An individual who earns more money per week is obviously in a position to spend more in buying consumers’ goods than is an individual who earns less money per week. For example, a man who makes $1,000 per week has the ability to spend $1,000 per week, while a man who makes only $900 per week has the ability to spend only $900 per week. (For the sake of simplicity, we’re ignoring such possibilities as going into debt or using up savings, and assuming that the individuals both want to live within their incomes.)

It seems to me that many small/medium companies live in fear of a big patent lawsuit. Even if they had their own IP, I suspect many companies would gladly give up forever their right to sue for patent infringement, in exchange for some kind of immunity from patent liability--at least, if they could eliminate the threat of an injunction, so that the worst penalty they might face is some kind of mandatory royalty. Surely IBM et al. would not take this deal, but I bet a lot of other companies would.

It is often the case that the great intellects advance ideas so rich and prescient that they anticipate, in however embryonic form, ideas that are more fully developed later on. One of my favorite examples is Hans Hoppe’s monumental argumentation ethics defense of libertarian rights, where Hoppe gives credit to Rothbard for recognizing, in a brief passage, the insights that Hoppe builds on more systematically: As Hoppe writes:

here

America — the “melting pot” of nations — we were called in the heyday of immigration. The melting pot may be pictured as the giant crucible of competition, heated by the flame of capitalism — that made the steel of the American temperament. Those poor “huddled masses” of the early 1900’s that Emma Lazarus addresses in her poem (on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty) became strong, independent, liberty lovers once they dreamed the American Dream. And even today when Liberty is somewhat hobbled, it continues.

Richard Epstein’s Cato-endorsed article The Problem With Presidential Signing Statements rightly warns of some troubling executive branch power-grabs by the Bush administration. As Epstein writes: