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Patents were around long before the 1980s, and generally being corporate-owned, probably have nothing to do with upward distribution to wealthy individuals. Why focus on this likely bogus cause without even mentioning movements toward a flat tax in the Reagan and Bush II administations, abandonment by the fed of the goal of full employment, no minimum wage increases for a decade, the many deliberate anti-labor policies that were central to Reaganism, and corporate governance developments that encouraged top executives to pad their own compensation packages to truly obscene levels? It's developments that have abandoned the middle class and lower-income classes in their necessarily perpetual effort to claim a larger share of corporate revenues (generated in large part by those patents) that have driven the growth of inequality, not the patents themselves. - urban legend