Humans Are a GMO and Have Been One Since the Stone Age

Genetically Modified As an Effect of the Technology of Our Apelike Ancestors

Stuart K. Hayashi

Photo by Wolfgang Sauber;
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In the near future, human couples might use in-vitro fertilization and then, while it is still an embryo, alter the DNA of their future child to edit out particular DNA sequences that would otehrwise predispose the child to hereditary diseases. This is formally called germline genetic engineering and derided with the pejorative label of “designer babies.” People fear the idea of technology altering the DNA of humans. They fret that this will bring about an unprecedented level of horror as depicted in such classic science-fiction dystopias as Brave New World and Gattaca. But the truth is that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been a GMO from the start. Our species was genetically modified and outwardly physiologically altered as a consequence of the technology of our ancestors, ancestral species as recent as Homo erectus and possibly something as far back in the past as the much-hairier Australopithecus afarensis (as shown in the Wikimedia Commons photo on the left).

As of this writing, there have been no fewer than two proposed courses through which Stone-Age technology has produced, at least indirectly, revisions in the genetic makeup of the first Homo sapiens sapiens — yes, the sapiens is listed twice in our species’s official name. One route has do to with fire: that gift from that premodern Frankenstein, Prometheus. When meat is raw, the meat-eater has to expend a lot of calories to chew and digest it. When Homo erectus began cooking meat, it was a way for Homo erectus to complete part of the digestion process even before the meat entered anyone’s mouth. In this respect, a cooking fire or stove’s burner can be thought of as a “stomach external to the human body.” When the meat was cooked, it reduced the number of calories that Homo erectus had to expend on chewing the meat.

The paleo-anthropologist Richard Wrangham theorizes that the calories left over then went to expanding the brains of the Homo erectus. Our ancestral environment “selected” for individuals who were genetically predisposed to have their brains grow larger in response to the leftover calories. Hence, someone whose genes had predisposed her brain to enlarge from the leftover calories was one who was likelier to transmit this trait to successive generations. I thank the cultural commentator Scott A. Corbitt for pointing this out to me on the social medium Threads.

However, yet another avenue of Stone-Age technology altering our gene pool goes back even further in time. This one has to do with our ancestors dynamic with stone tools, as observed by cognitive archaeologist Natalie T. Uomini. Our two-legged ancestors would sharpen their stone tools. This was practiced even by species that predated the genus Homo; archaeologists have uncovered evidence of this practice being performed by the hairier, more-apelike Australopithecus afarensis. This practice would involve holding one stone still with one hand, usually the left, and scraping yet another stone against it using the other hand, usually the right hand. Anthropologists refer to this as “flintknapping” or “stone-knapping.” 

In these activities, it was advantageous for a man to have one hand be more dexterous than the other. This practice “selected for” the men who were genetically predisposed to have a dominant hand. Men with a dominant hand were more likely than ambidextrous men to have children and then raise those children into adulthood. (I first learned of this explanation from Michael C. Corballis’s book The Lopsided Ape.) Additionally, Alastair Key and Chris Dunmore have found that this flintknapping also “selected” for thumbs to be more robust. Both of these physiological changes were already noticeable in Homo habilis, which pre-dates fire-making Homo erectus.

As our predecessors Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus already applied their conceptual faculties to restructuring objects from the wild to suit their own purrposes, it follows that our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has never been without technology. But, more than that, our own species was already genetically altered, albeit unknowingly, by the technology of our ancestors going back at least as far as the chimp-faced Australopithecus.

Even the ancestors who altered us — Homo erectus or a similar contemporary — were genetically modified as a result of the technology of other hominin species that begat them. Homo erectus having genes for thick thumbs and a dominant hand was a byproduct of the technology of the predecessor Homo habilis or some contemporary to Homo habilis. Homo habilis, in turn, inherited the genes for those traits from Australopithecus or something closely related to it. The uses of particular technologies were customs that were ultimately chosen volitionally, and yet these choices influenced which genetically-caused traits were transmitted to successive generations and which were not. The conterminous transmission of chosen customs and unchosen inborn genetics is what ethologists Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson dubbed gene-culture co-evolution.

This ancient pattern of technological transformation educing a corresponding transformation in the human genome and visible physiological traits had continued into the Bronze Age, at least in the region stretching from Europe to Asia. The new development was the switch from hunter-gathering to the farming of grains now being the primary method of obtaining food. In words written by Doug James, Nicky Thomas, and Ben G. Thomas for Seven Days of Science, this is how presenter Emilia Evans paraphrases this discovery of Ali Akbari and David Reich of Harvard and the rest of their team:

...the rate of human evolution has accelerated over the last 10,000 years. ...cattle-herding populations from the Steppes of Eurasia moved into western Europe, bringing with them Bronze-Age technologies. ...cities have been constructed... ...farming and different ways of living seemed to have had profound effects on the human genome. Hundreds of versions of particular genes have become either more or less common over the past 10,000 years, indicating that these accelerating societal and cultural changes have, in turn, driven the acceleration of the evolution of the human genome. ...[Quoting lead author Ali Akbari,] “Everything has changed in the way we live, and that’s reflected in our genome and how it’s trying to catch up.”

Ali Akbari, David Reich, and the rest of their team have identified particular physiological traits that became more prevalent as a ramification of these trends. Such traits included red hair and lighter skin. They were accompanied, strangely enough, by a reduction in the prevalence of male-pattern baldness.

