Recommended podcasts:

• “Cuba’s New Now,” KERA Think (Nov. 8, 2012). Fascinating interview by the amazing KERA Think host, Krys Boyd: “What has changed in Cuba since Fidel Castro ostensibly stepped away from power and are the changes happening fast enough for the Cuban people? We’ll talk this hour with National Geographic Magazine contributor Cynthia Gorney, whose story “Cuba’s New Now” appears in the current issue of the magazine.”
• “Joshua Rauh on Public Pensions,” EconTalk. Chilling discussion of the looming public pension crisis, with host Russ Roberts: “Joshua Rauh, Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the unfunded liabilities from state employee pensions. The publicly stated shortfall in revenue relative to promised pensions is about $1 trillion. Rauh estimates the number to be over $4 trillion. Rauh explains why that number is more realistic, how the problem grew in recent years, and how the fiscal situation might be fixed moving forward. He also discusses some of the political and legal choices that we are likely to face going forward as states face strained budgets from promises made in the past to retired workers.” My guess? States and localities will end up declaring bankruptcy to modify their pension obligations.
• “Chris Anderson on 3D Printing and the Maker Movement,” Surprisingly Free. “Chris Anderson, former Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, describes what he calls the maker movement. According to Anderson, modern technologies, such as 3D printing and open source design, are democratizing manufacturing. The same disruption that digital technologies brought to information goods like music, movies and publishing will soon make its way to the world of physical goods, he says.” A good discussion of IP implications of 3D printing begins around 14:00.
• My recent Libertopia talk, Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP.
• My interview, “Silver for the People Interview: Stephan Kinsella—Copyright Laws Cost the U.S. $Billions in Economic Growth” (at Libertopia, San Diego, Oct. 12, 2012).

This question was recently answered in length by physicist Steven Weinberg in the NY Review of Books.

After a well-written overview of how science projects grew from privately-funded individual labs to publicly-funded international collaborations, Weinberg states that:

It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.

When boiled down, what Weinberg promotes is actually stated most clearly by H. L. Mencken, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”  Weinberg has created a existential slippery slope, one that assumes that only governments can provide the goods and services that are currently on the chopping block.  Will we all run around like headless chickens if the government no longer is the sole financier and provider of roads, schools, modern art and particle colliders?

The actual problem facing Big Science is a lack of creativity and critical thinking.  In Weinberg’s mind, because the state has historically had the largest piggy bank at the table and has historically divvied out funds, he thinks the solution to all solvency issues is to continue appropriating (my euphemism for coerced) funds from the haves.    However if you remove the state and its funding, the monies it appropriated from taxpayers does not disappear into a black hole.   Rather the less money that goes to the government necessarily means the more capital is available for spending by private individuals, companies and institutions.

For example: Sergey Brin, Larry Page, James Cameron and several other high-rollers are set to announce next Tuesday about a private endeavor to capture and mine an asteroid.

Weinberg’s plea is just the latest in a line of well-intentioned science promoters (following most notably Sagan) yet his solution is misplaced.  Science took place before the state monopolized both scarce resources and skilled human capital.   In the event that government agencies are defunded and taxes are returned to individuals, what would stop private individuals in the future from financing other such activities?  If there is a commercial and practical application to the research surely there will be capitalists and entrepreneurs nearby.

In an ironic twist, Weinberg also noted in the same article that:

Space-based astronomy has a special problem in the US. NASA, the government agency responsible for this work, has always devoted more of its resources to manned space flight, which contributes little to science. All of the space-based observatories that have contributed so much to astronomy in recent years have been unmanned. The International Space Station was sold in part as a scientific laboratory, but nothing of scientific importance has come from it. Last year a cosmic ray observatory was carried up to the Space Station (after NASA had tried to remove it from the schedule for shuttle flights), and for the first time significant science may be done on the Space Station, but astronauts will have no part in its operation, and it could have been developed more cheaply as an unmanned satellite.

Look, the bottom line is that Big Science is socialism for engineers.  Despite claims to the contrary, the same problem that plagues all socialized endeavors (e.g. politicization, favoritism, subsidization, price distortion, misallocation) also plays a leading role in government planned science projects.  What particle scientists really needs is to take a page from NASA and hire Hollywood  spin-doctors  to portray the life-or-death drama at CERN.  And then get a voice over actor like the late-Don LaFontaine to talk about one physicist who is on a mission to save all of humanity by pressing the “any key.”

