“No,” he said, taking in all arguments at once, “it doesn’t matter whether you took one ear or all the corn, you have no right to do so, you’ve stolen from me, and you’re a thief. I struggle to pay for this land, I plow it, I pay for the fertilizer and seed, and I work to cultivate and to harvest. I take the risk, I spend the time, the land is mine, the corn is mine. Who are you? What did you do?”
My presumption that because I was from New York I could out-debate an Iowa farmer was beginning to go the way of all flesh. “There’s no sign,” I said, stupidly, beginning to fear that he was right, but, at fourteen, making a stand anyway.
“Do you mean to say that without a sign you have no way of knowing that this is not your field and this is not your corn? Did you think, ‘Oh, this must be the corn I planted when I was passing through here last spring. Otherwise there’d be a sign telling me that it isn’t’?”
“It’s just one ear of corn,” I insisted.
“Are you starving?” he asked. “You look pretty well fed to me.”
“No.”
“If you were, then you might have to steal someone’s corn, but at least you’d know that you had no choice—having asked for some in the first place, having tried to plant your own, having looked for work, having suffered until you were pushed. None of these things applies to you.”
“I’ll pay you,” I said, in one of my lowest moments. By now, I was ashamed.
“No you won’t. It doesn’t work that way. When a thief is caught it doesn’t change things if he offers to pay. ‘Sorry I robbed your bank. Here’s the money. See you later.’ Think of what the world would be like if that were true.”
“You want me to throw it back?” I asked sheepishly, holding up the ear of corn as if it were a fish.
“And then get out of here.”
“Do you own the side of the road?” I asked, voice cracking in defeat.
“Yes, I do.”
The rest of the day, bicycling toward Nebraska and a night camping on grasslands beneath a sky miraculously heavy with stars, I thought of rejoinders. I would not—even after the fact—let him do that to me. The problem was that I had not a single argument better than his. My pride was shattered, I had no excuse, I had been totally in the wrong and had had neither the presence of mind nor the good grace to recognize and admit it. It didn’t matter that he had thousands of acres of corn, and, perhaps like Van Gogh, would not have missed a single ear. It didn’t matter that taking the corn was easy, and except by chance would have been undetectable. I stole from him. That’s what mattered. And if I had been not a single kid passing through, but one of hundreds of thousands who stayed put and habitually raided his fields—simply because they could—then not only would it have been wrong, it would have been hurtful and destructive.
The farmer was right to have shamed me. Once I had made sense of it, and by the time we got to Nebraska and were camped under the sky as I had never before seen it, I felt freedom and enjoyment far superior to the corrosive delight of getting something for nothing.
Having been initially instructed in why most takings of property are unjust, I passed into adulthood nonetheless with an almost unconscious residual bias against property. (That’s part of what you get from living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in the same way that a fish gets water when it opens its mouth). It took decades, actually, for me to understand the positive—and, for a democracy, indispensable—effects of property, and to grasp in full the theoretical proposition that property is the guarantor of liberty. Though hardly as elegant as the word guarantor, the word coefficient is perhaps more precise.
According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,106 the adjectival meaning of coefficient is “Co-operating to produce a result.” As a noun, it is “a multiplier that measures some property of a particular substance, for which it is constant.” In regard to the relation of property to liberty, coefficient is thus a good predicate. This requires further explanation.
To begin, where would copyright, patent, and trademark be obviously unnecessary? Only in an entirely centrally directed economy, whether “perfect” socialism, communism, “democratic centralism,” or whatever it might be called. There, for example, drug firms would not need to own the rights to their discoveries, because to raise capital they would not need to promise a return, having obtained their capitalization by decree. (How this would work in comparison to the predatory capitalist model may be illustrated by comparing the number and qualities of drugs developed in the Soviet Bloc and China with those originating in the West.) Writers and composers would draw equal salaries from their cooperatives, or, as in the USSR, “unions.” As inventions would be produced only in the factories directed to do so by the central planning authority, with no possibility of competition, patents and trademarks would be unnecessary.
Is it significant that the only conditions in which such protections would not be required, or would be ill fitting at the least, and perhaps harmful, are those in the target end-states of Marxism? Of course it is, as this is the ethos from which the anti-copyright movement emerges. The theses they rely upon are sensible in their minds because they have already decided—even if not formally or consciously—against property, competition, and the free market. This is the foundation upon which their movement rests. Their arguments are mainly a subspecies of the
