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I have, in the past, bought a beautiful piece of fruit (peach, pear, apple, etc.) only to find it rotten at its

core when I get home and cut into it. I feel cheated, and then go into so many questions: did the orchard farmer know about this; are inspectors failing to detect the rot; has the produce manager at my store failed to cut into one of them????? Rotten at the core, at the level of the highest institutes of education has me worried about the point of recommending that a young person pursue a higher level of learning, because it may actually be sending them into the danger of the peach, pear, or apple.

Thank you ARI for your persistence in sending out such a diverse range of articles. My only concern is that at first reading I'm left wondering if they are primarily directed at academia and as such won't reach the farmer: the parents and grandparents of the youths who must ultimately mature into the healthy minds of the adults of future generations. I'm so grateful for Miss Rand's volumes of ideas that assist me in keeping the weeds and the viral infections at bay in my 9th-decade-orchard!

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Plagiarism is theft in the form of taking credit for others’ intellectual work. It represents the basic pattern of all property rights violations. The author invests his effort to create and publish his work so that he may profit from it. Whether the profit is in the form of money or prestige makes no difference — whatever his secondary purposes, what’s relevant is that as the creator, he has earned whatever the rewards may be. The plagiarist comes along, recognizing the value that’s been created, but rather than paying for what they’ve gained, they punish the author by siphoning off their rewards. The author sows and the plagiarist reaps.

I don't think ghostwriting is a form of plagiarism.

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Let's leave aside whether ghostwriting is a form of plagiarism. If one has someone else write a paper, when the understanding (with the teacher or the boss) was that one would be the only author, don't you think that's still defrauding the teacher or the boss, whether or not it's the plagiarism form of fraud?

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That aspect is definitely fraud.

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Then we're basically agreed. "Ghostwriting" is vague because there are professional versions of it, in which the named author has a subordinate co-author, where it's understood the first is telling the story to the second. I distinguish this from cases where the customer or audience is really expecting the author's firsthand writing.

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