What Intellectual Property Has Wrought

Want to know the cost of bogus intellectual property rights? Read "A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them."

An amazing collection of historic live jazz recordings is in the possession of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, but we might never hear them. Why?

"The potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large—and, more importantly, so uncertain—that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings," wrote David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. "Tracking down all the parties who may have a copyright interest in these performances, and therefore an entitlement to royalty payments (or to enjoining their distribution), is a monumental—and quite possibly an impossible—task."

Read This Book!

Is He Not in the Loop?

In Tuscaloosa Obama said he's never seen such devastation. Doesn't the Pentagon show him the bombing reports?

Talking Education on Reason TV

The Freeman, May 2011

Debt Ceiling Shattered April 15

Much attention is directed to the approaching congressional vote on raising the debt limit, which makes the following mysterious.

According to the U.S. Treasury, the $14.294 trillion limit was exceeded on April 15. See it for yourself here.

The latest figures to the penny:

Total Public Debt Outstanding

April 14: $14,270,792,119,184.89

April 15: $14,305,336,580,992.11

April 18: $14,309,159,097,877.65

April 19: $14,320,468,555,091.68

HT: Ken Sturzenacker

Splitting Hairs

If you teach people that government is indispensable to security, don't be surprised if they also believe that government is indispensable to social security. Good luck trying to explain the difference. (Calling the latter, but not the former, socialism does not work.)

TGIF: Saving the Welfare State

Why does everyone think Washington is plagued by excessive partisanship? The contest over how to address the fiscal debacle says otherwise: Both divisions of the uniparty (Democrat and Republican) agree that the warfare-welfare state must be saved. It’s the means not the end that divides them.

The rest of TGIF is here.

Question for Randian IP Advocates

The Randian case for intellectual "property rights" is that all value-productive action (which is necessary for life) proceeds from a creative idea, and therefore all property is ultimately intellectual property. Deprive a person of the exclusive right to his idea and you attack the very foundation of life.

That case prompts a thought experiment: Imagine a primitive tribe in which one member does painstaking research on which wild berries are good for human consumption and which are not. (The Randian case emphasizes that such knowledge is not automatic as it in the case of lower animals, but has to be discovered by intellectual effort.) He learns through his work that when he eats one particular berry he gets healthier and more energetic -- better in every way. He also discovers that other berries are best avoided. The rest of the tribe observes and takes notes.

Question: Under Randian IP law, would the others need the innovator's permission before they may consume the healthful berries? Or does the innovative have an exclusive right to the fruits of his effort. (Pun intended.)

If not, why not?

Think Dialectically

The title of the post is the advice my old friend Chris Matthew Sciabarra would surely give about proposals to change or abolish Medicare and Medicaid. It means holding the full context at the front of one's mind. These programs certainly violate the rights of the people forced to finance them and make the recipients dependent on the political class while discouraging independence and mutual-aid solutions. But they are parts of a system that has other, interlocking components. Focusing only on abolishing Medicare and Medicaid commits the serious offense of overlooking all the ways government (at all levels) cartelizes and restricts the provision of medical care and insurance against medical expenses. Licensing is pervasive, and myriad other controls and privileges impede competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Libertarians must emphasize this during every discussion of Medicare and Medicaid or they will appear to be advocating that vulnerable people be thrown into the nightmare that the reigning medical and medical-insurance "markets" can be and often are. We must also teach the public about mutual-aid societies and "lodge practice," which enabled poor people to obtain quality medical care during an earlier period in American history. (Also see Roderick Long's article on lodge practice.)

Unfortunately, too many libertarians imply (without quite saying) that these rigged markets are already free and, moreover, that they are the best in the world. I can't imagine a worse position for libertarians to take these days.

If we don't insist on freed medical and insurance markets, we will have no chance to make headway in the public debate. Potential allies who care about the vulnerable will be alienated, and we will be looked on as ... conservatives.

P.S. It should go without saying that this principle applies across the board.

TGIF: Had Enough Yet?

It’s hard to be optimistic that the mountebanks running the government will do anything sensible in the near future. Until there is a deep rethinking about government, the public will not accept the near-term drastic budget cutting required to head off a fiscal crisis, much less the longer-term structural steps needed to prevent a repetition of what we’ve been through. People will need to understand that while the wish for “social security” in an uncertain world is entirely reasonable, the route to it is not Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – which tether people to the political class — but freed markets and voluntary mutual aid.

Finally, the fiscal problem needs more than a fiscal solution. People would be less attracted to government succor if the barriers that raise the cost of initiative and independence – including self-employment taxes, medical care restrictions, occupational licensing, land restrictions, and protection of entrenched economic interests from competition – were removed, freeing individuals to find their most satisfying places in the market without having to kowtow to power and privilege.

The rest of TGIF is here.

Op-Ed: Emperor Obama

We were warned. “Who can deny but the president general will be a king to all intents and purposes, and one of the most dangerous kind too; a king elected to command a standing army.... The President- general, who is to be our king after this government is established, is vested with powers exceeding those of the most despotic monarch we know of in modern times.... I challenge the politicians of the whole continent to find in any period of history a monarch more absolute....”

The rest is here.

Show Us the Evidence

President Obama says he had bomb Libya to prevent Col. Qaddafi from massacring the people of Benghazi. Really? Where's the evidence that this was in the cards? Steve Chapman says it runs against the claim. But Obama asks for trust, and his Progressive supporters are mostly willing to give it.

Read about it here.

