produce a stronger ton of steel. This means that, on account of Neilson and Bessemer, in 1862 a ton of coal could produce over twice as much steel as it could have in 1850. Between 1850 and 1862 in the steel market, Bessemer more-than-doubled the usefulness and economic value of a single ton of coal. Neilson died in the year 1865. But from the introduction of the hot-blast furnace in 1828 to 1870 — five year subsequent to his death — the usefulness and economic value of a ton of coal in iron-smelting had tripled, largely on account of Neilson’s improvements.




Other Case Studies of Wealth-Creators
Even more foundational to producing such net increases in economic value was James Watt. Even prior to Watt’s time, a very large steam engine introduced in 1712 was used to pump water out of mines. From those mines would be come much great economic value, but a prerequisite to that was getting the water out. When it came to pumping the water from the mines, an important unit was a bushel, which was equal to the burning of 84 pounds of coal. The burning of this coal produced the steam that moved the pump. For every pound of coal burned, the device from 1712 could lift 107 pounds of water by a single foot. When James Watt introduced his steam engine in 1778, burning that same pound of coal could lift 225 pounds of water a single foot. That was more than double. That is, when it came to availing to people the valuable minerals to be mined, Watt’s engine in 1778 enabled a pound of coal to do more than double the work it did in that endeavor than that same pound of coal could have done in 1712.

That it took smaller quantities of coal to produce larger quantities of aluminum and steel and to move water out of mines was a fact that also made larger quantities of coal available for other endeavors still.

Historians know that Charles Martin Hall became a multimillionaire, but they do not have a firm estimate of how many millions he had. Historians are, however, more confident in their estimates on how rich James Beaumont Neilson and James Watt were when they died.

From 1840 to his death in 1865, through royalties for his invention Neilson had accrued revenues of £30,000 per year. In 2024, that would amount to £2.5 million annually. In 2024 U.S. dollars, with a single British pound being worth 1.34 U.S. dollars, that would be a yearly 3.3 million U.S. dollars. Neilson’s successful patent lawsuit in 1843 netted him £140,000. In 2024, that would be £4.4 million and 5.8 million U.S. dollars.

According to the historian Peter Tevjan, when James Watt died in 1819 his net worth was £60,000, which in the year 2020 would have the purchasing power of £80 million. Converting that into U.S. dollars in the year 2024 (again, one British pound equaling 1.34 U.S. dollars) would make it over 108 million U.S. dollars — all well-earned.

Let us consider what it would mean if Charles Hall’s net worth was the same, in today’s money, as James Beaumont Neilson’s. If Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson each received what is — in today’s money — 5.8 million U.S. dollars, it is because, from one end of the supply chain to the other, customers valued the newly-plentiful-on-the-market aluminum and iron, respectively, more than they valued the quantity of money that they exchanged for it. And the amount of money coming in from customers totaled at $5.8 million. Had the economic value that Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson provided not been worth as much to his customers, these customers would not have made those transactions. Thus, Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson each gained $5.8 million only insofar as the customers valued, in total, the man’s innovation at least as much as $5.8 million.

We can see this same phenomenon in a more-recent case study, one involving television screens. When it comes to economic value provided by televisions, fuel burned in the provision of electricity that powers the TVs will go a longer way on account of profit-motivated innovations. The big cube-shaped television sets from the 1950s were called CRT TVs — CRT standing for “cathode-ray tube.” The TVs were big because the cathode-ray tubes inside of them were such. TV manufacturers like Sony wanted to move onto more energy-efficient LED screens but there remained a problem they couldn’t crack — they couldn’t identify the chemicals that enabled the screens to show the color blue. Hence, images on the screen could appear in red and green but not blue. 

