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Patents create a monopoly for a time in order to combat the free rider problem [...] If you want to do away with patents and the problems with their associated monopoly, all you have to do is explain how your alternative to patents will combat the free rider problem. [...]

Innovation existed before the patent system was established. In addition, somewhere there is a paper out there (too lazy to look for it now) that proves with hard economical facts that in most industries patents usually cost more because of ligation than they provide by means of licensing fees, i.e. their only purpose is it block the market and thereby hinder innovation. Free market apologist see patents and copyrights as hindrance without leaving the mindset of capitalism. Finally, there is the alternative to build a society founded not con concurrence and profit orientation but on cooperation. This would nullify the free rider problem because someone copying you would be seen as a merit and not a s a bad thing. The latter of course would also require leaving the mindset of current capitalist economy - in my book not a bad thing at all.

Incidentally the capcha is overhaul

Ebooks are free here

Or you can use Tide laundry detergent.

http://bastiat.mises.org/2012/03/tide-as-money/

magnanimous? Are you for real?

The guy was an absolutely ruthless businessman, he would set up competitive auctions between shipping companies (which was the point of why he bought land for his refinery operations close to rail road and with access to water ways, so he could pit rail and boat shipping companies against each other). He hired people and trained them personally in the art of selling his product at the best price (for him). He set part of his profits aside to self-ensure against fires and thefts, etc., he cut entire parts of 'normal' (for the time) business procedures out and reimplemented them himself, he was vertically integrating at every business opportunity. He called the bluff of his first business partner and bid on the entire business against him (he was about 26 at the time, having worked since age of 16, from nothing he already managed to save a considerable small fortune, and threw together about 80K and bought the entire business), that was due to his partner wanting to get out, as the partner didn't realise how profitable the business can be. You can say he was Larry Ellison of the day, except he was much better at it, would you say that Larry Ellison is 'magnanimous' today?

In any case, throwing words like that around shows complete lack of understanding of how business operates, why decisions are made and what it means to be most productive and thus most profitable.

Rockefeller wasn't "magnanimous" when it concerned his business. He was charitable otherwise, but never in business.

However saying that the company would 'abuse' it's position sometime down the road and so it must be broken apart, that's ridiculous. Here we have a company that is excellent at providing best quality kerosene (and later other oil byproducts) at the lowest prices consistently by investing in better and more efficient processes and technologies all the time, but because LATER it could abuse its dominant role of the most efficient oil refiner and deliverer it should be broken up? That's cutting your nose to spite your face, it immediately retarded the development in the industry that put competitive downward pressure on prices and prices have not been lower since, they have only gone up.

However in an actual free market, there is no unshakable dominant position for ANY business if a government is not involved. It takes a government to solidify and cement status of a business as a monopoly. AT&T is one perfect case of such government created monopoly, which was created by government destroyed 3000 private competitors, which for many decades provided uncompetitive, unimaginative product line that nobody was allowed to compete against and once that was over the competition exploded and number of products expanded dramatically (from different types of phones to answering machines, to different, better service quality, to lower prices, to mobile devices, etc.)

What's lacking unfortunately is the hard work of quantifying the societal benefits as a function on e.g. patent duration. Which incidentally is the 99% perspiration to accompany the 1% inspiration (which all of us probably has anyway).

So Tabarrok's curve is a typical no-brainer (in both senses) as far as it has been worked out.

What's needed is an analysis along the lines of the one by e.g. Rufus Pollock (see http://rufuspollock.org/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf ) or the one described here: http://www.ipdigit.eu/2010/09/what-is-the-optimal-copyright-length/ Of course this is where political viewpoints enter the debate, as evidenced by the views of the Von Mises institute (see http://archive.mises.org/17319/optimal-patent-and-copyright-term-length/ ) who cite people that argue that patents don't contribute at all to spurring innovation (something that anyone who has ever pitched his idea to a VC with the objective of funding a startup will reject out of hand).

It's hardly a new point of view. Perhaps mr. Tarrock ought to do a better literature search before coming up with an existing idea and grandly naming a curve after himself.

It is unconstitutional for federal government to manipulate businesses, to regulate businesses, to get involved in disputes between private parties, to create so called 'anti-trust', to print fiat currency and call it money, to manipulate interest rates, to steal income via taxes, to get involved in medical care or insurance or banking or education or agriculture or transport and many many other things that are not listed as specific powers authorised to the feds. Government creates monopolies, that was also the case with AT&T when USA gov't destroyed over 3000 private competitors and declared AT&T to be a monopoly "for the common good".

roman_mir

Just about anywhere where humans lived. It used to be done with people bringing water in large cisterns (tanks) and other people removing waste as well in large tanks (not the same tanks I assume) and it was done for tiny amount of money so that people could afford it.

Individuals sold infrastructure as a service for as long as people live on this planet.

