Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter

by Tom Baugh

  Finally, his on-going costs were simply paying the machines' owners for the time, handling the cards and receipts, and watching the data whir. And billing, and hoping that his customers would actually pay, which meant even more sales calls to hand-hold customers who might be getting dodgy.

  The result? The rapid expansion of data automation, credit, technology and all the other benefits we enjoy in the world around us. As well as the ability for the collective to crush us with taxes and regulations. And crush us with all the other artificial constraints which would prevent such an idea, simple in concept but almost daunting in execution, to flourish today. But at least the DEA gets to monitor how much iodine we buy for our booboos, or how much watered-down cold medicine we buy for our sniffles.

  Perot was one of the lucky few who actually managed to profit handsomely from an innovation he was instrumental in implementing. Historically, the innovator rarely benefitted directly from the automation he created. No one even knows the name of whoever it was who hitched the first animal to a plow, or built the first bunny hutch or chicken coop. And yet each man, woman and child on the face of the earth today benefits from those simple ideas.

  Imagine that if each meal you ate was imposed a royalty of a thousandth of a cent, payable to the animal plow innovator. You hardly even notice the sum of this royalty over the period of your entire life, yet you certainly owe this person that fraction of a dollar for all the meals you will eat. Yet, paid by all the people alive today, almost all of whom benefit somehow from this innovation, that agricultural innovator's estate would increase by approximately two hundred thousand (pre-hyperinflation) dollars per day. Throw in a modest interest rate on the savings and clearly this innovator would be the richest person in the world today by far. And would deserve to be.

  Similarly, it is impossible to measure all the wealth and progress of mankind, and the corresponding quality of life for all of us, which was unleashed by Ross Perot's simple idea. An idea which dynamited the logjam that had been IBM's stranglehold on the computing business. IBM itself benefitted from this idea, as marginal customers who had resisted buying big machines could then justify the purchase by selling unused time. IBM also benefitted as the rising demand for smaller machines, demand created by Perot's business model, met the cost of making mid-sized computers. Two decades later that megalithic marvel of the collective would totally mismanage the PC revolution, which once again relied on innovators who were ridiculed by the establishment.

  Perot's billions were cheap when compared to what his idea did for the rest of us. And yet the collective assesses the wealth of innovators as merely spoils for their plunder, completely disregarding the disproportionate wealth, and quality of life, which they spawn in others.

  The reason we don't know the name of the plow-maker or the bunnyhutcher or the chicken-tender is that for most of human history ideas were merely public plunder. Ideas were usually used for the enrichment of a secular or spiritual tyrant for whom the innovator was merely a slave. It was only the advent of individual rights, particularly property rights to include an individual's ideas, in the period known as the Enlightenment that it became possible for an innovator to be at least known for his achievements, if not richly rewarded. The miracle of government as envisioned by the Founding Fathers to protect us specifically from the tyranny of the collective, added fuel to that intellectual fire.

  Even so, even in this country the innovator of a truly revolutionary idea has hardly been richly rewarded. History is full of examples of innovators who died penniless, only to have their ideas enrich others, and usually, devotees to the collective. Tesla died broke, and only enjoyed a fraction of the wealth which should have accrued to him. Yet Edison, the master collectivist, and Westinghouse received all the wealth and acclaim as if those inventions were solely theirs. After Tesla's departure, Edison went so far as to try to block Tesla's demonstration of AC power by enraging the public with an AC electric chair. He also used other blocking tactics to prevent Tesla from using his light bulbs in the demonstration.

  When Edison said, "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration," he didn't mean his perspiration. And by devaluing inspiration, he intended that the poor sap who he convinced that his idea was worthless would wander off empty-handed. Or come to work for him in desperation so that Edison might take credit for his ideas as the innovator slaved away in his early cubicle.

  Time and again, innovators are crushed by the collective as the life is squeezed out of them. In Tesla's case, he agreed to give up ownership as he believed that Westinghouse was struggling, trading one cheater for another. The pattern continues today. Kane Kramer, whose patents underlay the iPod, was recently in court with Apple, not to sue them, but to help them defend themselves in a patent dispute with another company. Kramer's position? Not to collect from Apple, but that his then-expired patents predated the other litigant's patents. This man should own a significant chunk of Apple, in my opinion, but instead, due to the expiration clauses of intellectual property law, he merely gets hired as a consultant to keep up impressions.

  File for a patent now, and a Chinese factory will be punching out pirated versions of your products before the certificate is on your wall. Even if you manage to beat them to market, soon some slick-talking TV huckster will be selling cheap low-quality knockoffs which will drive your product under. Because the collective wills it so.

  Elisha Gray invented a better telephone, but Bell beat him to the patent office. Later Bell models would use features which Gray, not Bell, had invented. Later evidence would be presented which alleged that patent examiners allowed Bell inspection of Gray's earlier provisional patent filings, presented before Bell's historic filing. And that the examiners had taken bribes to allow these inspections. Antonio Meucci might also have had a word to say about those developments.