There is a lesson in this for those who abhor technological alteration  as some unnatural tampering with biology. Stone-Age humans were the original ones to conduct genetic engineering on themselves and subsequent human generations, including us. That happened millennia prior to any technician going into a laboratory, placing a cell in a petri dish, and employing chemical methods to splice a foreign DNA segment into that cell.

Ridley Scott’s confusing Prometheus — his prequel to Sigourney Weaver’s Alien movies — portrays humans as having been engineered into existence by extraterrestrials through technologies far beyond what we have today. It turns out that aspects of that story may well be true, except that our technological creator was from Earth and that the technology employed in this endeavor didn’t even need to be as complex as ours.

There are at least two options in how we can interpret this. Should we think of Australopithecus as being in a category separate from ourselves, then, inasmuch as we have descended from Australopithecus or something like it, this Australopithecus was a mad scientist and we humans are his Creation. However, if we include Australopithecus and Homo habilis in the category of “us,” then, insofar as technological restructuring is a form of creativity, this process is an instance of autopoiesis: modern man is indeed self-made. Ultimately it is not the angels but we humans who are, in the words of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, “self-begot, self-raised...”

The technologies employed by our ancient ancestors — flintknapping, fire-making, and farming — were consciously chosen, but their lasting influence on changes to our genetic code were a byproduct that was not consciously chosen. Our Stone-Age ancestors didn’t even know of these effects. By contrast, when future couples engage in more-direct editing of the genetic codes of their children, those edits will indeed be consciously intended choices. For that to happen, these people will have in mind which specific DNA sequences to isolate in order to alter the very specific traits they are targeting. That is an important distinction between the technology-caused gene modificatoin of the near future versus the Pliocene past. But what has remained the consistent pattern since the prehistoric origin of our species is the presence of technology to influence the genetic codes of descendants. 

We would be best off giving up any aversion to GMOs-as-such. Our family lineage had become technologically-created GMOs in the Stone Age prior even to our becoming Homo sapiens sapiens. Far from technological innovation being some sort of deviation from our naturalness, the employment of technological innovation is inherent to human nature itself. Artifice does not refer necessarily to fakery; etymologically it means craftsmanship, being the root of artisan and artwork. And in the present and in the Stone Age, such crafting of both one’s surroundings and one’s own genetic makeup has been the way of the human. Thus, to be artificial is to be natural. It has always been our Stone-Age adaptation as an organism.

Libertarians and the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Patent Monopoly

Stuart K. Hayashi




The libertarian political movement claims to be all about free markets and privatization, and yet this is contradicted by its maligning of intellectual property rights. That is the movement’s party line, which dates at least as early as the 1970s. In that decade, Murray N. Rothbard and Roy A. Childs, Jr., began with misrepresenting the nature of patents. Samuel E. Konkin III and Wendy McElroy then added the mischaracterizations about copyrights.

According to the party-line straw man, an intellectual property right is an arrogant proclamation of a single party to be the exclusive owner of an “idea.” And this “idea,” continues the misrepresentation, is one upon which many other parties arrived on their own independently, but of which they are now deprived of implementing because that one other party has a government-enforced monopoly over it, the patent or copyright.

In the straw-man depiction provided by The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, a lawyer gaining a patent on the axe confers upon him a seventeen-year monopoly on the general product category of “axe,” or, as Jonathan Gullible calls it, “SharpMetalOnAStick.” Further according to such an argument, were someone to have a U.S. utility patent on a “paperclip,” she would usurp a seventeen-year government-enfranchised monopoly on the production of paperclips. The same would apply to “electric can-openers” and “the mechanical pencil.”

As this narrative proclaims that only one party gets the patent, whereas all the other chronologically-parallel-inventing parties end up bereft of anything to show for their own respective research-and-development, such libertarians would have us believe that intellectual property rights are themed on “winner takes all.” And the government-decreed winner who takes all, a Rothbardian-anarchist libertarian tells us, is the one most skillful in cozying up to politicians and having pull with them. I call this the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Race to Patent. It is also the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Patent Monopoly.

As the author of Jonathan Gullible put it to me, this is the situation as he sees it. Perhaps in 1915, two separate parties — one named Charles and the other named John — are each, unbeknownst to the other, working on a new invention: mechanical pencils. Then, continued the Jonathan Gullible author, when Charles gains the patent on “the mechanical pencil,” it is even worse than Charles merely gaining a State-enforced monopoly on this product. It will be the situation, the Jonathan Gullible author told me, that if John continues to pursue his own R-and-D on his own mechanical-pencil project, Charles will sue him successfully. Thus, the Jonathan Gullible author concluded to me and a whole audience, not only is Charles using the government to claim ownership over his own ideas, but Charles is even claiming ownership over John’s ideas and the ideas of all rival inventors. In effect, Charles’s patent is about the State being Charles’s henchman in Charles’s usurpation of control over the ideas of other parties against their consent.

But the scenario the Jonathan Gullible author described is not what happens in reality. It is time for us to look at the actual record.

Within a Span of Seventeen Years, Why Are There Multiple Patents on the Same Type of Product?
There are resources online whereby you can see actual U.S. patents, many dating all the way back to the nineteenth century. Such resources include Free Patents Online and Google Patents. Over the years I have gone through them and made tables of multiple U.S. utility patents on the same general category of product.

Here is a non-exhaustive table I compiled of various U.S. utility patents on “the paperclip” from the years 1867 to 1957 — a nine-decade duration.

