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# Patents are Marxist
- URL: https://www.schweizermonat.ch/patents-are-marxist/
- Published: 2026-09-14T04:06:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T18:41:14.000Z
- Description: Patents attempt to own ideas and fail. They deter innovation and tax our common inheritance.
- Author: Alex Buxeda

Die Deutsche Version finden Sie [hier](https://www.schweizermonat.ch/patente-sind-marxistisch/).

Property rights exist because they resolve conflict over things only one person can use at a time. So we settled on the rule that whoever used an unowned resource first owns it, and ownership then passes by trade or inheritance.

Ideas don't have that problem. If I learn your recipe or the mechanism inside your mousetrap, you still have it. Since ideas aren't scarce, enforcing a monopoly over them means reaching into someone else's property, and forbidding them from arranging it in a certain way. A patent suit uses coercion against a stranger using his own materials in his own shop. That is confiscation, ironically called property.

**The Labor Fallacy**

The usual justification sounds intuitive: you own what you create. If one pays closer attention, one realizes it is the oldest and biggest mistake in economic thought. Locke needed a bridge to connect "you own your body" and "you own the field you cleared," so he built one: you own your labor, therefore you own what you mix it with. It was a poisoned seed. Adam Smith argued labor ratios determine exchange value. Ricardo treated labor embodied in production as the cause of relative prices. Marx then pushed the premise to its weaponized conclusion: labor is the sole source of value; whatever value a worker creates belongs to him; and anything the capitalist keeps beyond the wage is theft. This is the axiom of the labor theory of value.

The sweat-of-the-brow theory of intellectual property builds on the same axiom. Marx says the worker deserves the value his labor created. Ayn Rand – and the mainstream case for patents – says the inventor does. Both say that prices should be determined by costs. Socialism and intellectual property are the same monopolizing mistake. Monopolizing either the means of production or ideas.

The Austrians nailed it with their pithy dictum: “Prices determine costs, costs don’t determine prices.” Value isn't poured into a good by labor; it is subjective and exists solely in the mind of the person valuing it. A diamond is valuable because people want it and there isn't much of it, not because someone labored to mine it. Again, prices determine costs, not the other way around. The opposite is Marxism. "You deserve to own the value your labor created" becomes nonsensical once you see this.

> The Austrians nailed it with their pithy dictum: “Prices determine costs, costs don’t determine prices.” Value isn't poured into a good by labor; it is subjective and exists solely in the mind of the person valuing it.

This is also why claiming an idea because you labored on it needs the state in a way owning land never did. Homesteading a field is self-enforcing; others see the link with their own eyes. A claim over the pattern of information in an invention has no boundaries; creating it requires an apparatus to define and – even more expensively – enforce the claim – a state hallucination caused by the cronies close to the state, not a preexisting right.

**A Tax on Human Progress**

Patents are inherently arbitrary; they have no empirical cost-benefit basis. If inventors wouldn’t recoup costs without protection, why is seventeen years correct? Why not five, or fifty? Nobody has an answer – it's a number set by the same government that can't explain why copyright deserves a century while patents get two decades.

The cost compounds every year. Human wealth is accumulated knowledge, every generation is richer than the last because it inherits a bigger precedent. Patents are a tax on inheritance, slowing the spread of knowledge. Not coincidentally, patents began as grants of royal monopoly under England's 1623 Statute of Monopolies.

If an enterprise wouldn’t be invested in without a state-granted monopoly, so be it. The purpose of the law is justice, not to allocate capital. The Soviet Union proved the state cannot allocate capital; it’s time to realize that patents Sovietize our economies and get rid of them.

> If an enterprise wouldn’t be invested in without a state-granted monopoly, so be it. The purpose of the law is justice, not to allocate capital

The reward for inventing something valuable was never supposed to be a governmental weapon against your neighbor's property. It was supposed to be the market's reward: profit from getting there first, and staying ahead of those learning from you, competing as everyone should.