🚀 go-pugleaf

From the "The Portable Jefferson" (letter 1813)

"It has been pretended by some .. that inventors have a natural and
exclusive right to their inventions, not merely for their own lives, but
inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the
origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be
singular to admit a natural and even hereditary right to inventors ... By a
universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixable or moved belongs to all men,
equally and in common, is the property of him who occupies it, but when he
relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is
the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It
would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an
individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and
stable property. If nature has made one thing less susceptible than all
others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called
and idea,which an individual may exlusively possess as long as he keeps it
to himself; but in the momement it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. 
Its peculiar character, too , is that no one possesses the less, because
every other possesses the whole of it ... That ideas should freely spread
from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of
man, and the improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible
over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the
air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of
confinement or exclusive appropriation.
...


[editorial comment. Unfortunately, the decline in educational standards,
especially  the subsitution of the works of politically correct "thinkers"
like Milton Friedman and William Buckely for the classical  works of
Paine, Jefferson, Hume, Madison , (not to mention Thoreau, Dubois, Emma
Goldman, Henry George, or any modern political and moral thinkers of any
stature at all ) have lead to a collapse of political
dialogue. Those who have come through a watered down educational system, fed
on a diet of cold war pablum, infotainment,  and stale propertarian ideology 
are ill equipped to deal with concepts more complex than those which can
be expressed in a 30 second telivision spot. ]