Early MPS neoliberals favored weaker patent rights over stronger ones

Evidence

In 1958, Machlup spoke before a US congressional subcommittee considering the question of what was then called “industrial property” as often as intellectual property. In calling patents into question, he cited MPS neoliberals from Mises and Hayek to Plant and Robbins. A striking absence in his discussion was the notion that property rights could apply in a commonsense way to ideas as they did to things. As he wrote in 1962, “If a public or social good is defined as one that can be used by additional persons without causing any additional cost, then knowledge is such a good of the purest type. To seek knowledge, to create, acquire, transmit, or retrieve knowledge—all these activities are ordinarily associated with effort or sacrifice of some sort; that is, they are not without cost. To use existing knowledge, however, may be costless.” … The guiding belief was that economic actors did not have to be incentivized to innovate as competition would do the incentivizing for them. Keeping or gaining the lead in a crowded field would compel companies onward to fund research and development. In the case of patents, it was weaker rather than stronger property rights that would serve the higher interests of the competitive order. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common caricature that all neoliberals blindly championed maximal property rights; connects to the reader’s broader project on internal varieties of neoliberalism. — connects to: MPS research argued patents obstruct economic development in poorer countries — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 184; Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 175; Free trade liberals had an anti-patent activist tradition in the nineteenth century — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 182 (+7 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘When liberals wanted fewer patents’ — recovering Machlup’s anti-IP moment as a forgotten strand inside neoliberal thought.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power #contradicts (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 175
• MPS research argued patents obstruct economic development in poorer countries #expands (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 184