I’ve recently bemoaned the damage done to RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry, by the US patent system. RIM eventually had to settle for over $600M with NTP, even though the patents it was accused of violating were being re-examined in the US Patent Office and might be overturned. Nevertheless, the very real threat of an injunction by the court that would have shut down RIM’s business—even if only for a few months, until the patents might have been invalidated by the PTO—would have ruined RIM.

There exists today in Anglo-American economics a veritable “conspiracy of silence” regarding the works and achievements of the French Liberal School of Economics.

New EH.Net book review by Bob Higgs:

Introduction

Standard theory views government as functional: a social need arises, and government, semi-automatically, springs up to fill that need. The analogy rests on the market economy: demand gives rise to supply (e.g., a demand for cream cheese will result in a supply of cream cheese on the market). But surely it is strained to say that, in the same way, a demand for postal services will spontaneously give rise to a government monopoly Post Office, outlawing its competition and giving us ever-poorer service for ever-higher prices.

Don Boudreaux, an inspired George Mason University Econ professor, takes issue in a recent blog with a radio reporter. The commentator confuses the alleged ill-effects of marijuana with the perils of the consumer-supplier transaction. That’s like saying venison can kill you because in your pursuit of the deer you might accidentally blow your head off. Or an astigmatic fellow hunter might do it for you. Products are one thing - transactions, another. Dr. Boudreaux understands this - the media does not.

As noted on the notorious Liberty and Power blog (well, notorious for having banned me once, anyway, and for letting me back in; usually only Objectivists, Catonians, or other types of neocons ban me, cough-cough-PALMER-cough, cough-NOODLEFOOD-cough),