Before AT&T was granted the monopoly status by the government there were literally thousands of competing phone companies with their own infrastructure. It was destroyed and confiscated. Electrical lines were built privately before governments subsidised certain companies with special laws and regulations and taxes. You are blissfully unaware of everything that is happening around you.

roman_mir

Just like Standard Oil, MS was targeted by government because it didn't play by the government rules, didn't "share" part of its success with the politicians the same way other companies did.

This is destruction of private property rights, nothing else. Government has no place in 'fighting monopolies', when in reality it doesn't fight monopolies it creates them, and the companies that it does destroy are those who are not paying bribes big enough to prevent the destruction.

roman_mir

AT&T? What a gigantic fail on your part, AT&T was granted the monopoly status BY government, which killed 3000 of its viable competitors. As I said, you are as stupid as you are ignorant and I have no time for you.

Riiiiight, because no one ever counterfeits hard currency, never used it to buy off politicians, never laundered, never dumped, never hoarded, never used it to bribe people, never used it to pay soldiers to murder people, etc.

Just in case you don't get it: A _digital_ NOR a _physical_ currency is NOT immune to the many (government & private) abuses. That is, there are MANY issues with money ... namely its design and mis-implementation.

* http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf
* http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul124.html
* http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/explore/problems.html
* http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Money-Its-Not-About/dp/0984502009

When are you going to stop being delusional that some magical pseudo-authority figure is the answer to everyone's perceived problems?

--
"Necessity is the Mother of Invention, byt Curiosity is the Father." -- Michaelangel007

The value of technology is truly enormous, yes, but it's not what money is used to measure. Money is medium *of exchange* and it is only the goods and services that are being exchanged which it needs to accomodate, not increases in general productivity due to improvement in technology, but only the tangible products of that productivity.

In a very real way, money is just like any other good. Even though we are used to thinking of all other goods as being valued in units of currency, the valuation works the same in reverse. It's just two ways of looking at the same problem. Any centralised monetary authority therefore falls prey to the calculation problem just as surely as centralised price setting for any other commodity does.

One thing I think we can agree with after reading your post is that there is, at any given time, a theoretical optimum level of money (or currency) in circulation, and the closer to that optimum level the actual level stays, the better the economy will work. But here's the problem. There is no way for a central authority to calculate that level correctly and in a timely manner, it's not difficult it is actually impossible. (In reality we have much bigger problems, it's inevitable that the central authority will wind up abusing its position rather than simply failing to function adequately, but that's another argument.)

It's a price problem, and the only known way to arrive at close approximations of proper price points reliably and quickly enough is through a market. With a market, you dont have a centralised authority, you have a large number of actors acting independently, each with specialised knowledge that is not accessible to the central authority. They are thus able, in aggregate, to do what the smartest and best informed man in the world would not be able to do - properly price commodities. Including money.

Right now the state has a legal monopoly on money. No one else is allowed to provide it. With no competition, there is no market. (And I know many nations have their own currency but they are all fiat currencies tied to the same corrupt banking system, no one is allowed to offer real money which cannot be inflated at will.)

Open up the market in money, and you will get a reasonable approximation of the optimum balance between inflation and deflation, because when there is too little inflation people will be motivated to find ways to provide more money, and when there is too much inflation they wont bother.

A way to provide more money, btw, could be any number of things. Historically it might have meant intensive mollusk cultivation, or expanded mining operations, but it doesnt have to be limited to those things. But in a similar way to how 0-cost email predictably created spam, 0-cost inflation is just too abusable for humans to handle.

One last thing, money is not only used as a unit of exchange but a unit of savings. Again, I think we agree there is an optimum level of savings, but the question is how to determine it. Top down here is a fatal conceit. The only fair and accurate way to determine this is from the bottom up - by a market valuation. The current system effectively drains value out of retirement accounts to fund wars. This is deeply unfair.

The flaws in this system? Well as I said, it's not perfect, but perfect isnt an option. The only real flaw I can see in it is that the powers that be wouldnt be able to enrich themselves from a priviliged position anymore, and thus they obviously arent going to let it happen anytime soon.

You need to define what it means to be guilty of "abuse of monopoly", because that can be very subjective. Difficult, will change with situation, matter for courts/regulator.

You list "pressuring suppliers and vendors" as an ill that needs to be fixed, but this ties into the need to to define "abuse". Businesses have and should continue to have the freedom to control their pricing, just like I have the freedom to sell an item at cost to a friend but sell it for profit to a stranger. No that's OK, but you shouldn't be able to force a supplier to charge more for a new competitor or force a vendor to use your product.

Outright corruption - This is a crime, but does not need any new rules for enforcement.

Re: Standard Oil - Why was it a good thing? http://mises.org/daily/5274

Key points from the article:

• 1. For that time period, oil prices continually fell due to Standard Oil's innovation in oil refining and transportation. Lower prices indicate lack of monopoly pricing, meaning no harm was done to consumers.

