bigluv

I wasn't going to waste my breath, and I'm still not.
It's "fallacy", by the way.

Your perfect painting copy machine is a stupid and flawed analogy. I was going to try to work with it , but its too messy, sorry.

It's as simple as this though. 2 instances of a particular object, does not reduce the value of them by half (divided by the # of instances). For example, if I have a gold bar and Im the only in the world with the special gold bar perfect replicator, and I take my 2 gold bars down to the currency trader guy or whoever deals in raw gold, then those people that end up with my gold bars are quite happy to pay the original face value X 2 for both of my gold bars.

Now, if you flood the market with gold bars, eventually you will drive down the price, and you could start to argue that I was actually "stealing" value from all the other people with original gold bars. But it would be more on the order of some small (like .0000x ) of the original value per gold bar.

What if though, I only gave my gold bars to people who weren't interested in buying a gold bar (or could never afford it), and signed an agreement with me to never SELL their gold bar once given to them. That they would ONLY use their special gold bar for personal use. No loss from this, right?

Or, what if because of my invention, someone became a "replicated gold bar collector" and wanted as many of my gold bars as he could get, just to put in his closet and look at them every day. (But only because they are free and special). Because he's only interested in my special gold bars, he would never have bought any of anyone else's gold bars and so had no economic incentive to pay for them. Therefore he was never a participant in the market and would never be so. (Again, no "loss" of value).

Not as eloquent as I would have hoped, but I haven't spent a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect analogy. Regardless, your painting 50% value thing is just dumb and tells me you have no idea about supply, demand, scarcity, economics, etc.