It is not a tumor

Many moons ago back in the suburb of Richardson I found out my high school physics teacher had originally moved from California to work on the SSC project down in Waxahachie — the same high-energy particle project that Weinberg discusses at length in his article.  And at the time my teacher held a similar opinion as Steven.

I haven’t spoken to her since I graduated last century but when the dust settled, science marched on.

Innovation in telephony did not end when the FCC privatized the air-waves.  Innovation in computing did not end when the NSF privatized their supercomputing facilities.   Innovation in the web browsing industry did not end after Mosaic’s team developed Netscape.   Innovation from pre-Web 1.0 technologies did not end after the national pipes were opened to commercial activity.

Twenty years from now – barring an apocalypse – science projects will continue to be carried out by curious individuals and enterprising firms.  We still might not know anything new about the Higgs boson, but then again maybe there is nothing commercially useful about the god particle.  And besides, it is not fair or just to coerce taxpayers to fund any agency, let alone NASA, NIH or any other alphabet organization.

Who knows, perhaps twenty years from now the Intel-IBM-Hasselhoff supercolider will have finally solved some of the fundamental questions of the day such as unifying quantum mechanics and gravity or how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.  After all, the big in Big Science is entirely relative.  Just ask the winners of the Ig Nobel’s.

Via Reddit

Does the North Korean rocket program deserve our scorn?

If it does, then all socialized and nationalized programs do.

Since the advent of rocketry as an amateur industry, hundreds of technicians and researchers have died trying to vault the political class – and their apparatchiks – of the US, Russia and others into orbit.  The US Space Shuttle program blew up 14 astronauts.  Four Soviet cosmonauts died due to a parachute malfunction and being exposed to the vacuum of space.  During the 1960′s, ten more astronauts and cosmonauts died while training on the ground.  And while I doubt even the most aggressive ambulance chasers would ever bring “involuntary manslaughter” lawsuits against these states this relatively small list of fatalities also shrouds the unseen, the enormous financial money pits that these programs amounted to.

The fact of the matter is, all national space programs amount to little more than face-projects that divert and misallocate productive capital.  They look grand with chemical jazz hands and glittery sequins but accomplish little in the way of tangible, practical results.  And even if they successfully conquered the final frontier, the Arachnids, Romulans or the green-men on Mars they did so with stolen booty from productive members of society.  The ends do not justify the means.

Evangelists and popularizers like Phil Plait and Neil DeGrasse Tyson weep and moan over the defunding of NASA.  Yet if success is measured by liberty, justice and profit, it is high time to give taxpayers their money back.  If we were to inspire the next generation of youngins, why teach them to rob Peter the taxpayer to pay Paul the engineer?  Instead, cut the umbilical from the Cape — privatize NASA’s assets and let private enterprises like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites try to eke out an existence without state largess.  And at the end of the day if you cannot afford to take those journeys, why steal ducats from the rest of us that would rather save the money for our own purposes?  That doesn’t sound like a fair deal for the 99% of us that are coerced to subsidize human exploration for the 1%.  Yea, I just went there.

Not that it should matter but to preempt ad hominem I will point out that I heart cosmology.  In fact, when I was recovering from my horrible Chinese gastroparesis last fall, I spent hours watching the series How the Universe Works.  My favorite app on my phone is the vertigo-inducing constellations-through-the-floor from Google Sky.  Many moons ago I even did my senior thesis on the X-15, the Air Force and NASA.  Yet as both an exploration aficionado and free-market minded curmudgeon, there is no wiggle room for socialism in any industry, even if it provides voice over and narration opportunities for fancy pants officers from La Barre.

The Norks purportedly spent $850 million on their latest flaming piñata an amount that could reportedly feed 80% of its malnourished population with food for a year.  And while fortunately no one (that we know of) was vaporizedover the East China sea, the Kim regime is arguably receiving a disproportionate amount of negative flack from all corners of the interwebs.  It is not like the development of Redstone and Vostok were exactly flawless or cheap either…

What the North Korean space program really suffers from is that of PR.  If only they had a friendly face like that of Tom Hanks to celebrate a total an utter failure, no one would be mocking them.  Apollo 13 was a disaster at every level yet the spin doctors at NASA and at the White House turned the propaganda dial to eleven and managed to snooker three generations into believing that socialized space exploration should be endured.  They managed to go above and beyond anything that the recruiting videos… err “movies” Top Gun or Act of Valor did for the US Navy and created a program whose legacy that remains seemingly untouchable.  After all, everyone is an apologist for it, even Ayn Rand (who called Apollo 11 “a symbol of man’s greatness“)!