• 2. When Supreme Court made its ruling, Standard Oil had 150 competitors. Note that "monopoly" means "single seller", and is typically used to describe a situation where there are no competitors.

If anything, Standard Oil is an excellent example of badly applied gov't regulation. What was the actual benefit to consumers? What was the cost to consumers? Government used taxpayer money to fund a lawsuit that harmed Standard Oil; but Standard Oil wasn't doing anything that harmed consumers. That's abuse of government power, which is a type of corruption that increases the cost of business (translating to higher prices).

What's your opinion on Bell's breakup?

No, more the nasty stuff that they can get done for, abuse of monopoly, pressuring suppliers and vendors, outright corruption into government oversight etc. I think it's good that they broke up standard oil, we're better off. They should have broken up MS, but MS got to them and they were found guilty, but allowed to continue and pay the "fines" in their own stuff, strengthening their position!

You need to define what it means to be guilty of "abuse of monopoly", because that can be very subjective.

You list "pressuring suppliers and vendors" as an ill that needs to be fixed, but this ties into the need to to define "abuse". Businesses have and should continue to have the freedom to control their pricing, just like I have the freedom to sell an item at cost to a friend but sell it for profit to a stranger.

Outright corruption - This is a crime, but does not need any new rules for enforcement.

Re: Standard Oil - Why was it a good thing? http://mises.org/daily/5274

Key points from the article:

• 1. For that time period, oil prices continually fell due to Standard Oil's innovation in oil refining and transportation. Lower prices indicate lack of monopoly pricing, meaning no harm was done to consumers.

• 2. When Supreme Court made its ruling, Standard Oil had 150 competitors. Note that "monopoly" means "single seller", and is typically used to describe a situation where there are no competitors.

If anything, Standard Oil is an excellent example of badly applied gov't regulation. What was the actual benefit to consumers? What was the cost to consumers? Government used taxpayer money to fund a lawsuit that harmed Standard Oil; but Standard Oil wasn't doing anything that harmed consumers. That's abuse of government power, which is a type of corruption that increases the cost of business (translating to higher prices).

I recommend the origins of money by Carl Menger. Here you can have it for free.

It explains exactly what you are asking: why a farmer would accept gold as method of payment with or without government, and how a society naturally goes from barter to adopting gold (and other commodities) as money by simple voluntary exchanges.

Mises then elaborates on this by explaining interest rates time preference and inflation, though Mises is not entry level material.

A counter example of your "tax" theory: Ireland had no government between 700 and 1700, and their currency was gold.

The analogy is sounds, but not at all for the reasons you try to expose.

Bulb tulips were a popular way for investors to save their welth from massive devaluation caused by the practice of clipping gold coins, combined with the special rules of the dutch banking system (free coinage) and the massive influx of precious metals from newly discovered America: gold would flow into the dutch banks, get deposited at facial value in exchange for full(er) coins - or certificates of value which end up buying bullion for minting into fresh new coins, and get shipped back for more clipping and recycling by the princes of Europe. Buying bulbs and bulb stock was one way to escape the madness, much like buying bitcoins today is one way to escape the monetary madness. You can read more here about it.

If you are really interested in what libertarians think about corporatism and what their policy would be in regard to it if they had power, why don't you, I don't know, like, ASK THEM? THIS also might possibly cause you to re-examine things. Just google "libertarianism corporatism". I can certainly recommend investigating some of the top site hits; it was helpful to me. Libertarianism and CLASSICAL liberalism (not the abortion of liberal socialism as found in most of the West) share so many points, they are practically the same thing.

Hint: you entirely miss the point of libertarianism with your comment. Maybe libertarian policies if implemented would work to bring about what libertarians say they want, or maybe it's an unworkable pipe dream, but it propose REAL solutions to the problems you seem to care about.

The difference is that the metaphor is used to bring up images of using wheelbarrows to hold enough money to buy a loaf of bread (see http://www.mises.org/daily/1611 ). But if we just add zeros digitally and index everything, where's the problem? Consider Israel's experience: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Economy/eco5.html :

Over the years, more and more non-immediate transactions - namely, the kind to be concluded some time in the future - adopted the indexing (or linkage) remedy. One of its first applications was in bank savings accounts. In order to prevent inflation resulting in a deterioration of the real value of their savings, depositors were assured that each deposit would be registered at its "value" (that is, the CPI rate) on that day. The deposit would be redeemed, when the time came, according to its "real value," as corrected by the rise of the index between the two dates. Soon after, interest accumulation was also linked in the same fashion.

[...]

The linkage system was very successful. In major economies around the world, consumers often feel the pinch of just 2-7% annual inflation. But Israelis, who had to deal with a much higher inflation rate, went about their business practically unaffected. For three and a half decades, their real income was protected by this index-linked mechanism. Furthermore, over this period the standard of living rose at an average rate of close to 4% annually.

