Mr. Myne has invented an extraordinary machine. This one machine can, using polluted air and brackish water as material inputs, produce a nutritious food substitute and potable water for one person for one entire day with less than $1.30 of grid power. The 2000 kcal daily diet uses about 8000 kcal of electricity and 10 L of dirty water. With this machine, a person can avoid starvation and dehydration for less than $500 per year.
But Mr. Myne owns the machines. He will lease them out for the low, low price of $8 per day. That's cheap for 100% of your daily nutrition! You still have to pay for the electricity and water yourself, which is about $1.50 a day.
There's the hypothetical. Now here's the experiment. What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines?
What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines?
Someone else invents it? The fallacy is the same one that most people in favor of "intellectual property" operate under: that Mr Myne is somehow so special that he's the only person who could have ever invented the machine. As history has repeatedly shown, even the very special are hardly ever truly unique. Most inventions and discoveries occurred at roughly the same time by different people around the world.
Why would someone else invent it? If people decide to stop paying for the machines, or at least stop paying enough for him to suitably benefit from making/obtaining & maintaining the machines, why would anyone else fill in the gap if they're not going to benefit either?
Such technologies are common: per-unit and per-use cost may be low, but price of reaching that cost level may be extremely high. Integrated circuits are individually very cheap (!), but the machines making them cost $billions - they're not something you are, on your own, going to construct just so you can have an iPhone. iPhones exist because Apple put enormous money into making their components in such volume as to reach commodity cost.
Mr. Myne's machines may cost just a couple dollars a day to rent & run, but may have cost a billion dollars to produce to achieve that cheap cost - heck yeah he wants 4x retail price thereon because he needs to earn back that billion dollars and make enough additional profit to make the whole enormous activity worth his while.
A thing is worth exactly and only what another is willing to pay for it. If people will pay $8/day for Mr. Myne's machines, that's what it's worth.
I feel the original thought experiment was not well phrased, and it felt a bit polemic, if not polarizing. I agree, the market will pay what it can bear, and if Mr. Myne doesn't react to that, the market will stop paying.
But unless Mr. Myne is the only one with the capital to create the machines, I can't see how someone else wouldn't come along and make the machines for what the market will bear. As the saying goes, "demand creates its own supply."
It's an allegory. Mr. Myne's machine represents the increased efficiency of future industrial capital. The magical machine is all the advancements of agriculture wrapped up in one black box, and completely automated to remove wages from the equation.
In the future, when robots can make everything you would ever need more efficiently than you can do it yourself, what can you possibly do to pay the owners of the robots for the things the robots make?
There aren't many options. You can own your own robots. You can do something the robot owners want that can't be done by robots. You can abolish individual robot ownership. Whatever you do, you have to think about what happens when producers and consumers are separated by an economic wall, when there's nothing that you can do that a robot cannot do better. Where you have nothing to bring to the market that anyone else wants to buy. It's not just people deciding not to pay. At some point they won't even be able to pay.
This is why patents ought to be property in the same sense that land or leases are property, and the govt. ought to be able to use eminent domain on them. Pay Mr. Myne a lot for his contribution to society, but then make sure that even the least-well-off can take advantage of this newfound material wealth without exploitation.
While there is no single right answer here, I think maybe you have stumbled across one of the many possible wrong answers.
If you haven't already figured it out, Mr. Myne represents the owner-investor class, his machine represents future industrial capital, and your solution was to use the government to seize control of the capital.
...discouraging anyone else from getting into the "Myne machine" industry. Why bother if others are just going to out-vote him, put a gun to one's head, and seize control?
(People have some sort of natural right to ideas that they never share, beyond that it's all protection granted by society. I guess it's a minor distinction.)
Patents are time-limited, government granted monopolies. Why confuse things with complicated and (often intentionally) misleading metaphors about property?
Mr. Myne has invented an extraordinary machine. This one machine can, using polluted air and brackish water as material inputs, produce a nutritious food substitute and potable water for one person for one entire day with less than $1.30 of grid power. The 2000 kcal daily diet uses about 8000 kcal of electricity and 10 L of dirty water. With this machine, a person can avoid starvation and dehydration for less than $500 per year.
But Mr. Myne owns the machines. He will lease them out for the low, low price of $8 per day. That's cheap for 100% of your daily nutrition! You still have to pay for the electricity and water yourself, which is about $1.50 a day.
There's the hypothetical. Now here's the experiment. What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines?