People who are not participating in the negotiations do not always come out ahead, and the net social benefit might be negative. Here are some two-party deals that are bad for society (some more extreme than others, but I think they illustrate the need for laws and social rules outside of property protection):

1. You pay me $1200/oz for gold, and I open a gold mine. The gold mine leaks poison into a nearby river, killing tens of thousands of fish, reducing life expectancy in surrounding communities by 5 years, and not being my problem.

2. I am a congressman and you are a pharmaceutical company CEO. You pay me $10 million, directly and in jobs to my underqualified relatives (and me as soon as I retire from Congress), to sponsor a bill which makes competing drugs illegal by extending your intellectual property rights another 5 years. I win, you win, and consumers get screwed with higher prices for a longer time, competing firms go out of business, and the generic version of your drug appearing 5 years later results in 50,000 avoidable deaths among the under-insured.

3. I am a hitman. You pay me to kill your wife, only $20,000, and receive $10 million of her assets that you would have lost in the coming divorce. I win, you win, she loses.

4. I go to a futures market and make bets/investments relying on a 4-degree temperature rise in the next 4 decades, open shipping lanes at the north pole, a dwindling supply of ocean-based food, etc. These are highly leveraged and worth approximately $50 Billion dollars. I then pay you to put CO2 and methane in the atmosphere as quickly as possible, investing $2 Billion in this scheme and improving the likelihood of my payoff by over 10%, making the investment an easy decision. You make tons of money, and so do I. A win for unrestricted capitalism!

These examples are crude, but meant to illustrate certain anti-social impulses inherent in unrestricted deal-making in a capitalist framework. Property rights are not as important as other human rights.

It doesn't matter what we call them, but it does matter how many sets of competing standards we have. You are skipping steps in your argument, and your claim that 'a human is going to fuck it up anyways' is just negative bullshit. There are clearly ways to reduce the chance of that - one is to move away from having two competing systems.

And your argument in turn implies that there's no point in ever trying to be systematically consistent to reduce errors, because .... What? The frequency and severity of human error is going to be constant regardless of the systems people are forced to work within?

People will continue to make mistakes. In some cases, the existence of confusing doubles standards increases the chances of that happening, as well as introducing pointless costs. Measurement is a wonderful example of a natural monopoly, and we should prefer (open) standards.

Racial purity, the most important of all the virtues!

And killing a bunch of children is certainly more reasonable than just using your God-like powers to spirit the slaves away to the land of milk and honey . . . .

This sort of thing is why the Old Testament is fun to read and makes for good movies, but is an unreliable source of moral guidance.

No, but I think Kozmo.com carries Instagram, and will bring it on a bike with some free ice cream....

I use Google Voice and still get that interstitial.

Bullshit. The NIH has been giving away enormous sums of money to study this crap, with the result that we now understand much better than we need to exactly how people come to convince themselves and others of the efficacy of specific placebos with magical and/or pseudoscience window-dressing.

If shops could raise prices without any effect on sales, they would do that constantly. While I admire your cynicism, I despise your naivete.

That's not true. The point of granting exclusive rights through copyrights and patents is to encourage the creation of works which contribute to the overall good of society. We don't care about individual creators past the need to encourage their creations, and further, due to the transferability of intellectual property, any post-creation changes to copyright law would not only provide no additional incentive for creation, but would benefit copyright OWNERS, not copyrighted material's CREATORS (though I concede significant overlap).

Think of it like this: intellectual property is a bonus you receive at the creation of a good which is very cheap to copy. Changing the value of this bonus UP, retroactively, costs society for no societal goal. Changing it down is similar to breach of contract. There are strong arguments for fixing the length of the term at the time of copyright.

I love your enthusiasm, but I think you misunderstood - the National Center for Science Education is actually appropriately named, and supports the teaching of science. A forgivable error, since so many lobbying groups take deceptive names these days.

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with HIV?

I didn't do anything 200 years ago. And your second (most wrong) part needs a citation, perhaps something from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

And now you will be paying to have police and roads and schools while you shop online, yay!

Assuming that this is true (and not just some random crap you picked up from Rush Limbaugh), I don't see the problem. George Washington lived a long time ago, and is less relevant to dealing with the modern world than Cesar Chavez is. Much, much less relevant. It's like complaining that people in a military college learn more about Schwarzkopf than Hannibal - Hannibal was clearly a towering figure in military history, but much less (though still a significant amount) can be learned from him than from Schwarzkopf about fighting modern war.