Put simply: Ideas aren't property.

You can't own a pattern of bits. You can't own a pattern of notes. You can't own a pattern of words.

Best of all, sharing ideas, "intellectual socialism," as you put it, doesn't mean that the originator has less. Information is not scarce, and capitalism is a system for managing the distribution of scarce resources. There's no need to ration it.

On the flip side, enforcing IP requires government force. It asserts that I own, and can control - and extract payment for the use of - the part of your mind that contains these words, simply because I wrote them, and you read them. If that's not against "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine," I don't know what is.

Now, I get why she supported it. She was an author. She made her living assembling patterns of words. But isn't using government force to prop up a bad business model exactly what she railed against in Atlas Shrugged?

Ahh, but she did, she just didn't know she did. Individual rights are best protected by an agency that doesn't violate them itself in order to get funding. Voluntary taxation isn't taxation. It's subscription. Really, someone should have handed her a copy of this. It would have rocked her world.