Economics

Let me begin with a definition: by "intellectual property" or "IP" I mean things covered by copyrights and patents (I exclude trademarks for the sake of brevity). More generally, I mean ideas and information that are covered by laws that grant their creators certain exclusive rights, such as the right to produce or sell instances of the IP in question. The U.S. Constitution, for example, grants its Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In other words, the stated purpose of intellectual property in the United States is to benefit society as a whole by providing incentives for the creation of ideas.

Democracy doesn't scale. It works fairly well for governing things like cities and towns, but on a scale like that of the United States' federal government it just doesn't work. The evidence of this is all around us, from low voter turnout to the stranglehold the two-party system has on the federal government, even as both sides converge more and more. This problem is a form of the free rider problem, caused by a kind of prisoner's dilemma.