George Gilder is so right that we need to stop thinking of economics in purely materialistic terms. An economic system is not resources, it is human ingenuity, creativity applied to resources. This is the lie of the ‘indigenous peoples’ that we stole their resources. Or even the Mexicans we ‘stole’ California from, and so they missed out on Mexican Hollywood as if they would have made the same use of that piece of desert real-estate as the Christians who founded it. We know what happens to the person not making use or adding information to their resources. What they have is taken and given to the one who has more. Mark 4, Matthew 15 and some other places.
It’s the twisted thinking behind that family who thinks they have a right to all the pharmaceutical intellectual property generated by developed cell lines from some lady who died of cancer years ago. As if any of them would have achieved the same scientific heights if they had been in possession of the tumor. The value wasn’t in the tumor, it was in the intelligence they applied to it. It’s also the basis for many flawed story lines in time travel movies. Just because you use Google , doesn’t mean you can go back in time and recreate the successful company and become rich. Just because you work in the mail room of a company doesn’t mean you can run the company and it’s not fair that the CEO makes more money than you. Your human carcass and the CEO’s may be equal before the law and equally deserving of the same human dignity. But that does not mean you are capable of achieving the same things.
It’s why intellectual property is protected in the Constitution, because they rightly saw that encouraging innovation is the key to succes and the breath of Christendom. “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.”
