It's the Pattern Privilege, Stupid
As noted in Patent Reform Touches DNC in Denver,
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told a crowd in Denver on Tuesday that it is crucial for Congress to pass legislation to update the U.S. patent system next year ... A proposal that would curb judicial "venue-shopping" for favorable courts is critical as is language to address patent abuses, she said. "How do you legally set a framework that prevents abuses and allows for a vigorous system that protects intellectual property?" Lofgren asked aloud. "It's not easy to come up with solutions."
Right. Call me crazy, but it almost seems like it's impossible to avoid "abuse" if one sets up a state-granted innovation-monopoly system! Hmm, I wonder how we could avoid that abuse... I wonder....
Join Ron Paul, Judge Napolitano, and Pascal Salin!
From Menger to the present day, Austrians have favored sound money over government-manipulated paper currency. The very first Mises Institute conference in 1983 was on the gold standard. At the time, people said the idea was outmoded and that paper currency was working just fine. Here we are 25 years later, and it is not so.The dollar is in grave danger, the government is growing at the expense of society, and the business cycle has been unleashed with ferocity.
The best time for a gold standard is in calm times, but only a crisis focuses the mind. People are looking for answers, and the Misesian answer is the same now as it was when Mises wrote his first book on the topic: restore sound money, stop the inflation, and get government out of the money business. READ MORE
"If Sarbanes-Oxley were a stock, we'd recommend selling it short."
A great comment and article on the editorial page of the New York Sun on the US Court of Appeals decision concerning the PCAOB and Sarbanes-Oxley.
The issue is whether Sarbanes-Oxley's creation of an agency to police auditors of public companies violated the doctrine of separated powers.
The chief constitutional problem with the law is that the five board members at this new agency -- the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board of the suit's caption -- aren't appointed by the president. Nor can the president fire them. Instead the commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who are presidential appointees, get to do the hiring and firing for the new Oversight Board. And the firing can only be for cause.
The Sun points out that the dissenting judge, Brett Kavanaugh, was an associate council of Bush at the time that he signed Sarbanes-Oxley into law in 2002. Kavanaugh also served under Kenneth Starr during the Clinton investigation, and was a principal author of the Starr Report. Senator Kennedy,who opposed Kavanaugh's appointment to the Court of Appeals, called him "a political operative who is the least experienced and most partisan appointee to the court in decades."
Here's Floyd Norris of the New York Times with some interesting articles on 1) the PCAOB and the court's ruling, and 2) how politics manipulates a board that exerts tremendous influence and control over public companies.
Make Ourselves Miserable Now
The local Swiss press carried a summary of a report compiled by a panel of so-called "experts" of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Science (SATW) under the startling rubric that motor gasoline "should" henceforth be priced, by fiat, at no less than four francs per liter -- roughly double the current market price and representing what, to an American, must seem like the eye-watering equivalent of around $14 a gallon.
The reason given by these cloistered killjoys for recommending such a brutal curtailment of people's material well-being? Nothing less than the incredibly convoluted one that since -- in their lofty estimation -- Swiss demand for petrol will inevitably outstrip the available supply sometime in the next two decades, it is better to anticipate the resultant economic stress by "discouraging" consumption now, rather than to allow such a painful (if utterly hypothetical) disappointment to be postponed until later.
Presumably, on this basis, in order to lessen the chance he might run over a cliff during the next mass migration, we should prevail upon the prudent lemming to fling himself out of a skyscraper window today. FULL ARTICLE
Reusable Toilet wipes
George Reisman writes to tell us of the newest environmental craze: family wipes. Scary.
Listen, YAF
This open letter is addressed to the libertarians attending the YAF national convention in St. Louis this Labor Day weekend [August 1969]. Notice I said the libertarians in YAF; I have nothing to say to the so-called "traditionalists" (a misnomer, by the way, for we libertarians have our traditions too, and they are glorious ones.)…
In the famous words of Jimmy Durante: "Have ya ever had the feelin' that ya wanted to go, and yet ya had the feelin' that ya wanted to stay?" This letter is a plea that you use the occasion of the public forum of the YAF convention to go, to split, to leave the conservative movement where it belongs: in the hands of the St. Something-or-others, and where it is going to stay regardless of what action you take. Leave the house of your false friends, for they are your enemies.
