Pierre-Guy Veer writes at the Foundation for Economic Education website that left-of-center complaints about so-called “cultural appropriation” could lead to unintended, and quite silly, consequences.
After years of complaining about such “problems” as a white chef cooking Mexican food or about “insensitive” Halloween costumes, it looks like Social Justice Warriors have finally prevailed. The United Nations will soon discuss, at the demand of indigenous groups, a ban on so-called cultural appropriation in order to “expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines.”
It is rather ironic that those Natives would only want to ban “appropriation” of “their” culture. Why not push it to its logical conclusion and call for a ban on all cultural appropriation? This means that they would have to forgo every single technology that was imported from the rest of the world since 1492. In other words, they would have to abandon mathematics, writing, any form of metal casting, currency, all languages not originally from Pre-Columbus America, modern medicine, etc.
Most of them would, of course, refuse, since going back to the Stone Age would mean pain and suffering as they would be at the mercy of Mother Nature, who isn’t all that merciful anyway.
Besides, they have the concept of property wrong. Property implies a physical object like a house or clothes you bought or made yourself. It is as old as human civilization and is scarce. Intellectual property is a monopoly granted by government
Intellectual property, on the other hand, is a monopoly granted by governments to keep someone from using something that is never scarce: ideas.
