Zero

Interesting post: The Importance Of Zero In Destroying The Scarcity Myth Of Economics

When Jim Harper of the Cato Institute kindly invited me to be on a panel discussion about copyrights at Cato in their Washington DC office, I had a lot of trouble figuring out what I was going to talk about. I had been spending a lot of time trying to understand why there was such a split among folks who prided themselves on having a "free market" or libertarian view of the world -- but who seemed to completely disagree on the economics of content. It bothered me that people who started with the same fundamental toolbox ("the free market is good") would end up at such widely divergent views. On the one side were folks like the Progress & Freedom Foundation, who felt that strong intellectual property laws (including things like stronger protections of DRM) were necessary to build an economy around content. On the other, were folks like myself, Tim Lee and David Levine, who saw that these intellectual property laws were basically government granted monopolies that could hold back economic progress.