  Eli Whitney, who filed for one of the first patents in the United States for his cotton gin, was embroiled in disputes against infringers for so long that his patents expired anyway. All profits he made from his invention were consumed by unsuccessful litigation. The collective, even back then, had little sympathy for his claims as he, in their estimation, simply demanded too much return for his ideas. As they lay in wait for the inexpensive fabrics which would soon reach their clutching fingers.

  John Kay, who invented the flying shuttle, had to flee for his life from displaced weavers who were angry at his innovation which eventually clothed us all. He died in Paris in poverty. James Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinning jenny, as well as the concept of a factory, had his house burned to the ground by an angry mob.

  Thomas Highs had almost every invention he ever made stolen by Sir Richard Arkwright, who amassed a tremendous fortune by patenting Highs' inventions as his own. Highs was simply too poor to afford the costs of either patenting or challenging Arkwright.

  More important than product designs are process innovations, which aren't even patent-able except in extremely unusual circumstances. Google didn't invent web search, or search-based advertising, and were more or less late to the table. And yet, they now have the reputation as having innovated better than others. The original inventor of web-search or search advertising is long forgotten, but Google, a darling of the collective, is now the benefactor of collectivist causes. Interestingly, I first heard about Google from a diehard communist, whose recommendation of them as advertisers for my business I thought a bit strange at the time. Looking back, I now see the connection.

  First Wife imagines a day in which some poor sap somewhere makes the mistake of finding a cure for AIDS. Should this individual make the mistake of wanting to commercialize it so that he could be rewarded for his hard work and risk, the collective will fall upon him like a pack of rabid wolves. Each day the cure isn't handed over the monkeys will blame him for additional deaths and curse him as a murderer. She believes that the collective will rejoice if it becomes known that he and all his heirs were killed, thus releasing the cure into the public
domain. I agree with her dark assessment of most of humanity.

  The great thing about stealing ideas from innovators, or convincing them to sell cheap or give up the rights entirely, is that monkeys get to avoid all those icky design costs. The collective benefits from this theft or fraud or outright naivete, as those design costs are not then built into the cost of the product or service. Each monkey then gets his pellet cheaper this way. It is not surprising that the collective often turns a deaf ear to the complaints of innovators as their wealth is stolen away.

  To illustrate this concept, and for instructional purposes only, in the next few years someone I know will patent, or attempt to patent, an innovation which has remarkable implications for the production of energy. The downstream effects of this innovation would place energy in the hands of individuals, and take it away from the hands of the collective.

  Yet, the collective simply cannot allow these effects, and to thwart this paradigm shift, will spring into action. The innovation itself must be seen as crackpot science, despite the fact that it could be replicated in any garage or basement. Usually, any discovery related to energy is usually attacked as attempting to replicate some sort of perpetual motion machine. As Sadi Carnot pointed out, a perpetual motion machine, however weak, would eventually generate enough engineering work to dislodge the universe.

  My friend's innovation is not in the category of perpetual motion machines. No, entropy is alive and well, and sadly, too well. Instead, this innovation merely reduces the price of something which is expensive, and currently, too expensive to use, and is expensive precisely because of the cost of the energy which is required to make it. No perpetual motion here, just economic reality.

  In this case, though, the discrediting must be done to conceal the fact that this innovation sits squarely in a hole of silence. Imagine that you wanted to keep a secret, but were so focused on secrecy that you created a black hole of discussion, meaning, every path to that secret dropped off a cliff. That is what I mean by a "hole of silence." This innovation is in such a hole. And the monkeys want it to stay that way.

  Normally, scholarship requires that an innovator or a scholar research and reveal the foundation of his research, the prior work which has been done by others. But what if all the prior work is in a hole of silence? What if every single path of basic study, including the reaction of some wellknown substances to basic physical phenomena, is completely and blatantly missing from the literature, although information around it in every direction abounds? For that particular field, each innovator might as well be Sadi Carnot, using his mind alone to deduce that innovation, and begin to tease it out of hiding.

  Curiously, each research topic my friend has been able to find leading toward this innovation ends abruptly once it reaches the edge of the hole. Some researchers even died at this brink. Others have been arrested, some on drug charges, some on immigration violations, and others on pointless little things which brings their research to a grinding halt as their careers were destroyed. There isn't even any research which shows why this innovation would be impractical. Nothing so brash as complaints of perpetual motion, nor even the gentle analysis which says it is too expensive, or even impractical. No claims that anyone has tried it and rejected it for even the most well-meaning reason.

  It just simply isn't there. Yet, the paths leading to it are well-trod and meaningful, and trod by people with credibility in the field. My friend has shown me this information and all of these dead-ends, and I must admit, the evidence is compelling. Which means that something really, really interesting is at the center of that hole.