When hyperinflation hit in the 1970s, the article continues:

However perfect, the linkage machine itself was fueling the fire of inflation at an increasing pace. As inflation evolved into hyperinflation, the price spiral was taking a toll on economic output. Dealing with daily linkage adjustments and their repercussions was draining the time and resources of households and businesses.

But what if "dealing with the daily linkage adjustments and their repercussions" was fully automated, so it didn't drain any time and resources? In other words, no one would have to worry about money except for computer programs, while we got on with our lives.

I should also mention the book "The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies" which is a point by point refutation of Keynesianisim. It is available for free as a PDF or ebook. Any time a Keynsian says something, you'll almost certainly find the refutation in here.

https://mises.org/document/3655

Once that book was published Kensianisim was definitively killed intellectually. It only stumbles on because it gives politicians the cover they need to do what they want to do anyway.

I've pointed out to you before that your view is largely a myth. I'll just leave this here for anyone interested.

The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315

That period of the 19th century you lament so much saw the largest rise in wages and standards of living that workers had ever seen, increase in safety (as technology allowed), and the effective elimination of the 10,000 year history of child labor by allowing parents to earn enough money that the children did not have to. Workers went from 14 hour days 6 days a week on the farm to 12 hour days in the factories, which soon went to 10 and eventually 8, all the while earning more than they could have at 16 hours on a farm thanks to the capital equipment at their disposal. Things were rough and primitive because the technology available was rough and primitive compared to today. They did the best with what they had just like we did 10 or 20 years ago with computers.

The problem of pollution was a problem caused by government refusing to enforce private property rights. Not to mention that one of the largest polluters was government agencies or organizations, especially municipal water systems.

The Libertarian Manifesto on Pollution
https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution

Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the 19th century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.

As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, the farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions against further invasion of their property. But the judges said, in effect, "Sorry. We know that industrial smoke (i.e., air pollution) invades and interferes with your property rights. But there is something more important than mere property rights: and that is public policy, the 'common good.' And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing, industrial progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be overridden on behalf of the general welfare." And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property, in the form of lung disease and countless other ailments. And all for the "common good"

Not to mention that the long term effects of some of these chemicals were not known at the time, so even if there was an EPA in 1870, they would have just dumped them in a hole anyway.

It's not like Libertarians haven't been thinking about these things, it's that the solutions don't fit into a 30 second sound bite. No solution is going to be perfect, so we are going to have to chose which imperfections we are most willing to deal with.

if you've taken ECON 200 you'll know is a really, really bad thing for an economy

Yeah, if you've taken a midlevel course in the failed and untestable Keynesian-theory based system, you'll have been told that. But empirical evidence shows that deflation is beneficial to an economy and heals the prior inflationary damage.

The Keynesians failed to predict the crash, predicted a real recovery by now, fail to see how their money printing is continually re-injuring the economy - in short, it's time to call their theory for what it is - an excuse to enable big government, and a monetary system that's utterly unable to fix a failing economy.

Deflation is a silly thing to be worried about.

How many hyper-deflations have occurred? 0.
How many hyper-inflationary events have occurred? A lot. (Zimbabwe, Germany, Hungary, Former Soviet Republics, etc.)

The idea of this gigantic "deflationary spiral" is also a myth

http://mises.org/daily/1254

Does a good job of explaining it.

First of all, there never was a "hole" - a better term would be an "ozone reduction". Its cause remains unknown. There are many theories, and the one exclusively blaming CFC's is made increasingly implausible by recent research, as well as the recent ozone increase. What is known is that the government intervention in banning CFC's had some small negative impact on the quality of life of almost everyone alive today. The effect of the ban on the ozone layer, if any, won't kick in until the CFC particles already released begin to exit the atmosphere many decades from now...

There are many natural cycles that affect this planet and this solar system, and modern science has not been around long enough to measure and fully understand all of them. However "we don't know" is not an acceptable answer to many people - they want a story that sounds good and fits their preconceived political beliefs...

--libman

http://archive.mises.org/5216/patent-and-penicillin/

>gold-worshiping cult online

Straw man much?

> I guess none of them have studied enough history to know about the great depression or what backed the currency at the time.

I'm very familiar with it, and I suggest you educate yourself on the subject. Read and learn

-jcr

> What's so fucking special about gold anyway?

Well, for one, hard currency is a lot less likely to be just created en masse like Soft currency. Let me tell you a little story about Zimbabwe:
  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576314953091790360.html

I am not saying we should go back to gold. However, if you want to understand money, start with the excellent summary from The Ludwig von Mises Institute:

http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf

Money is nothing more then an exchange of energy (be it time, knowledge, services, or items). The token that is used to represent those things are irrelevant.

--
Classmates.com (MemoryLane) is a SCAM

When am I going to publish a commercial OS containing those desktop environments? Never. That's when.

That thought doesn't even cross my mind - if I publish anything it is always as open source and "public domain".

