Data socialists

Over at Climate Etc Dr. Curry has penned a guest post selling a romantic vision of what she calls "data libertarianism" quoting an opinion piece by Fred Pierce:

The battle between the two men for the crown jewels was the backdrop — and very possibly the motive — for the still-mysterious hacking of CRU’s emails and their publication online at the end of 2009. Much of the world’s science community sided with Jones in the resulting “climategate” saga, condemning what they regarded as politically and commercially motivated attacks on their research.
But others took McIntyre’s side, seeing him as a data libertarian. And last June, following a new request for the data from Jonathan Jones, an Oxford physicist and “climate agnostic”, the FOI’s commissioner, Christopher Graham, finally ruled that the crown jewels should be handed over. And they were, a month later. The world did not fall in.
If CRU had been more open with its data from the start, a great deal of time and angst on the part of its scientists — and a great deal of public uttering of paranoid nonsense from climate deniers — would have been avoided.

Ignoring the foolish assertion that any amount of cooperation can stem the relentless neap tide of paranoid nonsense from deniers, this account of McIntyre's stance in the FOI wars is exactly wrong.

There has long been a huge amount of climate data freely available to the public. Some of it is not, for reasons that should be evident to any "libertarian": those that own the data (mostly national weather agencies) chose not to make it available to all. The data sets in question cost money to create. Their creators make money by selling licenses (limited licenses) to use the data -- licenses that have no market value if their property is forcible redistributed by the government as soon as a FOI request is made.

Steve McIntyre is what libertarians call a rent-seeker. He uses the coercive power of the state to force other people to give him, gratis, the fruits of their labor. He does not produce himself -- he uses the data of others, repackaged and sensationalized, to fuel the hit count of his blog.

A "data libertarian," if there is such a thing, would be horrified by this. The warp and woof of libertarianism is respect -- a respect that borders on fetishism -- for property rights. Forcing the people who spent time and money creating these data sets and profit by selling access to them -- for the supposed good of science and humankind -- is the opposite of the libertarian model. Making other people's property free to all comers is a philosophy which already has a name -- forced collectivization. In other words, what McIntyre is arguing for is data socialism, not data libertarianism.