Why patents mean growth

I like patents, but not for the obvious reasons. Patents are useful in many ways, even though they may not be useful to disclose solutions (once, they certainly were). But the real reason they are useful is that they create monopolies.
Remember what a patent is: A government-granted monopoly on a solution to a technical problem. Once, they were actually monopolies, period. This caused a bit of problems when several governements granted monopolies for the same things, and actually caused a few wars over trade monopolies, but that was more than 200 years ago.
Today, a patent gives you the right to enforce your monopoly. And this is where it really becomes useful. Even though getting a patent is a nice recognition for you as an inventor, anyone who is a serial inventor knows that the next patent may be less important then the one after next. It is not like copyright, where the moral right to a work enables you to restrict access to it (it is unlawful for you to read my love poems in public, and only because I say so). Note, though, that this moral aspect usually gets mislaid in discussions, like Scott Adams recent post on copyright, and his brilliant response to comments.
Patents and copyright are related, in that they both create a monopoly for me to determine how a work is to be commercially used (or, in this case, how my employer chooses to do it). And that is precisely the point: It is a right, and rights can be traded.
This means that copyright and patents have something in common with carbon dioxide emission rights (and other similar rights). They are governement-granted rights to do something, in the latter case release a certain amount of carbon dioxide per year. If you do not do it, you can sell it. It is the same with land, actually: There is nothing on my property that says where the borders should go, or that the land is mine, except for the markers which the surveyor puts out. But nowadays they do not need them, they use GPS. The only thing that shows where the border goes is the coordinate registration in the land registry.
So selling land is selling a right to something bounded within a set of coordinates. This is much the same as selling a patent. The land use rights in most countries have more limitations than the use of patents (I could not build a refinery on my land, even if it were large enough and economical in that location, without getting a governement license - another monopoly right that can be traded).
So patents are useful simply because they can be bought and sold. Selling and buying things exposes their value, by enabling a party who value them higher than the current holder to realize this value (quite obvious in the case of patents - if you do not have the right to do things a certain way, the courts can order you to close the company). So the ability to trade them is what is the true value of patents.
The more such opportunities are created, the more the economy will grow. And conversely, the more the economy grows, the more such opportunities will be created, since this is both part of what generated growth and an effect of it. Some kind of futures or patent bonds ought to be possible (if David Bowie could mortagage his copyrights, why not mortgage future patents?). Emission rights were certainly not on the horizon a few years ago, now they are as big as some kinds of bonds.
I have a theory about this, and it is that when things are traded, the extra value exposed is automatically included in the available amount of money in society. This means more trade means more money, but since it is also backed by more value, it does not mean inflation. It means growth.
A creative governement would make sure that there were opportunities for creative people to create tradeable assets, and for those who are not creative to trade them. Just imagine if you could trade songs from iTunes like people trade baseball cards. The value of most would be low, but some - like a signed Babe Ruth card - would be very high indeed. I wonder when politicians will realize that they have an opportunity to create growth, but they have been looking in the wrong place all the time?