It’s Krugman’s lastest manifesto in the NYTMag. It’s all here: how economists were in love with capitalism before the Great Depression (?), how Keynes was the only one who saw the failures of laissez-faire (!), how economists fell in love again with markets in recent years (!!), and how the popping bubble has startled them whereas the great Keynesian Krugman knew it all along (??).
[Chapter 2 of End the Fed by Ron Paul (Grand Central Publishing, 2009), pp. 12–31. The publisher controls reprint permissions for this chapter, and has given permission to Mises.org to run this. Unlike most everything else on Mises.org that is published under Creative Commons, it cannot be reposted or republished, but blogs and sites are welcome to link here.]
Despite a potentially crippling patent injunction against selling Word that Microsoft is battling on appeal, Microsoft, via a senior lawyer, is nevertheless calling for a global patent system “to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world”.
Like many libertarians, I initially assumed intellectual property (IP) was a legitimate type of property right. But I had misgivings from the start: there was just something too utilitarian and results oriented in Rand’s purportedly principled case for IP, and something too artificial about the state’s copyright and patent statutory classifications. I started practicing patent law around 1992, and the more I learned about IP, the more my doubts grew.
The question of how to objectively determine damages for negligence (tort) in a libertarian system often arises. There is not much solid, libertarian analysis out there on this issue–the answers are usually either positivistic and assume some presumptive validity of common law rules; or they are libertarian but without much mooring in any coherent libertarian legal theory.
At Recovery or Stagnation?, a Mises Circle held in San Francisco on August 29, 2009, there was a great Speakers’ Panel featuring Walter Block, Thomas DiLorenzo, Douglas French, and Robert Murphy. Great comments on the current financial mess.