Despite cries from chicken little’s, aviation innovation did not stop with the ending of Apollo (which cost approximately $170 billion).  Aviation innovation did not stop with the ending of the Shuttle program (which also cost about $170 billion).  And aviation innovation will not stop when NASA loses funding for yet another albatross (all eyes on Orion).  In fact, it will arguably free up a savings pool that is tied up in treasury bonds used to finance the current deficit.  Or as Andrew Beal explained more than a decade ago, socialized space flight crowds out the market for private endeavors, like space hotels.  After all, why risk and invest in a private program when the unwitting public already foots the bills for multiple government projects?

Nobody knows what the opportunity costs were and alternative histories that diverged due to state monopolization of aeronautical resources and human capital.  So here’s to hoping that socialized space exploration goes the way of the dodo sooner rather than later.  Or as a bumper sticker could say: stop subsidizing space piñatas.

See also:  Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon (The Onion)

Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet,” has given very confusing reasons for his view that Internet Access Is Not a Human Right. First, he says that Internet access, unlike freedom of speech and access to information, is not a human right. Cerf’s stance on the debate boiled down to this: ‘Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.’”

Hunh? What does “access to information” even mean? It seems to be some unlibertarian positive right. And if such things can be “rights,” why can’t access to the Internet? Because of the contextless, ad hoc assertion that ”Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.”

He goes on to try to elaborate on his shaky view of rights:

In order for something to be considered a human right, it must be among the things a person needs to lead a healthy and meaningful life, such as freedom from torture or freedom of thought, Cerf argued.

Well we need education and food to lead a healthy life, so if you are going by this standard you open the door to any number of welfarist, socialist positive rights, such as social security, employment, equal pay for equal work, vacation time, food, housing, medical care and education, as I discuss in Intellectual Property as Socialistic “Human Rights”.

The better approach is to recognize that there are no positive rights at all, since a positive right implies a positive duty on behalf of others to provide you with the thing you have a “right” to, such as food, education, and so on. The idea of positive rights implies that others are your partial slaves. If the positive rights are universal, that means we are all each others’ slaves. (The one exception is to this prohibition on positive obligations or duties is those that are voluntarily assumed by the obligor, such as the parental obligation to children, the obligation of a criminal or tortfeasor to help or make amends to his victims, and so on. See How We Come to Own Ourselves.)

I argue in Internet Access as a Human Right for a different approach to this issue. First, we need to be skeptical of the very term “human rights.” Common conceptions of “human rights” tend to hold that human rights include socialistic, positive welfare rights. This is why it is better for libertarians to refer to “natural” rights, or just plain rights or “libertarian rights.” Human rights can be seen as including three different things:

1. natural rights or related negative rights (right to free speech, etc.);
2. positive, socialistic welfare rights;
3. procedural or prophylactic/civil rights (i.e. rights that are not natural but that are good fictional standins for limitations on state power).

The first is of course to be welcomed, though it’s usually just an atrophied subset of the full panoply of real libertarian rights. For example human rights contemplate the legitimacy of governments, and taxation (conception #2 above requires it), and imprisonment and other punishments for violating state decrees, while libertarians recognize that these things violate rights. (The right to free speech is not really a fundamental natural right, actually, but only a consequence of more fundamental basic libertarian rights to have one’s body be free of aggression. See Rothbard,  “Human Rights” As Property Rights. But at least it indicates an aspect of, or consequence of, a real libertarian right. Not that this somewhat unclear view of rights doesn’t lead to trouble–if you view “free speech” as an independent right, unanchored from bodily and property rights, then they can be used to trump real property rights, as in the cases where state courts have “deemed” shopping malls to be “public spaces” and “therefore” they must allow people to engage in protests etc., in the name of “free speech.”)

The second set of rights are completely unlibertarian. There are not positive welfare rights.

The third are not “real” rights but are valuable so long as there are states, as fictions that help limit state power. For example, consider the idea of the “presumption of innocence.” This is the idea that the state has the burden of proving someone committed a crime before convicting them. This implies that someone is “innocent” if the state cannot prove he is guilty, and that it is unjust to punish him unless the state’s court can prove him guilty. In the libertarian conception, this is not quite right. If someone actually committed a (real) crime (such as assault and battery), then it is not unjust for the victim to punish or administer (proportional) force against the aggressor. Now, in a free society, if the victim does not go through established procedures and instead acts as a vigilante, there are various dangers and risks: he may punish someone who is actually innocent, and thus incur liability; he may be seen as reckless and suffer consequences like ostracism or shunning or increased insurance rates. But if a victim retaliates against a person who actually did aggress against him, even if the victim does not go through due process or reliable procedures first to prove his guilt, the aggressor’s rights are not actually violated. And yet the “presumption of innocence” is contrary to this understanding. Should we libertarians thus oppose it? Should we reject subset 3 above, as we reject subset 2? No, not usually. So long as the state is around, “fake” prophylactic civil or procedural rights, like the presumption of innocence, due process, etc., are good, as they help to limit state power.