FULL ARTICLE by Murray N. Rothbard
New Gift to LvMI
An Austrian economist of renown has just sent us an addendum to his Will, in which he leaves his books and papers to the Institute. We are very grateful for this, and would welcome more such bequests from scholars in any of the social sciences. Email me if you would like more information on making a similar bequest or outright gift to LvMI.
The Economics of War, Georgia Edition
Americans should consider how the US government would react if (say) Texas declared its independence and received massive amounts of military aid and advice from the Russians, all while the Texas president feted his Russian counterpart at state dinners in Austin and promoted Texan membership in a post-Cold War Warsaw Pact that had already expanded greatly in the previous 15 years. To me, the economic lessons dominate. FULL ARTICLE
Fannie, Freddie Failure Would Be World 'Catastrophe'
Bloomberg reports that a former central banker with the Bank of China has made some dire statements about the GSEs:
BEIJING -- A failure of U.S. mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be a catastrophe for the global financial system, said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China's central bank.
"If the U.S. government allows Fannie and Freddie to fail and international investors are not compensated adequately, the consequences will be catastrophic," Yu said in e-mailed answers to questions yesterday. "If it is not the end of the world, it is the end of the current international financial system."
and
"The seriousness of such failures could be beyond the stretch of people's imagination," said Yu.
Bloomberg adds " He didn't explain why he held that view.", but it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to figure this out, when the foreign banks hold several hundred billion dollars of GSE securities.
The unfolding credit crisis is really a box canyon. The large financial institutions are "too big to fail" and "too big to bail". Letting them unwind would trigger a contagion that would bring down most of the large banks and investment houses, while bailing them out risks a collapse in the dollar and hyperinflation.
As Austrian economist O'Driscoll noted earlier this week in the Wall St. Journal, Washington Is Quietly Repudiating Its Debts.
Invade the world: check
Murray Rothbard used to joke that the United States should just get it over with and invade the whole world. It seems like the US has already done so. See the map. Just a few more countries to go, and troops will be everywhere on the whole planet.
The Disaster that Driving will Lead To
Digital downloads will end the market for books, the internet is going to make us isolated and disconnected from the community, cellphones are going to privatize our communications to the point that we will all fabricate our own self-created universe, while facebook is going to mean an end to person-to-person friendship. Ok, all of these predictions have been made about new technology, but I had no idea that with the beginning of the car, lots of people said that it would be a disaster because we would all lose use of our legs: Here is Nock again from the 1920s:
When our whole population took to motoring, I remember, it was freely predicted that we would all lose the use of our legs --and actually, a great many never walked more than from the house to the garage. Now, however, even in villages, there is such a congestion of traffic that folks with errands to do park their cars and walk. It would not surprise me to find that on the average our population walks as much today as it did twenty years ago. Thus, the balance of natural habit gets restored, after a little shift one way or the other, and essentially we do not change much.
It turns out of course that a huge market developed in conveyor belts to install in our homes so that we can walk all we want.
Nock on the Need for Youth to Rebel
This passage from the Book of Journeyman, appearing in the Freeman, might have been written in the late 1920s or so. The book itself is not so much about politics but literature, art, and culture.
When by chance some of our youngsters do go through the motions of starting something, they set about it so constitutionally and with so much organization-decorum that they remind me a lot more of Methusaleh than of the flaming youth of the Second Empire. I am thinking of the young men's anti-Prohibition league that I was reading about a while ago. They ought to be planning to get ten thousand of themselves together, make a lot of hooch, and on a stated day peddle it openly on the streets of New York; another day, Boston; another day, Philadelphia; and so on. I say, this is what they should plan to do, and be so hellbent on carrying it out that moderate old constitutionalists like me would have our hands level full with persuading them to take it easy and see first what could be done by less spectacular means--like mobbing a few dry-drinking Congressmen and boiling them in oil, for instance. Then we old men, though we might shake our heads a little and deplore the growing disregard of law 'n' order, would at least be convinced that the country had a future; which we doubt at present, unless the rough-neck girls supply it. All the manifestos of the young men's anti-Prohibition league that I have seen are so well-aged and decorous that I might have written them myself....
