It's a relatively simple argument first made by Economist Paul Samuelson a century ago. > A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim

It's a relatively simple argument first made by Economist Paul Samuelson a century ago. > A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. Even if the operators were able—say, by radar reconnaissance—to claim a toll from every nearby user, that fact would not necessarily make it socially optimal for this service to be provided like a private good at a market-determined individual price. Why not? Because it costs society zero extra cost to let one extra ship use the service; hence any ships discouraged from those waters by the requirement to pay a positive price will represent a social economic loss—even if the price charged to all is no more than enough to pay the long-run expenses of the lighthouse. > https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitfalls-of-economic-models/ https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitf... If one is to pay any amount of money more than the marginal cost, and decides not to that is an example of dead-weight loss. I think the major issue here is that those that wish to abolish copyright and patents aren't then actively promoting another idea, as you say. Let's look at spaces where it is currently illegal to copyright or patent something, say, Maths formulas. Do we have no one working on new maths? No. We have plenty of Mathematicians. They either work for companies creating trade secrets, or they work for Universities releasing their work in journals for all to use. So let's re-imagine a system where copyrights and patents are abolished. As Samuelson argues, as this is non-excludable and has zero marginal costs, it is a perfect fit for the government to take charge. Given that the current system produces dead-weight loss bringing down the production of the entire country, if we remove this dead-weight loss than the country will have much higher productivity. That higher productivity will drive higher taxes, and those higher taxes will allow the government to expand tenure track positions in public universities. Those tenure track positions can then go on and create new works and patents. The demand that those works create will then bring students to study and allow the works to proliferate. Would you prefer a system where copyrights and patents were abolished but there were 100x more tenure track positions? Where 10% of the population held such a role?