I just received an exciting notice that one of my favorite books, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, is being released October 27, and the pre-orders are going well. But wait: according to copyright theory, this isn’t suppose to happen. There are many editions out there already. The book is long ago in public domain. And this is hardly the only case. Tens of thousands of public domain works are still sold the same as new releases. Intriguing.
The U.S. Treasury Department is the central headquarters of Wall Street, and Timmy Geithner is its demigod. The coup of the Treasury Department, which promotes itself as the “steward of U.S. economic and financial systems,” means an economy and financial system run by and for the Wall Street oligarchy, with Goldman Sachs spearheading the ruling class.
In the wake of the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of capitalism in China, I was asked to teach the comparative-economic-systems class at Auburn University for the summer term in 1989. My only exposure to the topic had been as an undergraduate student, where my teacher was a Cold War–era professor who concentrated almost exclusively on the Soviet Union. His implicit message was to fear the Soviet Union, which would soon come to smother the American dream.
Paul Krugman has concentrated his fire recently on those “thumping their chests” over the falling dollar. He has particular scorn for those recommending a return to the gold standard. In Krugman’s view, a simple look at the historical facts will show that it was a superstitious fetish for the yellow metal that prolonged the Great Depression.
In my last article on these pages, I offered criticism of a New York Times article that had praised the Lincoln administration’s property violations in pursuit of military objectives. Today I want to focus on a regular Wall Street Journal columnist who praises the Obama administration’s plans to violate property rights in pursuit of socializing medical care.
From The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009:
Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by user associations. Oliver Williamson has developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution. Over the last three decades these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.
Peter Klein writes:
In my post An Open Letter to Leftist Opponents of Intellectual Property: On IP and the Support of the State, I noted that both conservative and libertarian IP advocates, and leftist IP opponents, all accept the idea that IP is a type of property right. The leftists oppose IP for this reason–because they are opposed to private property rights; and the libertarians favor IP because they are proponets of property rights.
