Thursday, November 19, 1987

An attack on entrepreneurship.

Gov. Steve Cowper’s question concerning the retention of patents by the state of Alaska can be answered with a simple reading of the Constitution of the United States. “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Precisely because technological advances, respecting their discovery and their successful employment, require and flow from development of the creative mental powers of individuals, physical economy tends to stagnate wherever individual initiative is crippled by subordination to central authority.

Government has no business making the thousands of day-to-day decisions associated with state ownership of patents. An attempt by state government to retain patents for state ownership should be properly viewed as an unconstitutional attack on private entrepreneurship and a detriment to creating new employment opportunity.

Government’s proper role in the American system is to fund the mission assignments for science driver projects while consuming technology driver capital goods by creating large scale infrastructural development. These are areas in which private entrepreneurship is characteristically a poor performer as well as lacking the means to risk such undertakings generally.

Governor Cowper must realize that rigorous scientific understanding of physical economy points to advancing the frontiers of high energy physics as the proper focus for creating maximum employment opportunity in Alaska. A simple reading of the Constitution of the United States wouldn’t hurt either. Charles E. Duncan