If I figure out a way to do a job better, and start to do it, even if I have never heard of your invention, if you have patented it, and the government finds out, I will be prosecuted, fined, my property confiscated, and if I persist, thrown in prison. How am I profiting off of someone else’s hard work? What gives you the right to do this to me?

The answer is NOTHING. It isn’t your hard work. There is no property right in work once expended. You are dangerously close to quoting Marx’s Labor Theory of Value – who’s a Commie now? Patent and copyright are immoral.

…which Mark Ames certainly does to me  here (changes underlined – DUH);

“As a small-l libertarian, to your charge that I, and others similarly situated are enemies of the state; take a look around at the pestilential murder, torture, spying, groping, irradiating state that the corporatists have fastened upon all of us, in what was never a free country, take a deep breath, hold out your hand for koch money, and yell out a hearty “FUCK YEAH I’m an enemy of the state!” even though i take money from republican party linked shills and billionaires. How could any true, clear-eyed libertard think or feel otherwise?”

To which I replied;

“Read between the lines: Ames is most certainly NOT a puerile, childish, censorious, deluded, mentally-masturbating Koch conspiracy theorist, he would never deface or deliberately mis-characterize what a respectful commenter wrote in response to his never non-illuminating, non-constructive, regular Democratic party shilling specimen of non-awful, non-ad-hominem non-attacks of people who aren’t even aware enough of him to even care to defend their equally childish scratchings. Mark Ames should most definitely not see the error of his ways and try to understand that when a government violates all of its founding tenets, idealized or not, it is morally void, and is simply a gang of criminals transferring wealth from the people to the plutocracy. Oh, and I definitely get money from the Koch Brothers, who would never not fail to treat me like their favorite nephew – thanks for all the $$$$ Chuckie and David!”

Yeah, he’ll attack me some more, or else he’ll just delete it, but there you go.

The lesson is, know your enemy. He doesn’t, yet.