Utility Quotes
Saloth Sar Pol Pot. The mass murders took place in “killing fields” where the victims were buried alive or hacked and bludgeoned to death and then buried in mass graves. The twisted logic was that the capitalists and educated people must be eliminated and therefore, cities must be eliminated. Pol Pot and his associates calculated that only 2 million people were really needed to run Cambodia if it was only a rural agricultural state. So anyone who did not farm or have those skills was unnecessary to their concept of a state. See {631144}.
When Secretary of State, Jefferson ran the first American Patent Office. The Patent system was originally and educational program, not an intellectual property program. Inventors would keep all their technological secrets to themselves. The idea behind the original patent system was to give an inventor a limited monopoly on profiting from his invention in exchange for sharing his information and techniques with his countrymen—thus improving the technological competency of the entire society. The very first patents were available for public inspection for that reason. And even today, copies of patents are available easily for almost no cost. And few American ideas worked as well as our early patent system. Through its educational role and technology transfer, America came from technological nowhere to being the pre-eminent inventing nation of the world. The balance between public access to invention and innovation and preservation of some rights to the creator of intellectual property is key to modern development.
This statement of the problem was so eloquent and universal that it is even used a century later. For example it was quoted by James Inhofe, on his Senate Speech, October 4, 2004.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. The nature of telephone technology made it easy for companies to obtain monopolies for different areas of the country. When there is a monopoly, there is a huge tendency for the controlling company to charge very high prices and have poor customer service as the usual competition required for quality performance under capitalism is nonexistant. So in 1890, there was the same resentment of the telephone companies, that existed over a century later when there was still a monopoly. Regulation helped somewhat, but the capabilities of the monopolist began to include lobbying and campaign contributions so that typically, in the 21st century, the local telephone companies had much control over the State Commissions that were supposed to regulate them. Long distance service, whose monopoly was broken up by the Federal Courts became a wonderful service for customers and the prices were a tiny fraction of what they had been under their old monopoly.