Seriously - when I publish open source software, I prefer to use BSD style licenses, but I don't shy away from GPL except when I might need to violate said GPL in order to get value from it. I just don't see that being an issue with desktop environments for Linux... at least not anymore.

It's good that you prefer "BSD-style" (copyFREE) licenses. We need to explain to more people the drawbacks and dangers of copyLEFT. Then, how far they would go in the name of software freedom, is obviously up to them.

Using restrictively-licensed software won't kill you, but it is a step in the wrong direction. It matters more than you'd think, because use of open source software is a relationship - the more familiar you are with a project, the more likely you are to contribute code someday, or to be helpful on its mailing list / bug-tracker / forum / IRC channel, or promote it to friends who see you use it, or leverage it in another (hopefully copyFREE) project, etc. The software you use today is the software you may contribute to years from now, even if you currently don't plan on contributing.

                Watch your thoughts; they become words.
                Watch your words; they become actions.
                Watch your actions; they become habit.
                Watch your habits; they become character.
                Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
                                            -- Lao Tzu

Experience with freer software makes you more free.

--libman

Heard of the AMA and the BMA - They also function as Unions

Do they?

Fiat money grows exponentially. I'd rather it grow on trees. http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Criticism_of_fractional_reserve_banking

It's OK, somebody was going to run an intergalactic superhighway through these places eventually, so it doesn't matter much.

But seriously, the correct thing to do with was 110 years ago, not 20. 100 years ago in USA the socialist ideology started pushing forward with ideas that government should be taking care of everything by stealing from some and subsidising others. That's when the right time was to stop that in its tracks and allow the free market to continue operating. Nuclear power should be investigated, but it can't be because government controls every aspect of it. People should be free to do whatever they want in a search of solutions to sell in the free market, they shouldn't be stopped by any collective.

Either we, as a collection of individuals will try and try and fail and try again and figure out our solutions or we will shed all personal responsibility and delegate all matters, economic and social as well is ideology and morality to the collective itself, not the individuals, but the centrally planning collective and we will fail. There is no way that the collective will be able to allocate the resources in the most efficient manner, there is no way that the collective will work all the political angles out in order to achieve some form of a solution that actually works in the long run. It's impossible. It is as impossible for that to happen as it was impossible for the Soviet Union to survive economically speaking, and people predicted the fall of that country even in the twenties of the last century.

It is absolutely impossible to use the collective to solve any such economic problem, and this problem is an economic problem. By the way, the real reason that so many people disagree with the Greens is that they realise that the Green movement are actually just a disguised anti-capitalist, pro-collectivist, socialist ideology. You can easily see this in the answers of the Green party candidate in the third party debates on youtube. Jill Stein is a perfect example of what is wrong with the Green movement and why so many people will never support it, even if the entire planet cooks and goes to hell, we can't support the Green movement, it doesn't matter. It's better to die than to become what she advocates. What is the purpose of living as a slave, there is no reason to allow that.

Forgot the http. Link: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf

The US has defaulted on sovereign debt a number of times in the past. However, it's not likely that the government would do something default-like regarding the "trust fund" bonds. Among other not-default mechanisms, the government could cut or even eliminate benefits in those programs so that SSA and CMS never need to redeem them; that was the point of Flemming v. Nestor.

As a side note, you could eliminate all US military spending from the budget and still leave a sizable deficit. Social Security is getting close to the size of the military budget, as is Medicare. Those slices of the budget are growing rapidly -- and with no real end in sight, which is why entitlement reform is critical to controlling the deficit.

what we got was polluted rivers,

This was the result of government refusing to enforce private property rights under the auspice of "the public good". What was the public good? Industrializing. Politicians didn't want to "fall behind" countries like the UK and in the US during the early 18th century, people were frequently getting injunctions issued against factories over both air and water pollution. Both of those things were considered forms of trespassing onto another property, no different than if I dumped my garbage on your property. Once the government stopped issuing injunctions for pollution you then got the environmental disasters we see. It was a failure of government in one of its most fundamental roles that was the cause of that problem.

http://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution

strikers executed by private armies

You are probably referring primarily to the Homestead strike, but you are omitting a few important details.

1. The strikers had seized the factory, which did not belong to them. In other words, the strikers were guilty of felony theft.
2. The labor contract had expired, management had negotiated a new contract with all workers except the members of one union, representing ~800 workers. Yet when the strike began, all workers went on strike despite the vast majority having agreed to the new contract.
3. Local law enforcement had proven itself unwilling and/or unable to maintain law and order in these events. Thus the company had to rely on private security firms to protect the property of the shareholders.
4.The job of the Pinkerton guards was simply to secure the factory from the strikers and prevent damage to company property.
5. Most sources agree that it was the strikers who fired the first shots and it was the Pinkertons who suffered the first wounded and killed.
6. The strikers employed the time honored tactic of using women and children as human shields and to beat and brutalize replacement workers whose only crime was accepting terms of employment that the striking workers had rejected.

