You don't even have to take over the farm land to do that. Decades ago, our family grew corn in our large backyard. It was delicious, but had an enzyme in it that turned sugars to starch within hours of picking. so it had to be picked, cooked and eaten quickly. One could keep a cob of corn and plant the seeds next time around. It was free corn, labour and land aside.
Now, I pay extorquerationate prices for bought corn which is superlative corn if grown right and distributed right [not too much delay]. If I don't pay the prices demanded, I can starve or eat something else.
I tried keeping a cob and growing it, from seed, not realizing that the seeds are sterile, being patented sterile seeds so farmers always have to buy more seed from the monopoly.
I guess the inventors and suppliers of that corn are umpt$billionaires. That seems a good thing to me. I don't have to mess around growing my old-style corn. Even with their high prices, it's still cheaper than going back to my old ways, which I'm welcome to do. And the corn is great when it's good. I might have to grow it myself as the suppliers, like so many people in business, do a bad job of growing and distributing.
But getting back to your idea of monopolizing all land and food production, and thinking you can get all the wealth, you are forgetting that you are merely the supplier of the food to the people doing good. You can't get all the wealth because you are like the parasite, living off the wealth produced by your customers. You have to leave them a consumer surplus and can only exchange value.
You are thinking you can build a perpetual motion machine.
Many ideas are fun in theory, but reality does not actually work as the imaginary theory is constructed. So you would not in fact be able to create the reality you imagined. Global Warming is an example of a fine theory, with very expensive computer models which were claimed to prove the theory. Oooops, reality diverged from the models' predictions.
But let's go with your fun theory. One glitch is the patent you got from the government to stop anyone copying. Government force is not a manifestation of free will and voluntary exchange. There are understandable reasons why governments issue patents but in fact there is no law of the Cosmos that says patents should be granted. So I dispute that you should have a legal monopoly with government forces shooting anyone who copies your idea.
Even with patents and total government force, there has never been such a monopoly as you imagine. But let's say that even without a patent, you could invent something so spectacular that everyone wanted in. Such as, for example a duplicate world, tax-free, to which they could quantum tunnel, arriving in that perfect place as a clone of themselves, a total clone, down to the last neuron and chemical balance in every neuron, with exactly the same length of telomeres, no, what the heck, with genetic enhancement for no telomere depletion, meaning ever-lasting life. Your duplicate world would include all their houses, land, lakes and everything. The price you would charge would be to take over everything they had in their previous world, except that they would no longer be there.
That seems a fair exchange. If absolutely everyone chose to leave, the new place would be exactly as they had left, but they'd have unlimited food, with your fancy farming machine, ever-lasting life and all mod cons [from all your other fancy machines].
You would own absolutely everything in the Olde Worlde they had left.
That seems fair enough that you own everything. Absolutely everything.
So, patents aside, your farming technology seems reasonable. Maybe you created some fancy metal and amazing quantum computer control system essential to building the tractors so nobody could copy them anyway because you were the only one who could figure out how to make the metal and quantum computing control system. No patents needed. Just brain-power. It's reasonable that you charge what the market will bear.
But those are silly hypothetical examples.
If you want an immoral wealth-capture, have a look at the government enforced medical cartel, now to include Obamacare. Patents on cancer treatment, huge prices for pharmaceuticals, people dying from lack of treatment because they can't afford the price, FDA delays and huge costs in approvals, the medical cartel monopoly on use of the products.
Buyer beware and prosecute fraud under common law is the way to go. People who choose to do so could use only FDA-approved products from Obama's authorized medical practitioners. Others would be free to make their own arrangements. Toyota might use their quality control systems to go into the medical business. The government-produced Lada [I owned one in Antwerp] was not as good as the Toyota Corolla [I have owned that too and currently have a Camry. I'm tempted to buy the Lexus medical plan].
Mqurice |