  When that patent is attempted it is my friend's intention to slip it into the system with no fanfare whatsoever. Since no one knows who my friend is but me, good luck trying to predict when this patent application will be submitted, or from what quarter it will come. At first, there will be procedural issues with the patent. I will be watching this, so I can document these for you. Then, there will be delays as the prior art is researched. There will be none, as it sits in a hole of silence.

  If my friend is clever enough to avoid fanfare, then the patent might actually get approved, assuming that no one is watching closely enough. Whether it slips through might test the existence of "watchers." In a later chapter I completely discount the possibility of "smoke-filled rooms" of conspirators, and chalk up all the nonsense of our world to blind monkey ambition. I see no reason to deviate from this assessment for the patent office. But I could be wrong.

  Regardless, by silently slipping this innovation through the patent process, the discredit phase which faces scholars will have been neatly sidestepped. This same work, if submitted for publication in a scholarly journal, would be silently shouted down as the reviewers pass. For them, the hole itself is sufficient to consider it unworthy. "Who of our fellows have considered this worthy before?", they would have asked. And then answer themselves, "Why, none," as justification for their disdain. By avoiding publication and review, the reviewers lose the opportunity to reject it.

  Once the patent is issued, though, the real fun will begin. Because this patent will threaten the underpinnings of the energy industry, control and rationing of which is vital to the monkey on the street and in the ballot box, the patent itself must be rendered impotent. There are several time-honored ways to do this.

  First, industry could simply ignore the patent and just begin using it. With sufficiently shallow pockets such an innovator would never be able to find justice in court, and could spend their entire lives and fortunes fighting a fight they will never win. The collective knows this.

  Should the innovator graze too close to justice in court, the collective will take the second time-honored path to avoid his patent. Simply declare it as invalid. Although a hole of silence currently exists around this idea, as soon as the collective deems it necessary, out will come the reams of dusty binders. These binders will be full of prior art which had been hidden from view the day before. And on them ink still wet. A third dodge would be to simply locate the plants for this work overseas, and merely ship the product to our shores. The patent covers the means of production only, and who's to say how the product itself was made?

  Another would be to declare the means, or the product of it, or both, as illegal and thus remove it from the hands of the individuals who might use it to free themselves from the collective. Armed with this innovation and its product, the individual would no longer need the collective and its web of dependency. Instead, the individual with this means at his disposal would instead sell the collective the energy they need.

  The fifth way to defeat this innovation would be to declare the downstream mechanisms which use this product as unsafe, and thus unsuited to trust to mere individuals. Something which is perfectly safe and harmless today will become an outrage to not be tolerated. Perhaps even the shamans, theological and environmental, will assist with this outrage as they claim the product and its mechanisms lure their children into godlessness.

  In any of a myriad of ways, the same collective which demands we limit our use of energy would thwart my friend as he opens the door to a practically unlimited resource. Because that energy, while not free, and, at current prices not yet cost-effective, would become a threat to the collective which seeks to throttle the individual at all costs. This innovation will have reduced the cost of energy from astronomical to merely high.

  One day, when the costs of energy rise to meet the demand of the collective to limit it, this resource is one which would remain within the reach of the individual in his garage or basement. Or more likely, his workshop out back. Without this resource, the individual would have to bow and curtsey and stay in his cubicle cage to receive his ration. But with it, the individual would be empowered to live his life, and enrich it, and profit from selling energy to the collective which seeks to enslave him. And this empowerment, in either sense, cannot be tolerated.

  So the mechanisms, and the product, and the innovation, and my friend, must all be des
troyed. Or, my friend may just decide, like John Galt and his motor, to only trade the product of this innovation with those who share his outlook and philosophy. And withhold it for now, bringing it to light only when the monkeys have all withered away. I have advised him to consider this option myself, as it is the noble course for now.

  Of course, this book is a work of fiction, isn't it? So, there may not actually be a friend or an innovation or a patent. We'll see.

  But you don't need to have a startlingly important innovation to have your more modest ideas stolen or regulated away. The bottom line is that it is highly unlikely that you will ever become wealthy as an inventor. I am not at all advocating that you beat your head against that wall. As I have recommended to my friend, innovations, especially the world-changing innovations, should be held out of the monkeys' reach.

  Until there are no monkeys to reach for them. Or to be fed by them. Instead, the sort of innovation which I think is essential for each man are those small innovations which improve one's life. Automating away small tasks, and particularly those which would otherwise require the assistance of monkeys, is often rewarding in and of itself.

  As an entrepreneur, you will face numerous situations in which you must make the decision to innovate or to hire. To be enabled to make better decisions in this regard, you must be informed as to the merits of the process of automation itself.

  Consider the diagram below:

  In this diagram, the cost of labor is plotted for what might be called an unburdened laborer. For the purposes of this discussion, an unburdened laborer simply provides work for an employer, without regard to any payroll taxes, workplace regulations, union inefficiencies or other laborer costs. This would be the Og and Pok laborer.