So, does an actualy guilty person actually have a right to be presumed innocent? No. But should we libertarians want the state to be bound and limited as if he has this right? Yes. For the state is a much worse criminal than the accused private aggressor. Ultimately, fake, prophylactic rights are libertarian because they act as limits on state power, which helps reduce violations of rights of innocent people accused of crimes by the state (or of people accused of commiting non-crimes, like tax evasion or drug use), and also helps make the state less dangerous overall. It partially declaws the state. Thus, the fiction of prophylactic procedural and some civil rights are in the service of real rights since they are aimed at keeping the greatest violator of rights–the state–at bay.

And this is why, in my previous post, I argued that there could be some good from viewing Internet access as a “human right”–though there is some danger in it, too. To the extent it acts as a prophylactic right (type 3) or even an aspect of real rights (type 1), that is good. This means the state may not restrict people’s access to the Internet. It would be seen as an aspect of or consequence of free speech and related rights, which are themselves mere implications of the basic natural rights to self-ownership and ownership of property. But there is a danger it could be seen as a positive right (type 2)–that the state has to provide taxpayer-funded Internet access to people. As I noted in my previous post:

one has to be wary of the catch-phrase “human rights” as it can sometimes mean positive welfare rights. But not always. In fact, the UN Human Rights Council has recently opined that denying Internet access or related penalties–via laws such as  “three strikes” laws in France and the United Kingdom that boot users off the Internet for repeated copyright infringement, as well as ACTA and the DMCA–can violate human rights to free speech and related rights. In other words, the idea is that Internet access is a human right, and state regulations and laws that impair this are illegitimate.

Now, is Internet access really a human right–or, as we would say, an individual right, or libertarian right? Is free speech even a legitimate human right? No. As Rothbard explains, all human rights are property rights. But in a state legal system, a legal right simply acts as a limitation on state power. For the libertarian, who sees all or most state power as bad precisely because it infringes on real libertarian rights, any limitation on state power, even if it is labeled as a “right” but is really not a genuine libertarian right, is to be welcome. With one exception: that of positive rights, such as a right to food or a job; such “rights,” instead of being limitations on state power, are disguised grants of power to the state: it is then authorized to take from A to provide B with his “right.” But for other negative rights, such as a right to free speech, even though these are not real, independent rights (in libertarian theory, the right to free speech is merely a consequence of the more fundamental right to one’s body), it is still useful to have them seen as limits on the state. Other examples include constitutional and other “rights” that are not really natural rights, but merely “civil” rights, such as the right to due process, rights against double jeopardy, and so on. Any libertarian should favor these “rights” being imposed as limitations on state power.

And so it is with Internet access. There is no doubt that the Internet has become one of the most important weapons against the state, and use of the Internet crucial to survival in the modern world. Anything that restricts the power of states to hamper the Internet or to harm individuals by limiting their access to the Internet is good. And this is why I am not opposed to the UN implicit recognition of Internet access as a human right. (But please, don’t impose a global tax to set up municipal “free” wifi in poor communities around the world!)

Update: See the recent decisions of various local courts and regional and international tribunals in this ASIL International Law in Brief, for a sample of how these courts tend to be better than the policies of the states. See also The UN, International Law, and Nuclear Weapons.

In any case, regardless of his somewhat confused views about the nature of rights, he is a heroic opponent of the evil SOPA.

In late 2010 I taught my first Mises Academy course, “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.” I reprised the course in Spring 2011: “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.” This was a 6-week course, which provided an overview of current intellectual property law and the history and origins of IP. (In Teaching an Online Mises Academy Course, I offer my reflections on teaching the Rethinking IP class the first time.) Here is some feedback provided by past students of this course:

“The class (everything) was perfect. Content wasn’t too deep (nor too shallow) – the reviewed material was just brilliant and the “tuning” was great for someone like myself (engineering background – no profound legal/lawyer experience). It provided all the material to really “understand” (instead of “just knowing”) all that was covered which I find always very important in a class.”

“Instruction was very comprehensive and thought provoking. The instructor was fantastic and very knowledgeable and answered every question asked.”