Note the intervals of years between the patents: every interval is shorter than seventeen years. In effect, each U.S. utility patent on the paperclip was granted prior to the expiration of the one directly preceding it. Had it been true that a U.S. utility patent conferred a government-enforced monopoly on an industry and product category for a period of seventeen years, then how could this be? And if the first patent on a paperclip claimed ownership over the “idea” of “paperclip,” then why were there so many subsequent utility patents on the paperclip? Wouldn’t the U.S. Patent-and-Trademark Office have granted a single seventeen-year patent on “the paperclip” and thereafter been done with it?

The answer is in the convenient conflation when libertarians say that an intellectual property right is a demand that the government enforce someone’s monopoly on an “idea.” Here, the libertarian expects you to interpret “idea” as a general idea — a general idea for a general category of product, this one being “paperclip.” From that misreading, we are to assume that if in the year 1867 the U.S. Patent-and-Trademark Office (PTO) certified Samuel B. Fay’s rightful patent over his paperclip, that would preclude the U.S. PTO from certifying ten years later Erlman Wright’s patent on his own paperclip.

Actually a patent does not claim ownership over a general idea for a whole product category such as “paperclip” or “mechanical pencil,” and it does not grant to its owner a government-enforced monopoly on any industry — not for seventeen years or any other duration.

Rather, patents — this applies both to utility patents and design patents — are the State’s acknowledgment of a party’s already-existing rightful ownership over a specific original design, delineation, or configuration. The reason why there have historically been so many different U.S. utility patents on the paperclip for almost a century is that there have been differences in design in terms of the object’s exact shape and size and the material with which it is comprised.

In effect, a utility patent on a paperclip is not a utility patent on the paperclip. That applies even to the first-ever paperclip to be patented.

There is a very logical basis in a constitutional liberal republic recognizing ownership over a specific original configuration instead of over general ideas. Political economy is about what happens in practice, and intellectual property rights are the means by which we translate theory into such practice. A truly unprecedented conception cannot be put into practice when it stays nebulous in parameters and definition; for it to be implemented, it must be given specificity in form.

I have previously written another blog post that discusses other aspects of the fallacy of libertarian conflation about “ideas” — about their false insinuation that the patent arrogates to a single party some governmental control over just about any vague, hazy, broadly-defined and unrefined “idea” into which just about anyone can passively and serendipitously fall in. To stigmatize intellectual property rights as a government-enforced monopoly on an industry, it is important to libertarians that they mislead people into believing that patents are defined and enforced much more broadly than they truly are. 

 In person, the author of Jonathan Gullible would often repeat the same canned rejoinder.  Similar to Jonathan Gullible’s titular character, every time you point out the distinction between what is specifically patentable versus ideas that remain too foggily defined, he smirks, “What you just said is a good idea. Who has the patent on that?” That equivocation should fool the reader no longer.

Both Utility Patents and Design Patents Are for Specific Original Designs
Yet another misconception must be cleared up with respect to the word design. There are occasionally some people who think of themselves as free-marketers — many of whom do not share in the Rothbardians’ vehemence against patents — who nonetheless misunderstand the distinction between “design patent” and “utility patent.” According to their misunderstanding, it is only design patents that protect a specific original design, whereas a utility patent’s enforceability is much broader and, unlike a design patent, does confer a government-enforced monopoly on an entire industry.

That misconception is belied by the fact that all of the U.S. patents listed in my “paperclip” table are utility patents, not design patents. A U.S. design patent is designated by its patent number beginning with the letter D.

Both utility patents and design patents are to protect only specific original designs. The actual distinction is this. A utility patent protects a specific design with respect to the aspects pertaining to its practical functionality. Conversely, a design patent protects a specific design with respect to the aspects pertaining to its aesthetic qualities.

When Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi drew up his plans for the Statue of Liberty, for it he earned U.S. Design Patent D110,23S. This was on account of how Bartholdi raised funding for Liberty by selling handheld replicas of her. He therefore did not want imitators to snatch the aesthetic of his work and produce their own statues in the exact likeness of a woman in Greco-Roman garb, adorned with a Mediterranean “radiate crown” and holding up a torch. Likewise, celebrated filmmaker George Lucas earned U.S. Design Patent D264,109S for his “Boba Fett action figure.” Lucas did not want other toymakers producing their own toys, absent of his authorization, that were in the exact likeness of his own Star Wars character Boba Fett. Ralph Lauren had U.S. Design Patent D319,932S on a bed of a particular shape and U.S. Design Patent D259,098S on the fancy appearance of a cologne bottle.

I hope that it is now clear that design patents are about artistic features, whereas utility patents are about operational features, and both types are on specific original designs — what, for further distinction, we might also call specific original configurations, delineations, or plans. In short, a design patent is on how a specific design looks, and a utility patent is on how a specific design operates. For another blog post of mine about the line of demarcation between utility patents and design patents, and how both pertain to discrete aspects of the design, you can go here.

Other Examples of How, Within Seventeen Years, There Can Be Multiple Utility Patents Within the Same General Type of Product
These principles are not confined to the market for paperclips. They also apply to a more-complex machine. Here I present a table I made on various U.S. utility patents on the electric can-opener from 1948 to 1990. Including all of 1948, that would be forty-three years. Mind you that this table does not even include patents on more-traditional manually-cranked can-openers. Even when it comes to the more-specific category of electric can-openers, there is this much variation.

Once again, when each U.S. utility patent to certify the already-existing moral right to one’s specific configuration is codified, it is prior to the expiration of the other patent on the electric can-opener that directly precedes it. Once again, there are differences in design with respect to the moving parts that turn the blade; there are differences in the location of the motor and on whether or not the electric can-opener needs to be held by hand as the motor turns the blade.

In January 2026 I decided to look into another invention, the mechanical pencil. You may have seen my drawings on my blog, and their first drafts begin with what I have done on paper using a mechanical pencil. The earliest-known patent on a mechanical pencil is said to be with silversmith Sampson Mordan and engineer John Isaac Hawkins in England in 1822. Similar patents followed in the USA some years later. Not all of these are recoverable, as a fire in Washington, D.C., destroyed many important federal government records, including many patent documents from the early nineteenth century. 

Still, from 1836 onward and going strong for a century, we see the same pattern as before: each patent was awarded while the preceding one from the same general product category was still active and enforceable. These early versions do not exactly match what we think of today when we say “mechanical pencil.” The earliest-known one that can be called a modern mechanical pencil — it has refillable pieces of pencil lead, with a mechanism inside the pencil that propels the lead out the cylinder’s tip — is from 1915 with Charles Keeran.

There were so many U.S. utility patents alone on the mechanical pencil, that I was able to make five tables. And even these are far from exhaustive. The tables range from the years 1836 to 2024 — a span exceeding 185 years. All the while, each new utility patent on the mechanical pencil arrived even as the one directly preceding it remained in effect.

There is great variety in the exact shapes of the parts of the mechanism that propels the pencil lead through the cannister; they come in pieces varying in number and material. In the final table you can see the brand that I use: Pentel of Japan.

Someone prolific in the list of inventors was “Lucifer J. Most.” Another one was “Christ Andonov.” Among the respective inventors of the mechanical pencil are Lucifer and Christ.

How Competitive Was the Market for Incandescent Lightbulbs in the Timespan When Thomas Edison’s Patent Was Most Strongly Upheld and Enforced?
Someone else who looked into these matters was associate professor John Howells of Aarhus University in Denmark. He and Ron Katznelson have busted four myths (1, 2–4) that are routinely presented as case studies in how patents have supposedly slowed down technological innovation. One such myth is that Thomas Edison’s U.S. Utility Patent No. 223,898A — on the incandescent lightbulb with a high-resistance carbon filament — awarded in the year 1880, slowed down improvements in this industry. The U.S. Supreme Court definitively upheld this patent in the year 1892 and it was set to expire in 1897. Were the “monopoly” narrative accurate, this five-year period would be one where Edison did the most to exercise his monopoly powers, such as in hiking prices.

John Howells shows that, in fact, it was in this five-year duration that incandescent lightbulbs had their steepest drop in real price. 

The reason is that patent law allows for the principle of “design-around.” In “design-around,” a party’s engineers examine the specific task a patented or likely-to-be-patented configuration performs, and then seek to produce their own configuration that performs that same task through an alternative route or method. With respect to incandescent lightbulbs, Edison’s competitors came up with their own unique configurations — on which they received their own respective U.S. utility patents — that performed the same tasks as Edison’s.

Anticipating the 1880 approval of Edison’s carbon-filament incandescent lightbulb patent, inventor William E. Sawyer and attorney Albon Man arrived at their own version in 1878, U.S. Utility Patent No. 205,144A. Working in Great Britain, Joseph Swan had his own version receive a U.S. utility patent also in 1880 — U.S. Utility Patent No. 234,345A. The prolific Black inventor Lewis Latimer, whom Edison would hire two years later, produced his own competitive version in 1882, U.S. Utility Patent No. 252,386A. And Hiram Maxim, who today is most-remembered for his automatic machine gun, did his own design-arounds. In 1880 he was awarded U.S. Utility Patent No. 230,309A, and, in 1881, it was U.S. Utility Patent No. 237,198A and U.S. Utility Patent No. 247,380A. In 1891 Reginald Fessenden, who would later be renowned much more widely for his developments in radio, gained U.S. Utility Patent No. 452,494A. In 1893, William Emery Nickerson and Edward Egbert Cary received U.S. Utility Patent No.507,558A.

Companies in competition against Edison in the electric lighting business clamored to pay licensing fees for these other patents. George Westinghouse — Thomas Edison’s main rival in this industry — paid licensing fees on William E. Sawyer’s patent (1, 2). The Beacon Vacuum Pump and Electrical Company paid royalties to William Nickerson and Edward Cary for theirs.

As U.S. utility patents are on specific original configurations and not on the general idea, that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Edison’s 1880 patent in 1892 was unable to withhold from the market the incandescent lightbulbs configured in the patents of William E. Sawyer and William Nickerson. And to keep up with the competition from these other versions of the incandescent lightbulb, in the period ranging from 1892 to his patent’s scheduled expiration in 1897, Edison still had to cut his own prices.

John Howells and Ron Katznelson explicate what should now be clear: “...a patent is not an economic monopoly...”

What About the Claim That Multiple Parties, All Unknown to the Others, All Arrive at the Same Invention Chronologically Parallel to Each Other?
Left to be addressed is the allegation that multiple parties, each unbeknownst to the others, all arrive at the exact same invention at the exact same time. What actually happens is that separate parties, working independently of one another, arrive at the same general idea within relatively close temporal proximity to one another. The exact specific original designs, though, are different, and it is not unusual when these parties each obtain their own specific patent. When these parties dispute one another in court, it has to do with “overlap” in terms of the aspects of their respective designs that are similar.

