The choice: whether we shall be blackmailed for the next four years to support a horde of deserving Democrats or a horde of deserving Republicans.
As I argued in my last Forbes article, most of our expressions of conscience have more to do with signaling to others like us that we are righteous than they have to do with fixing problems. Things we do to Save the Earth are shining examples; to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, most kinds of “going green” are about showing that we are on the side of the angels rather than actually improving environmental quality.
In his speech to the Chamber of Commerce, President Obama said:
America’s success didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because [of] the freedom that has allowed good ideas to flourish, that has allowed capitalism to thrive; it happened because of the conviction that in this country hard work should be rewarded and that opportunity should be there for anybody who’s willing to reach for it.
Just like a mother of three in Columbus, I placed blame where blame was not due. The mother blamed the dishwasher; I blamed my children.
Lately, I’ve been assuming the white, powdery film that occasionally remained on our dishes was the result of someone (er, some child) forgetting to add the detergent.
Alas, I read today that my children are not to blame — blame lies with the state (the state of Ohio, in this instance). And I should have guessed as much.
In previous decades libertarians viewed intellectual property as a boring and technical area of the law, the province of legal specialists. They also assumed it to be a legitimate, if arcane, type of property in a capitalist, free-market society. After all, it’s in the Constitution, and Ayn Rand blessed it. But we don’t ignore it anymore, and we don’t take its legitimacy for granted. We can’t. The injustices of IP have multiplied in the Internet age, and they are staring us in the face.
In a recent article, The Case Against Gold David Berman interviews a Canadian fund manager who is bearish for all of the wrong reasons. As do the vast majority of analysts and writers, he totally misunderstands how the gold price is formed.
One of the most important concepts in economic theory is the quantity of money. However, when going from theory to practical application, things get messy. In the real world, it’s not obvious how to count up the amount of “money” in the economy at any given time.
Yesterday I was a Guest panelist on Denise Howell’s This Week in Law, Episode 97, entitled “God Creates. We Patent.” TWiL is part of Leo Laporte’s impressive and growing private TWiT (This Week in Tech) netcast network (I regularly listen to the TWiT network’s This Week in Tech, MacBreak Weekly, and TWiL, in addition to my some of my other favorite podcasts, such as Mises podcasts, Lew Rockwell, and the Slate Culture Gabfest and Slate Political Gabfest.)
