A Patent Five-Cent Utopia

EVEN thirty years ago political philosophy had so run down at the heel that he who elected to study the subject in college was considered a little queer by his fellows. Where ten of us were shepherded from Socrates to Tom Paine by a single high-domed professor, then already old and now the last of his kind, hundreds rallied to the group in political science, with its beautiful charts and its bold young instructors.

Under our philosopher we studied, among other things, Utopias. This in itself was enough to mark us, on that campus, as something less than upstanding youths. And yet we have lived to see the practicalities swept out to sea in a tidal wave, and Utopianism financed to the tune of billions. Waiting thirty years for social experimentation has been expensive. To paraphrase Tom Marshall, ’What the country needs is a good five-cent Utopia.’ Having delayed Utopia-building from Roosevelt to Roosevelt, billions must now be spent in experimenting where millions might have served in the simple days of the old Republic.

In Course I on Political Philosophy each of us was required, at one stage, to submit a plan for a Utopian commonwealth. The high-domed professor estimated that he had read of some thousand Utopias, most of which were not even fun. While the majority of the compositions reeked of Plato, More, and Butler, an original idea occasionally rewarded our teacher. One of them deserves notice in these times and straits. It set forth a rather neat plan to bridge this stock dilemma of political philosophy: The state is the guardian of security, yet security promotes accumulations and inequalities of wealth which tend to range citizen against citizen.

The original mind that addressed itself to this problem sketched a country in which the government, after granting a patent on a machine or process, retained the right to buy it back from the patentee at any time within the life of the patent if in the judgment of experts its effect was prejudicial to the common weal, through its being either too efficiently or too inefficiently used. Such a plan restrained progress slightly, but made greatly for security, since this wise little country could also require manufacturers under its patents to pay their royalties in goods, which were then exchanged for grain and other raw materials to be warehoused against time of dearth.

Our high-domed professor demolished most of these gingerbread edifices gently but firmly. Regarding Utopias in general, he reminded us that, alas, most of them were geared to small areas and well-favored isles where the blessings of nature were all present and outside contacts were not. What would we do with immigration, war, national defense, overpopulation? He had us there. Our minds did not run so far.

But on the Patent Utopia outlined above he waxed quite commendatory. It seemed nowhere to deny liberty, except by a restriction for which the sovereign state gave a quid pro quo. Letters patent being a state grant of value, enforceable in court, a reasonable price might be exacted by the state in return for the temporary monopoly granted. In recalling that monopoly, it would compensate the inventor and presumably such others as might lose through the change. Those who entered the patent equation after the grant and before recall would do so in full knowledge of what might happen to their interest. While progress might be slowed down somewhat, the first interest of the state — security — might very well be enhanced by the arrangement.

There was certainly something to say for the idea of requiring users of state patents to pay royalties in kind. This would have the effect of stabilizing prices, always a point for social security, and put the state in position to distribute goods to its citizens when need developed. The tendency would be for the state to exchange promptly such style goods as came into its possession for durable non-style goods of universal use and application, so that even if production slowed down through war, drouth, bad harvests, strikes, or the errors of producers, life could still go on amid plenty for a time. The very fact that not all the returns derived from improved processes could go into profits would tend to keep down the debt burden created by investing profits. To some extent the national margin would be invested in consumers’ goods, and only part of it in capital goods to be used in further production. So, when the warehouses began to overflow, the producers of the nation could take a month’s holiday and yet continue eating and drinking if the servers of the nation could be induced to take their vacation at another time.

The more the high-domed professor thought of this Utopian idea the less Utopian he thought it. He has been turning it over in his mind for thirty years, and he insists on discussing it whenever we meet.

‘Consider,’ said he recently, ‘what such an arrangement would have meant to us when America entered the World War. The nation would have possessed enough wool and cotton to clothe an army and enough chemicals and steel to arm it. A nation so fortified might never have been challenged to enter war; its resources would have been too apparent. But let us say we were challenged and entered; then we might have lent the Allies, not so many dollars, but so many tons of this and that. One of the miseries of existence rests upon this truth: that, whereas no nation has a monopoly of any considerable commodity, each has a monopoly of its currency. Our debtors can get dollars only by purchasing them from us, which renders repayment impossible; but if we could take their goods and use them, either for consumption or for storage against future need, then we might make our collections and they could save their honor at the price of labor.

‘Coming down to these distressing later days, would there have been the long delay in feeding and clothing the workless multitude if the United States had held, in granaries and warehouses, as Egypt did of old, the wherewithal to fill bellies and cover backs? The opposition which delayed federal relief work all centred around the fact that money and credit had become scarce, while goods were superabundant. Not even government, with its money monopoly, could easily put goods into consumption, because its chiefs considered they had to tax out of some of the people the money to buy the goods for others to consume. Money does seem, occasionally, to get in the way of the national welfare.

‘There is only one catch in the plan, and perhaps that is not as important as it used to seem. The difficulty is in building a government which can be trusted. It seems to be in the nature of sovereignty to break its contracts and to play favorites among its citizens. The Patent Board might be manipulated. The management of the government stores might get into politics, and then we might see cotton farmers complaining because the government would not exchange an airplane for a bale of cotton, with Southern Congressmen ready to fight a political campaign on that issue. Nevertheless, a country which is beginning to understand some of the shortcomings of uncontrolled progress might do well to consider this matter of keeping a whip hand on patents and collecting taxes on their use in kind rather than in currency, which of itself feeds no bodies and clothes no backs.’

I asked the professor if he thought an inflation of goods ought really to distress a nation organized to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

He crossed his fingers gently and waggled them at me. ‘There does seem,’ he said, ‘ to be a poison at the root of life, but I am afraid I shall not live long enough to discover precisely what it is.’