“Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?”

After a good Austrian bashing of the latest call to steal taxpayer money and waste it on something that will make a given problem worse, the stumped critics will often shout, “Oh yeah? Well do you guys have a better idea?” Even though “nothing” would be much, much better than all of the alleged remedies being bandied about, the Austrians actually do have concrete proposals for President Obama.

Does Monopoly Create Wealth?

[This is part 2 of my live blog of this book]

How strange this “intellectual property” issue is. In normal life, we tend to (or should) credit enterprise and markets for most innovations that surround us. I’m typing on a system here that includes products for several dozens different creative companies, with hardware and software and applications of all sorts stitched together through some miracle we call the coordinative power of the market. No news in that, I suppose. Ho hum.

An Internet KGB for Europe

In the 21st-century hunt for downloaders, we have, instead of mercantalism, the underlying ideology of IP, the theory that “intellectual property” is akin to real property. An international host of lawyers, rent seekers, and bureaucrats are working for the development and enforcement of IP laws. But they labor under the false assumption that there is a scarcity of ideas

Authors: Beware of Copyright

When an author signs a publication contract, insofar as it contains strict and traditional copyright notices, he is pretty much signing his life away. It used to be that the publisher would maintain control only so long as the book is in print. Today, with digital printing, this means forever: your lifetime plus 70 years.

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