Patents Are Not Economical

Well, they’re often economical for the patent holder in the short-run. But over time, a legal regime that discourages information-sharing simply closes off advances in technology. Defenders of government-granted monopolies (i.e. patents) often rely make broad claims that allegedly show that inventions would not be made were it not for patents. True history, on the other hand, generally shows the exact opposite as in the case of William Gilmour and the power loom.

The Levellers and Early Libertarian Thought

     The first-ever libertarians were the Levellers, an English political movement active in the seventeenth century. The Levellers contributed to the elaboration of the methodological and political paradigm of individualism, and they are at the origin of the radical strand of classical liberalism. While the Levellers are often characterized as a quasi-socialist movement, the aim of my research is to restore the Levellers to their classical liberal heritage, and to find out to what extent they were in fact libertarian.