The natural science of climatology and the social science of economics find themselves bound up with each other in the debate on global warming. There are many economic issues to discuss concerning the government’s ability to control the future of weather patterns through regulation and the like. But so far, the debate has focused on the natural-science question of whether global warming is actually occurring, and, if so, what its cause is. Here is where the popular understanding is very much in need of correction. FULL ARTICLE

On December 15, America celebrates the anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Of those rights, the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech is perhaps the most celebrated.

If so, there is a good reason. After surviving a critical test from the Sedition Act of 1798, which tried to muzzle political opposition by making it illegal to ‘combine or conspire together, with intent to oppose any measure or measures of the government,’ it has marked America as a country where people could openly criticize those in government power without ending up in jail or worse.

From a patent lawyer list I’m on, I received a solicitation to sign a letter opposing patent reform. The letter is to be sent to Senators Reid and McConnell. My response to the letter is below (only contains excerpts from the letter). Needless to say, I’ve received basically no comments back from those pushing the letter.

The pending reform of US patent law that has “inventors” and the IP bar all upset (even though it only makes modest changes to the law) is welcome by India and China, at least. See, e.g., this Indian newspaper article arguing that the patent reform measures being considered by Congress will make it easier for India’s patent holders to enter the U.S.

In the comments of my post on the mortgage mess, “Jake” linked to this fantastic piece by Peter Schiff. He makes the obvious point—that I somehow missed!—that the bailout will only further depress home prices in the medium to long term, since fewer people will qualify for loans. It’s really amazing how politicians screw up a part of the market and then kick it while it’s down.

In a recent press briefing given by him and his colleagues, the Deputy MD of the mission-starved IMF was positively drooling over the prospect that the next round of Climate-camouflaged tax transfers from the pockets of the developed world’s citizens will trigger a veritable host of ‘adjustment’ problems and hence offer this institutional dinosaur a whole new rationale for ill-judged economic meddling. In the Q&A which followed, one member of the audience wondered:-

Following the biblical narration, the Tower of Babel was said to have been the culmination of a widespread mortal desire to revolt against the creator. Instead what was to result was a crumbling of the foundation of Babylonian civilization, causing exchange to come to a screeching halt and mass unrest which left behind an uncompleted tower to serve as a monumental testament to the perils of reckless capital consumption.

Murray Rothbard writes: Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a “conspiracy theory of history,” “paranoid,” “economic determinist,” and even “Marxist.” These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is “conspiracy theorist,” almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the “conspiracy theorist” himself. It is no wonder that usually these realistic analyses are spelled out by various “extremists” who are outside the Establishment consensus. For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the “public good.”