David Bollier

It is rare for economists and other champions of the marketplace to step outside of their worldview and see it as an ideological value-system.  How refreshing, then, to see the Wall Street Journal run a favorable review of Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, What Money Can’t Buy:  The Moral Limit of Markets.  The review, by Jonathan V. Last of the conservative Weekly Standard, notes that economistic thinking has exploded over the past generation, superimposing market criteria on countless aspects of personal and social life. 

In 1988, only three stadiums had the names of corporate overlords.  Now more than 100 companies have bought “naming rights” to stadiums.  I was shocked to learn that “brand extension” has even reached the level of requiring the announcers for the Arizona Diamondbacks to call home runs “Bank One Boomers.”  The degradation of a venerated national pastime shows how very deeply the tendrils of market thinking have penetrated.

This is only the beginning.  List writes:

"Today you can purchase your way out of waiting in line for rides at many amusement parks. There are express lanes that allow us to buy our way out of traffic. Many schools now 'incentivize' performance, paying students if they read books or do well in school; some schools now sell ads on children's report cards. Cities routinely sell advertising space on public property, ranging from parks and municipal buildings to police cars. In each of these cases, long-held ideas about inherent worth and common ownership have been displaced by the simple morality of the market. There are, Mr. Sandel notes, practical concerns with this shift, affecting matters such as equality: 'The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters." But the higher concerns are philosophical and spiritual, about how we ought to value what he calls sweetly "the good things in life.'"

While Bradley L. Garrett may be an anthropologist by training, he prefers to call himself an “urban explorer” or better yet, a “place hacker.”  He recently came into public view after secretly climbing to the top of the Shard, the tallest building in Europe (1,061 feet/309.7 meters), in London.  He evaded security systems and at 2 am climbed to the top of the building, still under construction, earning a spectacular view over the twinkling London nightscape.

The night's adventure garnered wide media exposure for what is legally known as an act of trespassing. Garrett doesn’t consider this mere adventurism, although he concedes it is a thrill.  Rather, he sees himself as a thinking-man’s explorer of the meaning of urban ruins – derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals, abandoned military installations, sewer and drain networks, foreclosed estates, mines, and ruins of all sorts.  Garrett considers it ethnographic research into the physical detritus of modernity – and a statement about the scarcity of public spaces in cities for discovery, camaraderie and fun. 

As a video about place hacking notes, it’s all about the “psychogeography of place.”  It's about the desire to transcend the contrived, commercially constructed facade of the city to reach a rawer, more authentic sense of urban life.  And it’s about creating a community of fellow adventurers who share in discovering and investigating secret or derelict spaces.  Aficionados call such spaces T.O.A.D.S., “temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces.” 

The Texas Supreme Court has dramatically rolled back the scope of the public trust doctrine as it applies to Texas beaches in a 5-3 ruling by the all-Republican court. This means that the public’s right to enjoy shorefront on the Gulf of Mexico will be sharply curtailed in the years ahead -- a major victory for private property fundamentalists.  Judicial activism, anyone?

The court’s decision focused on the public's access rights to beaches when hurricanes or storms have eroded a public strip of beach.  Should the public be prohibited from using the "new beach" that might now be situated on privately owned land?  Or should there be a “rolling easement” that recognizes public access no matter how natural forces remake the actual shoreline? 

For decades, the Texas state public trust doctrine gave a rolling easement that assured public access to beaches.  That access right did not inhere in a particular strip of land, but in a general right of access.  Now, the court ruled, reversing decades of established law, if a storm washes away the public beach, “the land encumbered by the easement is lost to the public trust, along with the easement attached to that land.”  As reported by the Texas Observer, “the court dismissed the 180-year-old custom of public enjoyment of Texas beaches as ‘unsupported by historic jurisprudence’ and ‘a limitation on private property rights’.”

State attorney general Greg Abbott noted:  “With the stroke of a pen, a divided court has effectively eliminated the public's rights on the dry beach….The majority could only cite—nothing.  Not a single case, rule, precedent, principle, empirical study, scientific review, or anything else.”  Even the Galveston Chamber of Commerce joined the attorney general in seeking to uphold the historic understanding of the public trust doctrine.

In patent law, they have a saying:  the name of the game is the claim.  And when it comes to patenting the naturally occurring elements of plants, the human body and other living things, patent lawyers have shown themselves to be highly ingenious in making their claims.  Their goal, of course, is to own any knowledge about nature that is needed by lots of people and can be sold.  Patent law lets companies establish artificial chokepoints over knowledge that should belong to all of us, giving the “owner” the right to charge a toll and stifle potential competition.

This trend got its start in 1980 when the U.S. Supreme Court first allowed the patenting of lifeforms in the Chakrabarty case, which allowed the patenting of microorganisms.  That in turn opened the floodgates to the patenting of genes, plants, bioengineered crops, and much else.  Harvard University famously owns the patent of a specially bred mouse for cancer experiments, the “onco-mouse.”  There is much to be said for the fruits of biotech research, but there is also much to be lamented and condemned as far as the needless privatization of knowledge and stifling of competition and innovation.

Now it seems as if the tide could be turning against the patenting of nature  The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled unanimously that a diagnostic medical test that determines levels of metabolites in a person’s blood (in order to administer the proper dosage of a class of drugs known as thiopurines) cannot be patented.  The case, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, arose when the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota decided to develop its own metabolite diagnostic test and stop buying the Prometheus product.  Prometheus sued, saying that the Mayo Clinic’s self-devised diagnostic test violated its patent.  The Mayo Clinic responded that no one can own basic knowledge about human physiology and nature.