It could be said that Jefferson is a figurehead for limited state involvement in private and commercial matters. So, it's always been confusing to me that Jefferson served on the first patent examination board. Patents are government sanctioned monopolies on private or commercial things, so why would he advocate for them? I narrowed the answer down to an article called Godfather of American Invention written by a historian named Silvio A. Bedini and published in The Smithsonian Book of Invention in 1977. In the article Mr. Bedini gives many quotes that highlight what Jefferson might have been thinking. The problem is that Mr. Bedini does not give citations or references specific enough to read quotes in context or even validate them. For example, one quotation is taken from a letter "to a correspondent in France in 1787..." What the hell am I supposed to do with that? That has to be the scholarly equivalent of "they say..."
I'm not going to complain about Bedini. I give him full faith that all the things he quoted were accurate to the best of his knowledge and ability; from my limited reading about Bedini he was a much better historian than I. However, stumbling on this article made me realize that trying to dive back into the brain of someone who isn't here to explain themselves is pointless. Even if Jefferson said all the things that Bedini asserts, does it mean anything? If someone went through all my text messages, not even the drunk ones, and tried to discern what I think about any given topic it would be mishegoss. Not only are my own views and thoughts sometimes inconsistent, my definitions of words are not the same as everybody else's definitions of words. Separate that fact with 200 years of abstraction and you have terms of art that can't possibly be understood and phrases that make no sense out of the day to day context that all thoughts necessarily inhabit.
That's when it hit me: who cares what Jefferson thought about the patent system. I've been ordering books and reading online sources in order to track down a thought nugget that may not exist and is unreliable even if it does exist. What matters, and what I should care about, is whether the patent system makes sense TODAY. Does it accomplish it's constitutionally stated purpose of incentivizing innovation TODAY? It doesn't matter what a slave owner who granted patents on the manufacture of pot ash thinks about patents in the 1790's. What matters is whether the patent system TODAY, is working like it should TODAY. So I'm switching the focus of my research.
I'm not going to complain about Bedini. I give him full faith that all the things he quoted were accurate to the best of his knowledge and ability; from my limited reading about Bedini he was a much better historian than I. However, stumbling on this article made me realize that trying to dive back into the brain of someone who isn't here to explain themselves is pointless. Even if Jefferson said all the things that Bedini asserts, does it mean anything? If someone went through all my text messages, not even the drunk ones, and tried to discern what I think about any given topic it would be mishegoss. Not only are my own views and thoughts sometimes inconsistent, my definitions of words are not the same as everybody else's definitions of words. Separate that fact with 200 years of abstraction and you have terms of art that can't possibly be understood and phrases that make no sense out of the day to day context that all thoughts necessarily inhabit.
That's when it hit me: who cares what Jefferson thought about the patent system. I've been ordering books and reading online sources in order to track down a thought nugget that may not exist and is unreliable even if it does exist. What matters, and what I should care about, is whether the patent system makes sense TODAY. Does it accomplish it's constitutionally stated purpose of incentivizing innovation TODAY? It doesn't matter what a slave owner who granted patents on the manufacture of pot ash thinks about patents in the 1790's. What matters is whether the patent system TODAY, is working like it should TODAY. So I'm switching the focus of my research.
