Patents rain, but WITHOUT
GOVERNMENTAL GUARANTEE. Property titles are placed in the
keeping of citizens, but neither the property list nor the
charter guarantee their value: it is for labor to make them
valuable. And as for the scientific and other missions which the
government sometimes takes a notion to entrust to penniless
explorers, they are so much extra robbery and corruption.
In fact, society can guarantee to no one the capital necessary
for the testing of an idea by experiment; in right, it cannot
claim the results of an enterprise to which it has not
subscribed: therefore monopoly is indestructible. For the rest,
solidarity would be of no service: for, as each can claim for his
whims the solidarity of all and would have the same right to
obtain the government's signature in blank, we should soon arrive
at the universal reign of caprice,--that is, purely and simply at
the statu quo.
Some socialists, very unhappily inspired--I say it with all the
force of my conscience--by evangelical abstractions, believe
that they have solved the difficulty by these fine maxims:
"Inequality of capacities proves the inequality of duties"; "You
have received more from nature, give more to your brothers," and
other high-sounding and touching phrases, which never fail of
their effect on empty heads, but which nevertheless are as simple
as anything that it is possible to imagine.
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