“Learned more then i expected, the professor seemed to really enjoy teaching the class, and the readings provided were excellent. Overall for the cost I was extremely satisfied.”

“Very interesting ideas I was not exposed to. Inexpensive, convenient, good quality.”

“It is a very fascinating topic and I was quite eager to learn about what I.P. is all about. I thought that Professor Kinsella was able to convey complicated issues to us clearly.”

“Professor Kinsella’s enthusiasm and extra links posted showed his true knowledge and interest in the subject. Great to see.”

And:

Thank you so very much for all the excellent work — very few classes have really changed my life dramatically, actually only 3 have, and all 3 were classes I took at the Mises Academy, starting with Rethinking Intellectual Property (PP350) (the other two were EH476 (Bubbles), and PP900 (Private Defense)). …

My purposes for taking the classes are: 1. just for the fun of it, 2. learning & self-education, and 3. to understand what is happening with some degree of clarity so I can eventually start being part of the solution where I live — or at least stop being part of the problem.

The IP class was a total blast — finally (finally) sound reasoning. All the (three) classes I took dramatically changed the way I see the world. I’m still digesting it all, to tell the truth. Very few events in my life have managed to make me feel like I wished I was 15 all over again. Thank you. …

[M]uch respect and admiration for all the great work done by all the members of the whole team.

Students would often give real-time feedback, in comments such as the following at the end of the lectures (these are from the actual IP-lecture chat transcripts):

• “Thank you, great lecture!”
• “Thanks, excellent lecture.”
• “Great job.”
• “Great lecture!”
• “Thank you, Sir. Great lecture!”
• “Thanks for an excellent talk.”

(Student reaction to the first lecture of my Libertarian Legal Theory course can be found in Student Comments for First Lecture of Libertarian Legal Theory Course: Not Too Late to Sign Up!) In the meantime IP has continued to metastasize and increasingly harm property rights, capitalism, prosperity, technology, and freedom of expression–all, perversely, in the name of “property rights.” The patent smartphone wars have continued to escalate. And copyright, as I argue in here, is even worse. It threatens to enable the state to ratchet up the police state and threatens freedom on the Internet. The latest threat in this regard is the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

Below is an introductory video for the course followed by the audio and slides for each of the 6 lectures. The “suggested readings” for each lecture are appended to the end of this post.

Update: the audio files may also be subscribed to in this podcast feed. (In iTunes (for Windows) you can subscribe to podcast by copying the feed address to iTunes>Advanced>Subscribe to podcast; on Macs, you can click on the link to have iTunes add it to podcasts.)

Introductory video from the Mises Blog post Kinsella Can Be Your Professor:

Lecture 1: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN HISTORY

(mp3 download)

Lecture 2: OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICATIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY, AND IDEAS

(mp3 download)

Lecture 3: EXAMINING THE UTILITARIAN CASE FOR IP

(mp3 download)

Lecture 4: IP STATUTES AND TREATIES; OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICTIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY AND IDEAS; RIGHTS-BASED ARGUMENTS FOR IP: CREATION AS A SOURCE OF RIGHTS

(mp3 download)

Lecture 5: PROPERTY, SCARCITY, AND IDEAS; EXAMINING RIGHTS-BASED ARGUMENTS FOR IP

(mp3 download)

Lecture 6: THE FUTURE; INTEGRATING IP THEORY WITH AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND LIBERTARIAN THEORY; PROPOSED REFORMS; IMAGINING A POST-IP WORLD; THE FUTURE OF OPEN VS. CLOSED

(mp3 download)

SUGGESTED READING MATERIAL

The “suggested readings” for each lecture are appended below. The links were internal Mises Academy links so would not work here, and I had no time to add individual links for all of them, but until I find time to code in the links, most of these materials can be found on stephankinsella.com/publications, c4sif.org/resources, mises.org, hanshoppe.com/publications, or on Wikipedia or by google search. (If there is a particular link you cannot find online, email me or add to the comments, and I’ll try to find it and update the post with that link.)

Main Texts

• Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (AIP)
• Boldrin & Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (AIM)

LECTURE 1: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN HISTORY

• Legal Background:

• AIP, pp. 9-14

• Copyright Basics (US Copyright Office) URL
• Copyright overview (LII/Cornell) URL
• Patent law overview (LII/Cornell) URL
• Patent introductory information (Ladas & Parry) URL
• US Patent law information (USPTO) URL

• AIM, ch. 2, pp. 33-35 (“World Before Copyright” section); ch. 3, pp. 48-51 (“World Without Patent” section).