One such example, provided by Adam Mossoff (1, 2) is with different sewing machines patented by Elias Howe and Isaac Merritt Singer, the latter being the namesake behind Singer Sewing Machines. They eventually resolved the disputes by pooling all of their patents into a single trust — a patent pool. Such patent pools are not uncommon.

Another case study has to do with the integrated circuit that is vital to today’s personal computers. At Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce came up with one version, and, with another Fairchild cohort, he would co-found Intel with this invention as its basis. And within a short distance of time, Jack Kilby had his own version at Texas Instruments. Kilby’s patent was on the body of the device on its own, whereas Noyce’s placed more emphasis on the arrangement in which this was to be connected with other components.

With respect to where the two patents were similar, the two firms eventually arrived at something else that would become commonplace — a cross-licensing agreement. This meant that each company could use both its own patents and the other’s as far as the integrated circuit was concerned.

That is not the winner-takes-all model that the Rothbardians promulgate.

To reiterate, the Rothbardian narrative against patents, such as in The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, is that many parties invent the same “idea” at the same time, and, with but one of these parties gaining the patent-enforced monopoly, the R-and-D of the other simultaneously-inventive firms come to nothing. And, concludes the Rothbardian misrepresentation, the one solution to this dilemma is nothing short of the abolition of intellectual property rights outright.

And as we see with the sewing machine and the integrated circuit, the reality is far different.

Let us imagine that within times relatively close to each other, seven separate firms independently arrive at the same general idea. Those seven firms each receive their own patent, but, at first, there is difficulty in terms of similarities among the patents. Here we find that it is not the case that but one of the firms receive the patent and the other six see their efforts wasted. Rather, they have a cross-licensing agreement. Note how this is solved without capitulation to the drastic demands of the patent-hating libertarians.

In the patent pool, the firms that have invested their own resources into research-and-development still reap the benefits of that effort. Commensurately, the many-more firms out there that made zero contributions to that same R-and-D are not able to pilfer, through piracy, the specific original configurations resulting from that R-and-D. But, had the patent-hating libertarians gotten their way, the firms that invested no R-and-D would be able to free-ride off the seven firms that did do the R-and-D.

Clearing Up What the U.S. Constitution’s Copyright Clause Means By Exclusive Right — Hint: Pay Attention to “Their Respective Writings and Discoveries”
With this understanding, we can observe the clause in the U.S. Constitution that enshrines copyrights and patents. Pertinent here, we can ascertain how the opponents of intellectual property rights mischaracterize the meaning of the clause. U.S. Congress, says the document, is tasked “to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

The patent-haters seize on that phrase exclusive right and misrepresent that as a State-enforced monopoly. But here we should see that a party has an exclusive right to what that particular party originated. Suppose you claim a plot of wilderness and improve upon it and then live on it, with the State recognizing that homestead as your private property. That would not confer upon you a State-enforced monopoly on the entire real estate market. Likewise, points out Revolutionary Era attorney Daniel Webster, a “man’s right to his own invention ...is no more a monopoly for him to possess ...than to possess his own homestead.”

We can see that with U.S. utility patents on the mechanical pencil. Lucifer J. Most’s 1939 U.S. utility patent on his own mechanical pencil was an exclusive right on this particular configuration. Note from the table above that in the seventeen years that followed, the patent did not confer upon Mr. Most some State-enforced monopoly on mechanical pencils. 

The essential phrase in the Copyright Clause is not exclusive right but respective writings and discoveries. Let us read the clause again, this time with Lucifer J. Most’s situation in mind: “...securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (emphasis added). Here, respective means that Lucifer Most’s U.S. utility patent covers only the specifics on what he originated. 

Mr. Most did not originate mechanical pencils in general, and the patent does not secure for him any exclusive right over the entire market for mechanical pencils. Nor was it secured for his predecessor in producing the overall modern and general version of the mechanical pencil that we use in the present, Charles R. Keeran in 1915. Lucifer J. Most did originate, though, his own specific arrangement of the inner workings of a mechanical pencil. Hence, the U.S. Constitution is securing for him the exclusive right over his respective “writings and discoveries,” meaning the specific aspects he devised himself. And, thankfully, throughout our history the U.S. courts have been remarkably consistent in respecting that distinction.

Indeed, the absurdity of the libertarian accusation that intellectual property rights are a government-enforced monopoly on an industry is even more apparent when applied to copyrights than it is with utility patents. His copyrights on his Percy Jackson series of books don’t give Rick Riordan a State-enforced monopoly on the literature market. He has a “monopoly” only on his specific Percy Jackson prose, as he should, as he is the one who composed it.

Conclusion: Homesteading, The Original Intellectual Property Right 

Daniel Webster is apt in identifying the connection between the right to homestead and the right to patent — the former forms the basis of the latter. And this exposes yet another self-contradiction of the Rothbardians who hate intellectual property rights so much. They denounce intellectual property rights and yet wax enthusiastically about John Locke’s discussion of how, by improving the land he has settled on, the homesteader gains proper ownership over it. Indeed, the homestead is the original intellectual property right. Karl Marx wanted to pretend that this right was all about the physical toiling. But such toiling improves the land no more than the extent to which it has been properly planned — the work of the intellect, of the mind. The homesteader has to identify the right crops suited to this environment. The homesteader has to plan properly in the irrigation.