I'm sorry, but if you're stealing stuff that doesn't belong to you and you refuse to give it up when asked and actively resist giving it up, you should not be surprised when you get shot.

Do you say that Microsoft, Toyota, or Pepsi have"private armies" because they have their own security at their large facilities? If these really are "private armies" I miss the part in the history books where Carnegie Steel Company launched a military offensive against Bethlehem Steel and other competitors. What you call "private armies" were nothing more than hired security personnel.

Now maybe you LIKE the idea of the air being as nasty as China, of having rivers catch fire like they did in the 70s,

As I pointed out above, that's a problem caused by the government not enforcing private property rights. Note that some of the worst polluters in China are the state owned industries.

or having corporate masters own you through a company store

That was a temporary problem caused by the lack of affordable transportation for the working class. Their shopping options were limited to what was within walking distance and they also had to be within walking distance to the factory. This was solved in part by the mass produced safety bicycle and later on solved completely by the mass produced automobile.

I'd go socialism, at least countries like Iceland seem to be making a civilized go of it.

If anything they have been the most free market, when the crisis hit they let the banks go bust. Iceland is not a Socialist country, its is

On the other hand, the Patent system works well when viewed in its historical context. They have been a net benefit for innovation.

Actually, one of the most comprehensive studies on that topic (Fritz Machlup, An Economic Review of the Patent System) concluded more or less the opposite:

If one does not know whether a system "as a whole" (in contrast to certain features of it) is good or bad, the safest "policy conclusion" is to "muddle through" - either with it, if one has long lived with it, or without it, if one has lived without it. If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it. This last statement refers to a country such as the United States of America - not to a small country and not to a predominantly nonindustrial country, where a different weight of argument might well suggest another conclusion.

Yeah! Keep the status quo, don't rock the boat! Never innovate, never change anything! Keep still, don't move, don't go forward, hold still. DO NOT MOVE! Don't try new things, they might be worse than what we have now. Don't sail to the white areas, there be dragons. Curiosity killed the cat, remember?

On the other hand, the Patent system works well when viewed in its historical context. They have been a net benefit for innovation.

Actually, one of the most comprehensive studies on that topic (Fritz Machlup, An Economic Review of the Patent System) concluded more or less the opposite:

If one does not know whether a system "as a whole" (in contrast to certain features of it) is good or bad, the safest "policy conclusion" is to "muddle through" - either with it, if one has long lived with it, or without it, if one has lived without it. If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it. This last statement refers to a country such as the United States of America - not to a small country and not to a predominantly nonindustrial country, where a different weight of argument might well suggest another conclusion.

Similarly, the FTC Innovation report from 2003 was also far from unequivocally positive about patents, especially in the hardware/software fields. Or Jim Bessen's research, as presented (twice) at an FFII conference in 2004.

For example, there are many fewer patents lawsuits regarding Smart Phones than there were in the time the original telephone was invented.

That does not exemplify how patents have supposedly been a net benefit for innovation. Additionally, you are wrongly paraphrasing the article you refer to below. It only says that nowadays, per filed patent there are fewer lawsuits than there were in the days of the fixed telephone. From that it concludes that there is no problem with the volume of patent lawsuits.

I would argue that the reason for this is that patents are used in a very different way today compared to how they were used back then (there were much less large companies back then amassing patent war chests just for defensive purposes). Arguably, the standards for patentability were also higher back then, which means that actually going to court rather than only looking for the players you can convince to settle out of course was a much less risky business.

Here is a god article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/02/09/no-the-patent-system-is-not-broken/2/

While I appreciate that shooting the messenger by itself is not a very strong argument, that's an opinion piece by "the vice president and head of strategic acquisitions at Intellectual Ventures". That's patent troll central. Suing companies, or threatening to sue them, based on all kinds of patents is their bread and butter.

Moving on to substance, he's most definitely wrong when he claims that "Every major technological and industrial breakthrough in U.S. history [..] has been accompanied by exactly the same surge in patenting, patent trading, and patent litigation that we see today in the smartphone business". Do you remember the massive patent wars from the eighties and nineties that came with the personal computer revolution? No? Me neither. There were a few lawsuits (e.g. Stac vs Microsoft), but there most definitely was no surge like what we see today.

What we need is general legal reform so that disputes can be decided simply and inexpensively without Lawyers getting all the goodies.

Rothbard makes a decent argument against this "implied contract" argument, but yeah, you've outlined well why some libertarians can claim to be pro-life. There's also the enforcement to consider. How do you possibly enforce prohibition against abortion without stepping on all kinds of rights.

https://mises.org/daily/4276

There is more than one surgeon in the world.