• AIP, pp. 9-14
• Statute of Anne (Wikipedia) URL
• Stationers’ Company (Wikipedia) URL
• History of patent law (Wikipedia) URL
• Letters Patent (Wikipedia) URL
• Statute of Monopolies 1624 (Wikipedia) URL

• Krummenacker, Are “Intellectual Property Rights” Justified? (Historical Origins section) URL
• Palmer, Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach (pp. 264-71) URL
• A Brief History of the Patent Law of the United States (Ladas & Parry)

LECTURE 2: OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICATIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY, AND IDEAS

• Defamation (Wikipedia)–beginning to Section 5 only URL
• Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy URL

• Machlup, “An Economic Review of the Patent System” [pp. 2-5] URL

• Machlup & Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century” [pp. 2-6, et pass.] URL
• Frumkin, “The Origin of Patents” URL

• AIP, pp. 19-23

• AIM, ch. 7, esp. pp. 176-201

• Kinsella, There’s No Such Thing as a Free Patent URL
• Machlup, “An Economic Review of the Patent System” [pp. 19-26 et seq., et pass.] URL
• Machlup & Edith Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 7-28 URL
• Hurt & Schuchman, “The Economic Rationale of Copyright” URL

• AIP, pp. 23-28

• Ayn Rand Lexicon-Patents and Copyrights URL
• Ayn Rand Lexicon-Production URL

• Dale Halling, Ayn Rand on Intellectual Property URL
• Kinsella, Comment to “Galambos and Other Nuts” URL
• Machlup & Edith Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 7-28 URL
• Greg Perkins, Don’t Steal This Article! URL
• Kinsella, Objectivists: “All Property is Intellectual Property” URL
• Kinsella, Inventors are Like Unto … GODS … URL
• Hurt & Schuchman, “The Economic Rationale of Copyright” URL

• Tucker & Kinsella, “Goods, Scarce and Nonscarce” URL

• AIP, pp. 28-42

• Kinsella, “Intellectual Property and the Structure of Human Action” URL
• Boudewijn Bouckaert, “What Is Property?” URL
• Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, chs. 1 & 2 (esp. pp. 13-15, 18-30); p. 158 & p. 158n120, et pass.

LECTURE 3: EXAMINING THE UTILITARIAN CASE FOR IP

• Patent Troll email response Page
• Hidden from students: Patent Troll email response URL
• Patent Trolls and Empirical Thinking URL
• Facebook Threatened by a Non-Patent Troll URL

• Once Again, the Copyright/Trademark Tail Tries to Wag the Internet Dog

LECTURE 4:  IP STATUTES AND TREATIES; OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICTIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY AND IDEAS; RIGHTS-BASED ARGUMENTS FOR IP: CREATION AS A SOURCE OF RIGHTS

• Outrages: See following recent C4SIF entries: Hershey Claims Ownership of Orange, Brown and Tan Candy Wrappings; UK High Court Ruling Implies Headlines Are Copyright; Universities attacking high schools over trademarks; EFF rescues ASL Ally’s sign-langu URL

• Photography and the law URL
• Key IP Statutes and Treaties

LECTURE 5: PROPERTY, SCARCITY, AND IDEAS; EXAMINING RIGHTS-BASED ARGUMENTS FOR IP

LECTURE 6: THE FUTURE; INTEGRATING IP THEORY WITH AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND LIBERTARIAN THEORY;
PROPOSED REFORMS; IMAGINING A POST-IP WORLD; THE FUTURE OF OPEN VS. CLOSED

• See recent postings on C4SIF.org (since Dec. 8) URL

• Kinsella, “Mises on Intellectual Property“ URL
• Hayek and Rothbard references in “Other Publications and Resources” section URL

• A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, pp. 30-33 URL
• Kinsella, “Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and “Rearranging”” URL

• AIP, pp. 45-55 (IP as Contract)

• Kinsella, “Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer,” pp. 59-63 URL

• Kinsella, “Reducing the Cost of IP Law,” URL

• Kinsella, “Innovations that Thrive without IP URL
• Kinsella, “Funding for Creation and Innovation in an IP-Free World ” URL
• Kinsella, “The Creator-Endorsed Mark as an Alternative to Copyright” URL

• Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society

[C4SIF]

Physicist Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, sent me a copy of his scathing letter to the Wall Street Journal in response to Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence, a global warming screed by Prof. Michael E. Mann. It was not published, but the text of the email is appended below, with permission. Hayden is also author of the books A Primer on CO2 and Climate and the recent Bass Ackwards: How Climate Alarmists Confuse Cause with Effect, among others. See also my previous post, Physicist Howard Hayden’s one-letter disproof of global warming claims.