What worries me is not the younger generation's rebelliousness in petty matters, but
their tameness in great matters.
Sex, Violence, and the Culture War
One of the fundamental problems in the social sciences is that correlation is not necessarily causation. Unfortunately, correlations are often reported and causality is inferred based on the predispositions of the analyst without adequately accounting for alternative hypotheses. There is nothing intellectually dishonest about this; indeed, empirical research is extremely difficult. However, it should cause us to view claims about causal relationships with some skepticism. FULL ARTICLE
Pickens and Water pumps
According to the always interesting Timothy Carney (he wrote "The Big Ripoff"), the ballyhooed windfarm plan of T. Boone Pickens has a couple of stealthy side projects.
Based on the investigative work of several journalist, it turns out that Pickens got the state legislature to turn his tracts of land into a bonafide town (it helped that he donated $1.2 million to various assemblymen). And now, not only does he have the power to issue tax-free bonds, but he is using eminent domain to kick people off their property so he can build a water pipeline to Dallas.
It should also be noted, this is the same Pickens that lobbies for taxpayer subsidies all in the name of a clean environment.
Perhaps next year Pickens will promote the candlemakers' petition on capitol hill.
Via DealBreaker
Röpke's warning
As I read Wilhelm Röpke's insightful and morally challenging book, The German Question, I am struck by the implicit warning that we -- the defenders of Liberty -- must speak out, in the various media, against our current situation and likely path, lest we suffer the condemnation of our posterity.
For us the cry is not "To Arms! To Arms!," rather it is "To Pen! To Pen!"
Biden?
This isn't a political blog, and I'm terrible at political predictions, but the Obama choice of Joseph Biden as running mate strikes me as incredibly dumb. Obama's main advantage is the perception that he is an outsider who will change Washington, someone not hooked up with the establishment, someone who will rethink the ways things work. And he has some of that Clinton-style capacity to appear to get beyond the conventional statism of the Democrats -- probably all illusory but there it is. Biden, on the other hand, is the consummate insider/operator/statist, and not the slightest bit interesting from the reformist perspective. It has already been looking bad for the Dems this year at the presidential level. I'm assuming that this choice means we can look forward to a McCain presidency, which is a very scary prospect given his love of the activist welfare-warfare state exceeds even the Bush level.
It used to be said that one party is the stupid party and the other party is the evil party. Now it seems like both are both.
Skyscrapers and Business Cycles
Building the world's tallest building, writes Mark Thornton, has been a matter of particularly bad timing by entrepreneurs and even if they were able to successfully steal away enough tenants from the remaining pool of renters, the economic problem for society is that valuable resources are lost in the process of constructing buildings that are bad investments and underutilized. However, it is not the entrepreneur's formula that is at fault, but a system-wide failure that has occurred periodically throughout the 20th century and before, known as the business cycle. FULL ARTICLE
A different view of America
Here is an argument that Michael Phelps helps repair some of the damage inflicted on the reputation of the United States in the last several years. "What did Michael Phelps do for Americans and for the world? He showed us what that 18th century dream was really about: achieving great things through hard work and self-determination. Phelps did not enter the Olympics at gunpoint... but chose this way of life for himself, and he made all the best of it. What a great relief for a story like this to be showcased before the world in a time when we most needed it, in a time when the 'face of America' is a failed oil businessman become failed president."
Challenge to Sarbanes-Oxley is Denied by Court of Appeals
The Free Enterprise Fund's challenge to the constitutionality of the PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) created by Sarbanes Oxley was denied by a US Court of Appeals today. There was one dissenting judge.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh dissented, writing that it was "the most important separation-of-powers case regarding the president's appointment and removal powers to reach the courts in the last 20 years."
The PCAOB's structure "unconstitutionally restricts the president's appointment and removal powers," Kavanaugh wrote.
An appeal to the Supreme Court can be expected.
Kinsella Vindicated
You will note that Kinsella's book Against Intellectual Property is the #2 bestseller in the store. This is despite its having been online for six years and remains so, in two formats. What a way to demonstrate a thesis. If you have something that is valuable to others, people might be willing to pay for it.
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