No, two words. Fascist healthcare.

https://mises.org/daily/4276

No. The libertarian position is that a job is a transaction between a buyer and seller; see for example Tom Mullen's article "What is a Job?":

The employer is the buyer and the employee the seller, selling his services to the employer for a mutually agreed upon price. This is a voluntary transaction for both parties, just like the buying and selling of lawn mowers or breakfast cereal. The buyer offers to purchase services at the price he can afford and the seller decides whether to accept those terms or not. Both parties are free to decide not to go through with the sale at any time. Unless a specific term of employment has been agreed to, both parties are also free to cease doing business at any time. The employee can quit the job (refuse to continue selling the service) and the employer can terminate employment (refuse to continue purchasing the service).

Supply and demand play a role in the price and benefits a person will be able to negotiate, certainly. But the hyperbole about machine guns does nobody any good. The fundamental libertarian principles is the non-aggression principle (non-initiation, not pacifism). Neither forcing people to work, violence against competitors/workers, or opposition to unions (just against being compelled or forbidden to join one) are libertarian principles.

If you are really interested I would recommend reading Man Economy and State by Murray Rothbard.
http://mises.org/books/mespm.pdf

You will see why this isn't a science like Physics. The reason is all human action is based on preferential choices and every human is different.

In Soviet America, success is a curse. Obviously Google gaind an "unfair advantage" by "cheating"... fun fact: antitrust law has mostly been used by smaller companies with failed businesses/business models as a lever against the companies doing the actual innovating. Here's a good book on the subject.

because unless they allow anyone to dig up the roads

That's exactly the solution. When a given part of town is due to be resurfaced, let every utility who has paid the permit fee lay its conduit. Natural monopoly is a myth.

Government is the reason we don't have more efficient transportation. Our politicians decided that everyone should drive, so they took our money and built lots of congested highways. Here is what we really need:

FREE MARKET TRANSPORTATION: DENATIONALIZING THE ROADS* by Walter Block. Department of Economics. Rutgers University, Newark.

And the utilities can get away with this because they are natural monopolies.

Why are the utilities natural monopolies, other than because of city governments' failure to efficiently estimate the cost of tearing up a road to install conduit?

You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.

You're about as foolish to deny evolution as you are to deny the basic laws of economics. And at least evolution is only a theory, you can actually prove the laws of supply and demand the same way you go about proving the Pythagorean theorem. You note that people prefer one outcome to another (this is the definition of cost, and our axiom in this law). You then construct a plot of how many people would be willing to trade at what price. It's mathematically necessary that as price goes up, demand goes down and supply goes up.

True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.

If this were true then you would turn something called a loss. You can't use up more wealth than you put out, and remain profitable. (By definition! Unless of course, you're getting subsidized or similarly, though this doesn't fall within the economist's definition of profit, unlike the accountant's definition.)

This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.

An "economic collapse" is not the same thing as "restructuring of capital resources in response to a change in demand". Sudden changes in demand that mis-matches our capital structure (and debt) is what a recession is. We tend to recover from those relatively quickly when allowed. And you do understand that the price will go up gradually, right? It's not like we wake up one day and boom, $50/gal gas. We choose oil because it's the cheapest, in comparison to all the other things we could use. That doesn't mean the slightest that we need it for any particular end, it just means it makes our lives that much more livable.

Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics.

Um, welcome to economics, which means the study of scarcity (after all, what does it mean to say "I want to economize my electricity usage"). We're saying we do not consume resources at the same rate until we suddenly run out, instead, we start migrating away as the price increases. Some people will prefer oil squirting up out of the ground in Texas to solar-power electric lighting. Those same people will prefer electric to oil that has to be dug up a mile below the Ocean (which is much more costly). Your argument is about as stupid as saying the laws of geometry trump the laws of architecture. What?

Protip: Don't try lecturing an economist on the causes of the fall of Rome.

Again, consult your local Economics textbook for more help. It shouldn't be my job to correct all your misunderstandings for you. Here's a good one for you (free, too): http://mises.org/books/econforrealpeople.pdf

Look how GOVERNMENT REGULATION is ruining things for the consumer again!

You've got it reversed. This is government trying to hack a fix to an earlier error: that of providing private parties monopolies over natural wireless frequencies. If that first government intervention hadn't happened, allowing instead the free market to develop technological solutions to the obvious fact that you'd have tons of people trying to use the same frequencies, then you wouldn't need such a hack. And neither the new hack down the line that will appear when this one proves problematic, and so on and so forth.

Want an actual solution? Apply the Chodorov Principle of abolishing the actual source of the problem rather than trying to fix it over and over again.

I consider myself somewhat of an authority on socialism, having been born in the USSR and having read much about socialist and free market economic theories. My verdict on the word "socialism" is that it's not an attainable state of being, but a relative ranking on a continuum of to what degree individual Rights (including Property Rights, Parents' Rights, etc) are being violated.