As noted in my post Access to Energy, Hayden helped the late, great Petr Beckmann found the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further Beckmann info here; further dissident physics links). Hayden later began to publish his own pro-energy newsletter, The Energy Advocate, following in the footsteps of Beckmann’s own journal Access to EnergyI love Hayden’s email sign-off, “People will do anything to save the world … except take a course in science.”

Here’s the letter:

***

December 5, 2011

Editor
Wall Street Journal

Re:  Michael Mann:  Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence

Dear Editor:

One of the problems with being brilliant far beyond the rest of humanity is that you go through school so fast that you manage to skip a few things along the way.  The Geniuses of Deep Science (GODS), such as Michael Mann and the railway engineer who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are in that category.

While we peons were in grade school learning about the Vikings settling Greenland in the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the GODS were studying advanced electrodynamics and quantum mechanics. In our art courses we studied paintings from the Little Ice Age (LIA), but the GODS skipped that to concentrate on the Standard Model and string theory.

Not only did the GODS skip over basic science classes, they mastered the art of focusing people’s minds.  They were so good at the craft that they convinced their lesser colleagues and the Nobel Committee that one study of tree rings could supplant thousands of papers in geology journals, paintings in art galleries, and records of crop production from around the world.  Gone was the MWP.  Gone was the LIA.  Who needs that stuff, anyway?

The GODS even invented a new kind of hockey-stick statistics that is so brilliant that a committee of ordinary professors of statistics couldn’t even understand it, so they called it faulty.

You and I might try to draw a connection between CO₂ concentration and temperature by making a kind of freshman-algebra graph with a measure of CO₂ on one axis and temperature rise on the other.  But the GODS are so superior that they’ve never had to stoop to such childish maneuvers.

With the release of two sets of Climategate emails, the GODS have lost a little luster, but they should be able to hide the decline.

Best Regards,

Howard C. Hayden

Prof. Emeritus of Physics, UConn

That, at least, was my impression of the worry expressed in a recent Wired.com article, “Real-Time Debate Feedback Distorts Democracy.”

What’s all the hoopla about? Well, you may recall that back in the 2008 presidential election CNN debuted a new ratings-capturing gimmick below the bloviating candidates: “A real-time graph depicting the averaged reactions of 32 supposedly undecided voters, who expressed favor or disfavor by turning handheld dials as they watched.”

A study by British scientists purports to show that a relative handful of indecisive common folk can “unduly” influence millions of their equally indecisive fellows around the country with this real-time feedback. Wait, we needed what was probably a tax-funded scientific study to tell us that?

Anyway … this, apparently, is BAD FOR DEMOCRACY™.

We can’t have WE THE PEOPLE™ influencing WE THE PEOPLE™ while a “debate” is going on! Oh noes! It’s the job of the elites — in the media, in politics, in government bureaucracies, in academia, and in think tanks — to influence the people before and after the “debates.” Now that’s democracy!

“The responses of a small group of individuals could, via the [graph], influence millions of voters. This possibility is not conducive to a healthy democracy,’ wrote Davis and Memon.”

Well, then, if it’s the influence of a few on the many that we should be concerned about, where’s the worry about the influence of political-campaign spin on voters? of “unbiased,” “fair and balanced,” “we report, you decide” journalist coverage of the campaigns? of slanted commentary and analysis by mainstream-media talking heads and political pundits? of “debates” consisting entirely of hyper-choreographed, alternating presentations of substanceless soundbites and slogans in response to a moderator’s softball questions? No, that’s all the essence of democratic discourse, of course. Nevermind that these elites are also relatively small groups of individuals influencing millions of voters.

It’s not so much the real-time nature of the feedback that these people find troubling. I presume they do not have a problem with a politically opinionated and outspoken individual providing running commentary to his friends or family while they watch the “debates” on tv … unless he’s espousing opinions with which they strongly disagree, of course. It’s the scale of the influence that really bothers them. CNN’s graph allows a few commoners to rival the influence of their betters. They don’t like the competition.

Would they also be troubled by a mass techno-democracy in which the preferences and reactions of millions of Americans were aggregated in some kind of social-media graph so that millions of Americans, instead of just 32, could influence each other in real-time? I think so: “real-time onscreen feedback is fundamentally incompatible with the notion that voters ought to think for themselves.” Voters ought to think for  themselves … except, that is, when it is the elites who are trying to influence them.