Just as with works that are patented and copyrighted, it is through the devising of a rational plan — the proper configuration and design — that the homesteader produces, from the homestead, a net increase in economic value. And as with the patenter and copyrighter, this is a newly emergent value that had not previously existed or circulated anywhere in any society’s economy. The homesteading principle that the Rothbardians worship is the origin of the intellectual property right that these same Rothbardians try to deny.

And as libertarians stubbornly affix themselves to their antiquated opposition to intellectual property rights, the ship of moral progress is sailing and leaving them behind. Fortunately, increasingly there are academic philosophers recognizing that the homesteading of a plot is the original intellectual property right, and that trademarks and copyrights and patents and plant variety protections are mere extensions of the same principle. Such academic philosophers include Justin Hughes and Adam D. Moore.

Libertarians presume that economic “scarcity” applies only to tangible objects, and therefore “intellectual property-rights” is an oxymoron. I have addressed their falsehood about that over here. More pertinent to this particular discussion, the truth is the opposite of the the libertarians’ conclusion. Poverty has always been the default for our species, and economic value is created through the application of the human mind to produce it from nature’s raw materials. As the application of the intellect is the source of economic value in units of private property — including the artificial improvements to every homestead — the term intellectual property-right turns out to be a redundancy. Private and specific intellectual effort is what ultimately begat the economic value to be rightfully privately owned by its respective creator.

Sadly, libertarians repeat their misrepresentations ad nauseum, trapping themselves in the very same intellectual stagnation from which patents and copyrights have freed those of us who are much more curious. Fortunately, we need not let them hold us back. Nay, we can hold true to the U.S. Constitution’s Copyright Clause and continue to advance human progress. We do so as we remember that U.S. utility patents are not winner-take-all monopolies but instead the means by which inventive parties protect their financial identity and are thereby able to reap the rewards of their respective specific innovations.

From Feb. 2–3, 2026, I added the mentions of academic philosophers Justin Hughes and Adam D. Moore and of how intellectual property rights are a protection of financial identity. On Feb. 3, 2026, I added the mention of the immature “What you just said is a good idea. Who has the patent on that?” quip. on Friday, May 1, 2026, I added the point about the term “intellectual property-rights” actually being redundant. On Monday, May 11, 2026, I added the paragraphs about the fallacious claim that if both Charles and John are racing to be the first to patent a mechanical pencil, then Charles’s patent is Charles’s way of trying to police and usurp John’s ideas as well.

Importance of Rational Philosophy in Validating Private Property Rights Against Force

Why Libertarians Saying They Oppose the ‘Initiation of Force’ Is Meaningless in Absence of the Proper Rational Philosophic Justification for That Opposition

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. According to that presumption, if you refrain from following any of the government’s capricious edicts to micromanage your life and private property, it is you who initiated force against the State through breaching the contract that you implicitly entered into with the State. 

Then, continues the presumption, when the State dispatches police against you, the State is merely retaliating against the contract-breach you initiated against it. And, even then, Democrats and Republicans feel incensed when you bring up how the threat of physical force has always been in the picture. But in contrast to conventional Democrats and Republicans, there is a group of people — emphatically not fans of large-scale commercial 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.”

That attitude of Pierre Proudhon’s and “Red” Emma Goldman’s remains pervasive to the day of this writing. Hypocritical internet-based multimillionaire commentator Hasan Piker tells an uncritical and tacitly approving New York Times, “I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers. . . . I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in. ...it’s a cliché at this point but wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.” Once again the insinuation is that for the corporation to have a billion dollars is necessarily for the corporation to deprive everyone else of a billion dollars’ worth of resources, and therefore to steal from the corporation is merely to retrieve from the corporation what the corporation stole first.

As far as Hasan Piker is concerned, “If someone needs the food,” that person “should absolutely steal it.” Earlier in the interview he spells out, “Yeah, I’m pro-piracy all the way — across the board. ‘Would you pirate a car?’ Yes, you know, if you could.” Alluding to well-known television advertisements imploring people not to pirate intellectual property, Hasan says, “ ‘Would you steal a car?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ If I could get away with it — if it was as easy as pirating intellectual property — I would do it.” Here, Hasan omits mention of the fact that he himself is a multimillionaire trust-fund baby with a $3 million mansion and a $200,000 Porsche, and that, by his own standard, it would be social justice if someone stole his Porsche.




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 (1, 2), 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 philosophizing 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 from — 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 Emperor Napoléon III had guests over for dinner, he treated them differently according to social 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 construct the sort of engine that was necessary for their airplane to fly, 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. Within a few paragraphs, we will delve deeper into the further developments responsible for the figure being so low for iron by the turn of the twentieth century.

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 in large quantities, definitely more difficult than the iron from which it came. 

In the year 1850, 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 metal being purer and more durable. 

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.

And into the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, innovations in ironmaking and steelmaking continued. The reader will recall that the boyfriend of one of the anarcho-collectivists I quoted earlier had tried to murder the chairman of Carnegie Steel. The Carnegie Steel Company made great strides in energy efficiency, especially on account of one of its engineer-executives, the inventor and chemist and metallurgist James Gayley.

Both before and during his stint at Carnegie Steel — he joined the company in 1885 — Gayley had many of his own U.S. utility patents for various inventions. And as a scientist, Gayley published numerous academic papers on his discoveries, as displayed here, here, here, and here. Particularly helpful was his method that was known as the “dry-air blast.” Even in spite of the improvements by James Beaumont Neilson and Henry Bessemer, in the 1870s a major problem continued to besiege steel production. Water vapor in the air would enter the furnaces and degrade much of the pig iron as it was being processed. But by 1894 Gayley thought to place a condenser inside furnace’s blast engine, taking into itself the moisture from the air. This resulted in greater yields of iron of a much more consistent high quality.

