Study IP with Kinsella Online

(Austrian) Economics, Education, IP Law, Libertarian Theory
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IPAs mentioned on the Mises Blog in Study with Kinsella Online, starting November 1 at the Mises Academy, I’ll be presenting the 6-week course Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics, with Monday evening lecture/question-and-answer sessions. An excerpt from the course description:

Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics

PP350 — with Stephan Kinsella

Cost: $125
Length: 6 weeks
Dates: November 1, 2010 – December 17, 2010

Click here to register for this course

This course is taught by Stephan Kinsella, a practicing patent attorney and author of Against Intellectual Property. This is a 6-week course and will run from November 1 until December 17 (with Thanksgiving week off), and will provide an overview of current intellectual property law and the history and origins of IP. The course will explore and offer critical analysis of various utilitarian and deontological justifications offered for IP. The course will analyze the proper relationship between property, scarcity, and ideas, and integrate the proper perspective on IP and the nature of ideas and information with Austrian economics and libertarian theory. Various legal and political reforms consistent with this perspective will be offered along with discussions of market and social institutions in a post-IP world. Optional testing will include a multiple-choice mid-term exam and a combined multiple-choice and essay final exam. Kinsella is Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute, editor of Libertarian Papers, General Counsel for Applied Optoelectronics, and was formerly an adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law. He has frequently lectured and published on IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics, including Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (co-editor, with Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises Institute, 2009).

Course outline and further information available at the course page: Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.

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Digging Up Holes and Filling Them Back In

Eminent Domain
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highway to nowhereNearly forty years after the Baltimore city government eviscerated a neighborhood for a massive, abortive highway project, it decides to build a parking lot instead:

Lillian Duckett was a teenager when Baltimore officials bought the Mulberry Street home she shared with her eight siblings, parents and grandmother, and then tore it down.

The Ducketts were among the nearly 3,000 residents who were uprooted from their predominantly black West Baltimore neighborhood four decades ago to make way for a highway project to connect Interstate 70 with I-95. But construction stopped nearly as soon as it began, leaving a concrete bridge that rises near the site of the Ducketts’ former home and ends abruptly in a grassy slope.

Duckett sat in her current home, which overlooks the ill-fated project, on Friday as Gov. Martin O’Malley, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other officials announced a $2.5 million plan to demolish the hulking dead end that has become known as “The Highway to Nowhere.”

All of this being funded by Obama’s barrels of stimulus cash, none of which will ease the pain and resentment of being victimized by eminent domain abuse all those years ago.  For the crime of destroying hundreds of people’s homes, not to mention a significant part of their economic activity, this seems like a pathetic Band-Aid.

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Do More Guns Lead to Less Crime?

Firearms
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Last week, an AK-47-wielding student caused a major scare on the UT-Austin campus. He ultimately killed himself in the library. Fortunately, no one else was hurt. That same day, the Libertarian Longhorns and UT Students for Concealed Carry on Campus were scheduled to host John Lott, famed author of More Guns, Less Crime, to speak about his research showing that government restrictions upon firearms are counterproductive.

Thanks to Rob Love of Texans for Accountable Government, we have video of the event. It has officially been posted on Youtube, and we hope you will assist us in making this go viral. We need people to understand the gravity of this kind of restriction upon our individual property rights. It’s not just about students needing to protect themselves, it’s about grasping the limits of government power.

Here’s the Youtube playlist, I know it’s a long series (8 parts!) but at least try to catch some of it. Know the facts!

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Tea partiers will fall for anything

The Right
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Tom Tancredo today boasted a variety of endorsements he has received from local tea party organizers in his bid for the governorship in Colorado. I won’t bore you with the details, but Tancredo, a Republican member of Congress until 2009, launched a campaign as an independent demagogue after he decided the GOP nominee was not to his liking.

Now, I have no idea how representative these tea party organizers are of the rank-and-file tea partier, but I do know that Tancredo has spoken at local tea party events and has been cheered.

What’s interesting is that Tancredo was the only GOP member of the Colorado Congressional delegation that voted for the TARP Bailout. So, Tancredo, who voted for the greatest taxpayer ripoff in American history, goes to tea party events where he recites something about the virtues of small governments, and then receives thunderous applause.

Tancredo, who supported the legislation that stole almost a trillion dollars from the taxpayers and handed it over to Goldman Sachs and friends, now lectures the American people on the need for smaller government.Probably no other piece of legislation in recent memory galvanized and defined the party of liberty in America more than the TARP bailout and the opposition to it. It was the legislation that revved up the non-stop fleecing of the American public to about triple its normal speed. And with the support of Tom Tancredo.

The tea party types here are making excuses for him because Tancredo now says that voting for TARP was a mistake. How courageous. He voted for TARP because that required no courage, and now he’s disavowing his vote because that requires no courage. What a magnificent display of principle!

But, hey, tea partiers, I’m sure that, even though he voted for the biggest big government piece of legislation in decades, because Goldman Sachs told him to, that doesn’t mean he won’t be a staunch opponent of big government on everything else. Right? Keep dreaming, tea partiers.

Hey, remember when all those Republicans slashed the size of government after they got control of Congress back in 1994? Remember when George W. Bush didn’t double the size of amount of federal spending in 8 years? Wasn’t that great?

Oh wait, none of those things happened? Well, I’m sure your voting into office all the exact same people, like Tancredo, who gave us the bloated government and bailouts of the last decade will suddenly act in the exact opposite way now. It’s sure to happen.

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