Copyright and Video Games
The train of examples of absurd applications of modern patent and copyright law is seemingly endless.
The Climate Debate: When Science Serves the State
With the Kyoto Treaty, writes Joseph Potts, government and science have found each other, and the spawn of this marriage look set to destroy global wealth on a scale that will render the greatest of history’s wars trivial by comparison.
America, Don’t Suffocate Ideas
The Hoppe Victory Blog represents a spectacular, even unprecedented, international effort by supporters of liberty on behalf of a libertarian intellectual under fire.
Paul Craig Roberts on the Privatization Tax Hike
From BusinessWeek, March 7, 2005 (registration required but what matters is right here):
Meaning of national security
Spreading democracy is one of the mantra’s of U.S. foreign policy. Austrians, of course, know otherwise. The military is often used not for alturistic aims, but to secure the financial interests of unscrupulous firms that have an influence over government policy.
I found a most frank example in a recent article in The Economist,
“The view from abroad,” dated 19 Feb. 2005
UNLV supports instructor (Badger Herald)
Badger Herald by Sundeep Malladi
Thursday, February 24, 2005
The University of Nevada decided Friday to dismiss a letter of instruction and all related materials from the file of an economics professor accused of homophobic comments made during one of his classes.
Improving Copyright Law: Baby Steps
As an opponent of modern statute-based federal copyright law, I’m in favor of any improvement, including incremental reductions in the scope of copyright. Lawrence Lessig suggests encouraging the Copyright Office to recommend changes to Copyright Law to make it easier to use “orphaned works”—copyrighted works where the rights holder is hard to find.
Anything for a Buck
Proposed in UK: a gum tax.
Accountants Don’t Know Time is Money / Paper Idea
One of my colleagues (an accounting professor) mentioned that he almost always applies for an extension on his taxes, and admitted that it was due to pure procrastination. He said that most accountants do this too (but said in their case it was that they had to do their clients’ taxes first). I said that it would be interesting to run a regression on the interest rate and the number of late (or early) tax returns filed. Presumably, the higher the interest rate, the higher the opportunity cost of delaying.