You know what does worry me about CNN’s real-time feedback graph?

It’s that journalists will quite naturally not be unbiased in selecting a “representative sample” of supposedly undecided voters. It’s that the graph or the sample of voters producing it could be tampered with by someone or some group with an agenda. There are token mentions of these two worries in the Wired.com article, but the bulk of the worry is over a few voters influencing millions of others. On the other hand, “random” samples of 32 voters are potentially more representative than juries, and it would be tough for their composition and deliberations to be more thoroughly manipulated by the MSM than juries are by judges and lawyers.

What worries me the most is that more people seem to be concerned about the graph than the far more insidious influence of our statist elites on society that I just highlighted.

There’s a lot of misinformation and confusion out there about nuclear power. Environmentalist wackos are against nuclear because they are against energy; as environut Paul Ehrlich infamously said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Others think nuclear power plants can explode like nuclear bombs (they can’t). Still others fret about where the waste would be stored, the same types who wonder about landfills. They don’t realize the waste problem is far worse with other types of energy, or that nuclear is safer and cleaner too.

The current nuclear technology is superior in many ways to fossil fuel energy production, but thorium-based nuclear energy has many advantages over the current uranium-based systems. As noted here, in a thorium-fueled nuclear reactor, “1) it cannot be used for producing the raw material for atomic bombs, 2) it cannot meltdown under any circumstances, and 3) after 500 years its waste will be no more dangerous than the ashes from a conventional coal burning power plant.” Point 1 should give you a clue as to why this did not become the dominant technology. Thorium does not provide material for nuclear bombs, while uranium reactors do. (See Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium (“US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation. The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.”); Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium (“After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.”); see also the video below around 7:10.)

A few years ago in honor of Arthur C. Clarke’s then-recent birthday, I wrote on my own blog that he must never have read Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard,

because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

As disappointing as it is, it’s not surprising that he had a natural-scientistic bias against economics. Sadly, he died only a few months after my post.

In a more recent article in the Sri Lanka Guardian, more of Clarke’s economic ignorance is on display:

While researching for this article I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, “No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking”. He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented. All this indeed makes one wonder whether he really was a closet socialist.

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. — Murray Rothbard

Maybe not a socialist, at least not of the Marxist variety, but there’s definitely a technocratic central-planner streak in there. Now, there may be government policies that divert more people to work in the legal, insurance, and banking professions (particularly legal) than otherwise would in a free market, but somehow I think Clarke has in mind here a more general dismissal of the value of these professions — which is just silly ignorance.

As for so many engineers working on automobiles rather than spaceships and space elevators, well, there’s just more money in it, bub. Deal with it. And, quite frankly, as much as I dream about space exploration and colonization, I’d rather keep driving ever-improving cars than make do with horse-and-buggy for who knows how long while the nation’s resources are diverted to centrally-planned space projects that will undoubtedly waste vast resources and trillions of dollars and may not come to fruition in my lifetime. So sue me for having high time preference.

But in my old blogpost I did identify some good quotes from Clarke, again reported by Benford:

“[F]or the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

“[E]xact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of war: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.” But Clarke probably had in mind using the state to direct all that effort and money toward his pet space elevator.

In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford added two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good ideal all along!”

[Cross-posted at Prometheus Unbound.]

Recently, I was listening to the BrainStuff podcast, which I highly recommend, and Marshall Brain, the host and founder of Howstuffworks.com covers the possibility of bacteria or algae being used to create fuel, eliminating our need for fossil fuels. This is quite fascinating, and listeners speculated that the oil companies might simply kill such technologies. Brain then started speculating on ways to get around this possibility, and came up with the idea that an inexpensive do-it-yourself kit might be developed, and spread widely, making it impossible for the cheap and easy method for fuel production to be shut down. This is a very optimistic view, but I think his idea could be jeopardized by intellectual property laws.

If such a method were produced, it is difficult to imagine the bacteria/algae being unencumbered by patents. The patent holders would have incentives to prevent the sort of underground fuel production plants that Brain describes. The oil companies would not need to kill the technology. Unauthorized production of fuel could be addressed in the same way that unauthorized production of drugs and alcohol is addressed: with police raids and tax crackdowns. In fact, one way to help prevent people “unfairly” using the intellectual property of others would be to require the tracking of mileage and gas purchases for registered vehicles, so that no one could own a car, drive 20,000 miles in a year, but not have gas purchases which correspond to the miles driven. The templates for these things are already in place. All which is really needed is a new application. Old wine in new bottles.