First Define Your Terms

I don't mean to make Sean Hannity apoplectic, but I don't "love my country." Why not? Because I don't know what the hell that means and I don't sign on to things without knowing the terms.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Still Making No Sense

Barack Obama says the Libyan intervention is necessary to save innocent civilians from slaughter. He also says that since Qaddafi is the source of the threat, he has to go. But, Obama adds, the U.S. military cannot directly effect regime change (no boots on the ground) because that would "splinter" the coalition (NATO and Arab League) that he takes so much pride in.

This makes no sense. Is the coalition an end in itself? Why should the humanitarian mission that Obama says motivates the intervention take a back seat to the coalition's preservation? If keeping the coalition intact means the deaths of many civilians, what kind of humanitarian mission is this?

That Obama's case for taking sides in this civil war is riddled with such unanswerable questions is a sign that he is not leveling with the American people. The reason he cannot level with them is that he's trying to do incompatible things: serve the interests of the Empire, create a legacy as a humanitarian, and keep his Progressive base in line. (The base might go for a humanitarian mission as long as it's part of an "international" effort.)

This intervention has nothing to do with humanitarianism -- which is not to say that would justify U.S. involvement. This is about the U.S. government's claim to be the ultimate keeper of order in the world, with "order" being whatever condition serves the political-economic interests of the ruling elite.

On Antiwar Radio

Scott Horton's latest interview of me on Antiwar Radio is here.

Geraldine Ferraro: For the Record

Geraldine Ferraro was not the first woman nominated for vice president to win an electoral vote (or, Joe Lieberman, the first Jewish person to be such). That distinction goes to Toni Nathan, who was on the 1972 ticket of the Libertarian Party. The LP ticket of John Hospers and Nathan won a Virginia electoral vote when Roger MacBride, a Nixon elector, broke ranks and voted for them in that state's electoral college balloting. MacBride went on to head the ticket in 1976.

Rizzo on Libya

Mario Rizzo's "Libya and the Rule of Law" is not to be missed.

Rizzo makes many good points, and any self-described advocate of limited government who supports Obama's Libyan intervention must answer them or shut the hell up. As Rizzo notes, the NATO treaty signed by the Senate after World War II says specific things, none of which would make NATO an all-purpose global police force at the disposal of the American president whenever the humanitarian impulse hits him. This intervention is an outrageous breach of the rule of law that everyone pays homage to, and there should be legal consequences for the perpetrator. That means impeachment.

The Problem

Many people -- maybe most -- have a presumption against war. The problem is that their ideological framework enables them to knock the presumption down with a feather.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Unsorted Thoughts on Libya

Jacob Sullum put it well when he wrote, “Obama claims 'we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.' Yes, we can, and we often do."

I’d only add this: Some of “our” best friends have been tyrants (sometimes called prime ministers and presidents) who treat “their” people without mercy or justice. Must I really name them?

Empire apologist Jeffrey Goldberg excuse this under the label “strategic hypocrisy.” “We’re all he adults,” he says. In other words, those who demand principled consistency are immature.

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Anyone who thinks that Obama’s intervention in the Libyan civil war is motivated by humanitarianism is clearly unfamiliar with the history of U.S. foreign policy. Please do some reading. I modestly suggest that here’s a good place to start. On Libya specifically see Pepe Escobar’s analysis. There’s plenty more at Antiwar.com.

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Imagine that Abraham Lincoln were doing today what he did 150 years ago to prevent the South from breaking away from the Union. Would Obama (or another past president), as head of a hypothetical superpower, have intervened to stop him? Or would he have assisted Lincoln in his violence against the secessionists? It would have depended on the particular interests of the ruling elite.

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Why do the media insist on calling what the U.S. government has done a “no-fly zone”? It was far more than that from day one, unless Qaddafi has figured out how to make tanks and soldiers fly.

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The mildest thing you can say about the Libyan intervention is that it's unconstitutional. And the war powers act is a joke.

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Republicans lie us into wars with the word "security." Democrats lie us into war with the word "humanitarian." That’s the two-party system: a choice between two rationalizations for empire.

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A NATO war is a U.S. war. NATO has always been an American tool. The Supreme Commander, Europe, is an American admiral. This is not a handoff. It’s a smokescreen to serve Obama’s political interests.

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The Arab League is a bunch of autocratic nations led by Saudi Arabia, one of America’s staunchest client states. The League’s request for a Western-imposed no-fly zone in Libya means little. It is reasonable to suspect the request was part of a deal involving the Saudi intervention on behalf of the king of Bahrain, who is violently putting down a popular majority Shiite uprising. Besides, most Arab leaders despise Qaddafi. He has insulted them in the past. He’s called some of them “women” because of their robes.

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Pro-Obama commentators, the ones on MSNBC in particular, have disgracefully taken the easy way out. Instead of examining the issues involved in the intervention, they prefer to mock Republicans as flip-flopping hypocrites. Granted, they’re flip-flopping hypocrites (with one exception). But what about the intervention?! Rachel Maddow’s commentary was the most ridiculous. Obama is different from her predecessor, she said, because he was reluctant to intervene. How do we know? The White House keeps telling us, she said. Seriously! She also said that one of the best things Obama did was not to give solemn explanation to the American people from the Oval Office like all his predecessors did when they intervened in a foreign country. Really!

Do these people ever listen to themselves?

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Why doesn’t Obama bribe Qaddafi to move to Afghanistan and make him president?

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Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki apparently has Obama’s okay to violently put down popular protests against his regime. Democracy is in the eye of the beholder.

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Why are the Chinese rulers willing to lend the U.S. government money to intervene in Libya (and all the other countries it’s intervening in)? Please stop!

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I have an idea for a constitutional amendment. Before the U.S. government gets involved in any foreign matter, the public must vote on the name. Operation Odyssey Dawn is ridiculous. Someone said it’s the name of a stripper.