That was finally solved by the chemical engineer Shuji Nakamura. Absent of Nakamura clearing this hurdle, TVs and computer monitors and smartphones with LED (light-emitting diode) screens would not have gone on the market as soon as they did. Companies tried to weasel out of paying the royalties they owed Nakamura — very much like Murray Rothbard-influenced patent-hating libertarians on their part. Fortunately, Nakamura prevailed in litigation and, in a settlement, companies finally paid him the millions they owed him.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, CRT TVs consumed 60 to 150 watts per hour, electricity generated from the burning of fuels such as coal. By contrast, subsequent to Nakamura’s solution — LED screens possessing Nakamura’s blue — LED TVs and LED screens on other devices consume 50 to 100 watts per hour. On the whole, an LED screen from the year 2024 consumed less than half as much energy as a CRT TV did. Nakamura’s efforts greatly contributed to the fact that the burning of fuel in the provision of electronic video has doubled in the economic value that it previously provided. The equivalent of millions of U.S. dollars entering Nakamura’s bank account was a quantity in direct proportion to the net increase in economic value wrought from his creative choices.




A Rich Inventor’s Property Isn’t Theft But Proportional in Size to the Quantity of Economic Value He Created
The benefits provided by Charles Martin Hall, James Beaumont Neilson, Henry Bessemer, James Watt, and Shuji Nakamura were not the result of them pilfering from everyone else a share of a fixed quantity of resources such as coal. Instead, each quantity of coal could produce more economic value for people than that quantity could have before Watt, Neilson, Bessemer, Hall, and Nakamura came along. If you had a quantity of coal and wanted it applied to producing iron or steel, your ton of coal was over twice as valuable as it would have been had Neilson and Bessemer not taken action. Likewise, if you had only a kilogram of coal and wanted it applied to making aluminum available to consumers, your kilogram of coal became over four times as useful and valuable as it would have been had Charles Hall not intervened.

Any time you produce wealth through your labor, that economic value is stored in the direct product of that labor. And maybe you exchange the product of labor for something else. Should you exchange your labor for money or other items, it is the case that you did not directly produce units of that money or those other items. Nevertheless, you retain the economic value that you produced originally. That economic value is now stored in the money or other items for which you exchanged the more-direct products of your labor.

The same principle applies to efficiency-boosting inventions. An inventor such as Charles Martin Hall, Henry Bessemer, James Beaumont Neilson, James Watt, or Shuji Nakamura may sell his patent. As another alternative, he may keep his patent and rightfully use the more well-known method of recouping the costs of the units of resources he expended. After all, those resources were expended in the research-and-development and experimentation needed to arrive at the functional design and delineation that was needed for the invention to perform as intended. Such costs of the units of resources is recouped through licensing — properly selling access to the invention’s functional design. And when money and other items are exchanged for this access, the economic value of the invention is then stored in the money and other items exchanged to the inventor for it.

As Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger has noted, first dibs on ownership of an economic value rightfully goes to the person who produced that economic value. That is why an inventor has rightful ownership over the specific plan for implementation in production of still more net increases in economic value, that specific plan being the invention codified in patent. It is also why the inventor gains a quantity of resources — millions or billions of U.S. dollars’ worth. That quantity, which was justly traded to the inventor in exchange for him offering access to the fruits of his intellectual efforts and the investments of his own resources to those efforts, is no greater than the net increase in economic value that the inventor-entrepreneur’s productive choices brought into being.

Not at all an exercise in grabbing an unfair share of a fixed quantity of economic value in society, the wealth enjoyed by Henry Bessemer, Charles Martin Hall, James Beaumont Neilson, James Watt, and Shuji Nakamura was commensurate — no greater — than the net increase in economic value they had availed to the world in total through their finding and applying new methods to produce greater economic value from the existing quantity of resources. Whatever the exact figure, Charles Martin Hall and James Beaumont Neilson rightfully owned the millions they did because that was the quantity of wealth that they created. As also explained by Objectivism, in the long run, even when someone inherits billions of U.S. dollars, the size of his fortune ultimately matches the quantity of economic value he has rationally maintained and produced on his own (1, 2, 3). Those are the just deserts of Charles Martin Hal and James Beaumont Neilson peacefully pursuing their own interests. Note that this is the ethical argument from Objectivism and which is not found in the other philosophic traditions that Rothbard named as being at least as valid in explaining how it is wrong to initiate the use of force against private property rights.