I think in numbers; words are just the primitive glue that ties numbers together. What politicians call themselves and what slogans they use doesn't matter - what matters are the results. A so-called "Economic Freedom Index" (which should be adjusted a bit from the "Tax Misery Index") can be used as a crude estimate of degrees of socialism - except of course you wouldn't find a ranking for Bill Clinton's dream policies, as they would have been if he had zero opposition in all three branches of the U.S. government. Bill Clinton is a fairly balanced politician (compared to Obama), but I think his ideal America would be closer in economic freedom to France (#67). As someone who thinks that even Hong Kong and Singapore (#1-2) have much room for improvement in the pro-capitalist direction, I can very easily call Clinton a socialist. Everything is relative.

More to the point, my comment about Clinton falling into the "Let's Build A Pyramid" pattern is very much valid. The idea of interstellar flight has that same effect of stimulating the "wow impulse" of the populace, while actually being quite low in the ranked decision-matrix of where capital ought to be allocated for optimal civilizational growth. The real world isn't StarTrek, and in the foreseeable centuries we'll remain very much tied to this one solar system. The free market, which operates within a framework of reality-based economic signals and intensives, would probably rather use space for vast long-term projects to bringing down the price of energy (taking pollution liabilities into consideration) and rare metals, which human industry so desperately needs. This would lead to ever-cheaper electronics bringing down the Digital Divide, cheaper electric cars (and someday flying cars), cheaper water filtering / desalination plants to irrigate the deserts, cheaper greenhouse agricultural robots to feed the world, etc, etc, etc.

Politicians have no intensive to actually solve problems - especially if those problems create the fear (ex. environmentalism) that helps keep them in power. They have to advertise themselves as solutions to those problems, while keeping the problems alive perpetually. Their incentive is to provide "bread and circuses", like the subject of this article. Of course public funding of this particular project hasn't been discussed yet, but it's rather obvious that Bill Clinton is no champion of insisting on 100% voluntary funding - he's a politician down to his core. The same phenomenon already applies to smaller research projects currently in existence - planting flags and mapping the far reaches of the universe gets priority, while more practical and timely research involving orbit-to-surface energy transmission and near-earth asteroids is largely ignored...

Challenge accepted.

http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=9
http://archive.mises.org/7880/patents-and-innovation/
http://archive.mises.org/10217/yet-another-study-finds-patents-do-not-encourage-innovation/
http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/do-patents-increase-innovation/
I didn't really even cherry pick; I just did a Google search for "innovation in countries without patent laws" and a whole slew of studies came up.

It appears that many of the studies have shown that heavy patents don't necessarily increase innovation, but rather direct the types of innovations that are made within an industry (perhaps: innovate for a long term lock-in, not for shorter term or wide-spread improvements).

/shrug I think patents have their place, but I can't fathom a reason why a company would need more than a decade of locked-in profits after a product is released to market. I can maybe see the case for the very, very expensive and time consuming process of drug manufacturing, but in those types of special cases, shouldn't the patent be proportionate to the time invested, and not a broad "You just won the cancer game for the next 63 years!" certificate?

Challenge accepted.

http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?p=9
http://archive.mises.org/7880/patents-and-innovation/
http://archive.mises.org/10217/yet-another-study-finds-patents-do-not-encourage-innovation/
http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/do-patents-increase-innovation/
I didn't really even cherry pick; I just did a Google search for "innovation in countries without patent laws" and a whole slew of studies came up.

It appears that many of the studies have shown that heavy patents don't necessarily increase innovation, but rather direct the types of innovations that are made within an industry (perhaps: innovate for a long term lock-in, not for shorter term or wide-spread improvements).

/shrug I think patents have their place, but I can't fathom a reason why a company would need more than a decade of locked-in profits after a product is released to market. I can maybe see the case for the very, very expensive and time consuming process of drug manufacturing, but in those types of special cases, shouldn't the patent be proportionate to the time invested, and not a broad "You just won the cancer game for the next 63 years!" certificate?

All communist countries had health care. This is communism all about.

http://mises.org/daily/3650

"Climate Change" is a natural phenomenon. Climate has always been changing, in regular intervals, since the Earth was formed. And the variations in the Earth's temperature are due to changes in activity of the entity who warms it - the Sun. It's the variations in the Earth's temperature that lead to variations in the CO2 levels, and not the other way around. And this happens with a 800 years discrepancy. (Read the explanation here or here.)

The whole story about "Man-made Global Warming" is a fraud. (See this very good documentary, for example.)

The main scientists involved in this great swindle have already been exposed in a scandal known as "Climategate", in which it was denounced that the scientific data presented has been faked.

This hasn't only been exposed in the so-called alternative media, but has also been talked about in the mainstream one.

(I'm surprised that the people at slashdot don't seem to have read about this(?)...)

You are all being brainwashed and lied to. And this whole story is just an excuse to preserve valuable natural resources for the elites promoting it.

(And no, I'm not an ignorant person who doesn't read scientific or generalistic newspapers (controlled by this same persons). I'm a person who also swallowed this fraud for about 10 years, until I realized I was being lied to...)