Does anybody here have an interest in macroeconomics?

[rva_jeremy]

Patent systems have been exploited by the large corporations especially, I would guess, because of seemingly unlimited money available for litigation.  But a simple inventor making some fees because of a great idea he/she had - who could argue with that?

I consider the latter example simply a legitimizing narrative to shore up the prevalence of the former example.  What I don't get it why we wouldn't expect a system of state-subsidized private property to accumulate property to those better at navigating the system?  It just seems like the rules are set up to favor capital -- almost like it is a "capital"-centric or capital-ist system.

I think my mindset in posting this is more related to the concept of "regulatory capture", than anything else.

Fair enough.  As an anarchist, I typically point out in scenarios like this that corporations are chartered by the state.  They are literally tiny privatized departments of the state, especially to the extent they enjoy limited liability protection.  If you're interested in this critique, I wrote an essay called Let the Free Market Eat the Rich a few years back that lays out these ideas.

I'm in agreement that STO civilizations would not have to be technologically advanced - but then, what does that mean?  

Perhaps it means that, sometimes, doing things the inconvenient, labor-intensive, hard way has upsides that we don't recognize in terms of human connection, cooperation, and selfhood.  Technology these days tends to have a very distracting quality to it.  Freeing us from toil just to sit in front of a screen doesn't seem like a big win.