Conclusion
Henry Bessemer, Charles Hall, James Beaumont Neilson, James Watt, and Shuji Nakamura grew rich only to the extent that they had enriched other people who consumed the output of these entrepreneurs’ innovations. And this enrichment came in the form of improved methodology that enriches people far beyond the mere number of units in natural resources available. That net increase in economic value that Hall, Neilson, Bessemer, Watt, and Nakamura each produced — a quantity of value that was and remains gigantic in size — redounded upon each of them in their respective personal fortunes. Private property rights enabled Bessemer, Hall, Neilson, Watt, and Nakamura to pursue such endeavors, and private property rights enabled Bessemer, Hall, Neilson, Watt, and Nakamura to enjoy the just deserts of those efforts. 

Far from private property rights being just a mere method for dispute resolution in court, private property rights — especially the intellectual sort — are a documentation of financial identity. They help to identify particular creative efforts by a particular creative party, and thereby assist customers in identifying and recompensing the specific creative party that provided them the specific value.

It is good to educate people about the principle that it is wrong to initiate the use of force. But what is equally needed is more than what Murray Rothbard and many other libertarians cared to provide in the 1970s. Absent of the further clarification, people will not gain any more insight into the need for free enterprise than did Pierre Proudhon, “Red” Emma Goldman, or Friedrich Engels.

If you think a productive inventor is right to call the police on people who burglarize his home, then you need to understand what important consideration was missing when libertarians in the 1970s assumed it was adequate simply to unite behind the declaration that they opposed any initiation of the use of force by governments and private citizens. The corollary imperative is to understand that the biggest driver in creating wealth — the wealth that becomes the property at risk of being stolen — is human rationality and its application by inventor-entrepreneurs such as Charles Martin Hall, Henry Bessemer, James Beaumont Neilson, James Watt, and Shuji Nakamura. Absent of this philosophical understanding that intellectual effort — intellectual property — is the basis for rightful ownership over anything tangible, any libertarian proclamation of the wrongness in initiating force against private property rights will be worse than incomplete.

That is the fundamental flaw of libertarian “anarchists” influenced by Rothbard proclaiming that opposition to “the initiation of force” is sufficient without a proper philosophic basis. It shows they do not understand what does and does not constitute a wrongful initiation of force against one’s rights to control the resources that one needs to survive and thrive. It leaves such libertarians helpless in debate against the alternative interpretation from anti-capitalists like Pierre Proudhon.  Even with Marx, Engels, and Lenin being discredited overall, their assertion that everyone is born with a rightful claim to an equal share to all economic value, which means anyone richer than others is stealing the birthrights of those others, is an assertion properly answered by Objectivism but remains unanswered by libertarians like Rothbard. That is the fatal weakness of libertarians who object to the forceful taking of rich people’s wealth but fail to explain that those rich people created that wealth in the first place and thereby do have rightful claim over it. 

Lacking in the proper philosophic foundation for defending private property rights, libertarians influenced by Rothbard talking up physical coercion versus self-defense against are comparable to a parrot squawking, “Two plus three equals five.” All the right words can be used here, but the parrot does not know the meaning of “two,” “three,” “five,” “plus,” or “equals.” The same principles applies in any attempt to bypass the rational philosophic foundation of these concepts when using words such as initiation of the use of force.





On Friday, September 5, 2025, I added the paragraph at the end mentioning the squawking of parrots. On Monday, September 29, 2025, I added the parts about Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. On Tuesday, October 14, 2025, I added the case studies of James Beaumont Neilson, James Watt, and Shuji Nakamura.