That air was particularly important as it involved an earlier innovation by Gayley. He developed his own blowing engine to place greater quantities of air into the furnace at a time. Simultaneously, Gayley had the process incorporate changing bins wherein the materials used would not be piled on top of one another but instead mixed to the extent that all of the materials burned more evenly than before. Those innovations likewise produced increased quantities of output from smaller quantities of the same inputs.

James Howard Bridge’s book The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company provides a table showcasing the net gains in efficiency. In April 1880, it took 2,536 pounds of coke — purified coal — to produce a ton of iron. By May 1890, with Gayley’s methods, Carnegie Steel produced that same ton of iron with 1,884 pounds of coke. Over the course of a decade we find that in terms of each unit produced, that is a 25-percent reduction for that particular natural-resource input.

The direct mirror to the net increases in economic value that Gayley had created was the increase in economic value that he enjoyed personally. As he introduced greater methods of improving efficiency, Gayley was likewise promoted to more lucrative positions in the Carnegie Steel Company. By 1897 he was a managing director. But his highest position followed the merger of Carnegie Steel into a new, larger company — U.S. Steel. There, Gayley was made vice president. A multimillionaire, Gayley became rich enough to purchase a mansion in New York and finance personally the construction of an entire Chemistry-and-Metallurgy-Department building for Lafayette College.

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 $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.




Economically Electrifying
Here is another example of how efficiency-related technological improvements allow for greater economic value to be generated from smaller and fewer inputs of natural resources. More telecommunications at a faster rate and greater quality can be performed today than in the 1960s from smaller quantities of material, smaller in terms of mass and weight. A copper wire in the Telstar-1 satellite in 1962 transmitted 1.5 megabytes or 24 voice channels of information per second. Hence, that satellite allowed for 600 long-distance telephone calls at the same time. But, adjusting for inflation, copper was getting scarcer and more expensive. Resultantly, for the purpose of aiding the telecommunications firms, inventor-engineer-entrepreneurs sought a cheaper substitute. Among these seekers was Narinder Singh Kapany, who would eventually go on to be a university professor of both physics and business and have over 120 patents. He and some other engineers found that substitute in the form of fiber-optic cables made of glass, itself made from sand.

Fiber-optic cables make use of lasers, and so inventor-engineer-entrepreneurs who pioneered this technology, such as Gordon Gould, also played a role. The general principle of transmitting data through a beam of light was already achieved in the late 1800s by Alexander Graham Bell subsequent to his invention of the electric telephone. But Bell did not know how to make his “photo-phone” economical. It was a more-than-half-century later that Gordon Gould and Narinder Singh Kapany were able to make that a reality.

By the year 2001, a fiber-optic cable thinner and lighter than a copper wire transmitted over 2.5 gigabytes or 32,000 voice channels of information per second. Hence that year an Intelsat satellite allowed for 120,000 long-distance telephone calls and three TV channels simultaneously. Between 1962 and 2002, the switch to a material of a smaller mass enabled a thousand-and-a-half-fold increase in the information transmitted. In effect, more people were able to make more and longer long-distance calls, and requiring smaller quantities of natural-resource inputs per telephone call, to do so. In the two decades that followed, it also eased up marketplace demand for copper, allowing for its inflation-adjusted real price to decline. More copper became available for other uses than there otherwise would have been.

Such technological advancements made both Narinder Singh Kapany and Gordon Gould into multimillionaires — in the latter man’s case, this onetime member of the Communist Party of the USA gained $46 million. Gould would ultimately tell interviewer Kenneth A. Brown of his chagrin at the “dead weight created by all that red tape” that the State imposes on innovators. And Gould continued, “Government regulations are even worse than industrial lab regulations at deadening invention, and they certainly deaden entrepreneurship” (Inventors at Work: Interviews With Sixteen Notable Inventors, {Lake Leelanau, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988}, 324).

And there are plenty of other instances of increases in quantities of wealth being wrung from smaller and fewer inputs of resources. The economists Roger Foquet and Peter Pearson have estimated the inflation-adjusted price of artificial light over history from 1300 CE onward. The unit of shine from light is called lumens. In the year 1300, if you wanted an hour’s worth of artificial light shining at a single lumen, you would have to pay £25,000 in year-2000-CE British pounds. That is, to obtain that much light from a candle, you’d have to do £25,000 worth of work or trade £25,000 worth of resources — in year-2000-CE values — for it.

By the year 1800 with whale-oil lamps powered by kerosene, that same hour’s worth of one-lumen artificial light was priced at £12,000 (all monetary figures are in year-2000-CE pounds). Then Thomas Edison introduced the electric light in 1882, with George Westinghouse selling a rival version in 1886. They got it down to £3,000 for that same hour’s worth of single-lumen artificial light. In effect, on account of entrepreneurial efforts from those like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, your labor and resources could get you a quantity of artificial light in 1886 that was quadruple as much they would have gotten you in the year 1800. 

That is why Edison and Westinghouse were rewarded so handsomely. At his death in 1931, Edison had a net worth of $12 million. In inflation-adjusted 2024 U.S. dollars, that is over $200 million; Edison was one-fifth on his way to becoming a billionaire. on that basis, Forbes magazine admits that Edison’s net worth was substantial enough “to have put him on the Forbes 400 list, had it then existed.” As for Westinghouse, at his death in 1914 his net worth was $50 million — over $1 billion in today’s money.

Naturally, there were still improvements to be made. The first electric generators provided by Edison and Westinghouse separately were powered by reciprocating steam engines that had 2.5 percent thermal efficiency. Those steam engines were eclipsed by inventor-engineer-entrepreneur Charles Algernon Parsons’s steam turbine engines. Those are still the sorts of turbines used in power plants at the time of my writing this. By the year 1930, a year prior to Parsons’s death, his steam turbines were at 36 percent efficiency.

Prior, Westinghouse recognized the superior efficiency of Parsons’s engines and incorporated them into his own electricity generation systems, as did Edison’s former employee Samuel Insull. This means that by 1930, a pound of coal in an electric power plant using Parsons’s technology could generate over ten times as much electricity to homes as could that same pound of coal when Edison first introduced electricity generation. That made Charles Parsons very rich as well. When he died in 1931 he had a net worth exceeding £1.2 million. In 1930, a single British pound was worth over three U.S. dollars. In 1930 U.S. dollars, that would mean Parsons had over $3.6 million. In 2024 U.S. dollars, that would be over $60.7 million.




A Rich Inventor’s Property Isn’t Theft But Proportional in Size to the Quantity of Economic Value He Created
The benefits provided by the innovative inventor-entrepreneurs I profiled 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 any of the aforementioned inventor-entrepreneurs 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-entrepreneur 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.

“Once it is admitted,” Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger has us consider, “that wealth is the product of individual thought and effort, the question arises: Who should own the product? On an ethics of rational egoism, the answer is: he who created it” (H. Binswanger, “The Dollar and the Gun,” 269–275: 274, in eds. Debi Ghate and Richard E. Ralston, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy: The Capitalist’s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, {New York: Penguin, [1999] 2011 revised and expanded ed.}, 274). 

That is the crucial point that is missing from all of the pro-capitalism thinkers whom I credited who are not Objectivist, such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Julian Simon. Those other thinkers did well to explain how all the wealth that exists was created primarily from the application of the mind’s powers by specific individuals. Yet, except for John Locke, those other non-Objectivists hardly touch on the corollary fact that it is exactly the individual whose mind it was that created that new value, who should likewise have first claim over use — and, with that, private ownership — of it. And none of those other thinkers — not even Locke — explicitly acknowledge that the ethics of rational self-interest provide the valid ethical basis for that corollary private ownership.

Yes, 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 the historical inventor-entrepreneurs I have profiled 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. 

Here, I have provided case studies on inventors and engineers who directly produced new designs that, when applied to mass production, allowed for greater economic value to be produced from the same, or smaller, quantities of natural-resource inputs. Here, even if anti-capitalists concede that the inventors and engineers created a net increase in economic value, it is tempting for anti-capitalists to proclaim that the same does not apply to rich businesspersons who are not inventors. James Gayley got rich at Carnegie Steel, but the company’s namesake — Andrew Carnegie — got even richer than he did and, unlike Gayley, Andrew Carnegie did not invent the dry-air blast.

Actually, the principles I explained do apply to businesspersons who are not inventors. Note that I said in the previous paragraph that the invention produces a net increase in economic value when applied to mass production. In the division of labor, it is the businessperson tasked with making informed choices on how to organize the roles played by the inventors and engineers, such as with making adjustments to the machine plans to accommodate new circumstances; tasked with instructing the engineers properly and procuring for them the equipment they need; and in making the best choices of how to route the output through the supply chain so that it reaches the consumers intended. 

Absent of anyone performing those tasks, the invention in question will not be able to benefit anyone other than the inventor. Inventors and engineers take part in those other important roles only insofar as they take on business management positions themselves, as James Gayley did. In their management positions at Carnegie Steel, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick and Charles M. Schwab got rich to the same extent that they employed James Gayley’s inventions in producing greater wealth for Gayley and their customers. Here, too, the net profit to Carnegie and Frick and Schwab was commensurate with the net increase in economic value they produced in their choices to maximize efficiency in the use of resources.

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
There is a pattern among the inventor-entrepreneurs I have profiled. They all 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 these inventor-entrepreneurs 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 these innovators to pursue such endeavors, and private property rights enabled these innovators to enjoy the just deserts of those efforts. That is what we find with Charles Martin Hall, James Beaumont Neilson, Henry Bessemer, James Gayley, James Watt, Shuji Nakamura, Narinder Singh Kapany, Gordon Gould, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Charles Algernon Parsons. And, again, the principle also applies to business executives who are not inventors but still invest wisely in inventions and other methods of maximizing efficiency, as did Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Charles M. Schwab.  

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. 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. On Thursday, November 11, 2025, I added the quotation from Harry Binswanger about how first dibs on ownership over a net increase in economic value that is created must rightfully go to the party that created it. On Saturday, December 6, 2025, I added the section about electric lighting from Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Charles Algernon Parsons. On Sunday, December 7, 2025, I added the section on James Gayley. On Saturday, December 20, 2025, I added the paragraphs about businesspersons who are not inventors. On Sunday, December 21, 2025, I added James Eckford Lauder’s 1855 painting of James Watt and his steam engine. On Tuesday, December 23, 2025, I added the section on Narinder Singh Kapany and Gordon Gould. On Friday, April 24, 2026, I added the Hasan Piker quotations.