Incompressible

There are a variety of manifestations of intellectual property - trademarks, copyrights, patents. Many things can be copyrighted and patented ... even business methods can be copyrighted! Famously, Amazon patented its so-called "1-click" purchase option, threatening other online sellers who dared to imitate its brilliant invention with lawsuits! Leaving aside conceptual definitions of IP, what are its ultimate effects? The ultimate effects of IP are to prohibit certain sorts of actions by individuals which are construed to be violations of the "intellectual property" rights of others. Now, the essence of property - in a Hoppean/Rothbardian conception - is to assign rights to exclusive use of a physical resource to a specific individual. If John owns a car, that means John has the exclusive right to operate and control the car and to determine who else is allowed to operate and control the car. When the State arrogates to itself the authority to license John's op...

What the hell??

Case closed .

Well, it looks like the Prohibitionists aren't giving up on California without a fight. LA city council voted 9-3 to impose heavy new regulations on medical marijuana distribution centers, including capping the total number of distribution centers in the city to 70 (there are currently estimated to be 800 to 1000 in the city). This is disappointing, as California has thumbed its nose at Washington more than any single state with its de facto nullification of Federal drug laws on marijuana. We'll just have to sit back and see how this one turns out. It will be a good barometer of the strength or weakness of US drug policy. If the Feds can be defied in California, they can be defied almost anywhere... and if that starts happening, our international drug policy will begin crumbling around the world. The repercussions would be widely felt.

This spending cap is a joke. It only applies to a tiny fraction of the Federal budget... $350B out of, what, close to $4T? Exempt are DHS, DoD and foreign aid. How transparent can you get? US gov won't stop sending more welfare to international bankers (through foreign aid) and won't stop spending even more on its already ridiculously outsized war budget. The charade is getting to be downright unbearable. I would prefer it, for sanity's sake, if these assholes would just own up... "yes, we're bilking you for close to 50% of everything you earn because we can... so get used to it." At least I could have the satisfaction of bitching about it and having everyone in the room nod their heads in agreement. How do they pull this off?? I'm in the wrong line of work.

Law What is law? Frederic Bastiat, in his treatise The Law, defines law as the collective use of force. As much as I love Bastiat’s treatise, I think his definition is not sufficiently analytical. It is certainly the case that the law plays a role in the collective use of force but the law is something more basic than this. We can begin by looking at law as it is today. The website for the Oregon courts has an excellent summary [1] of modern law and courts. I will quote it at length: Throughout history, people have had disputes and have needed some means to settle their disputes. As civil societies develop, they need an orderly system of conflict resolution. One system that developed in "western" cultures is the "law court" or court of law. In England, those early law courts developed a "body of law" called the common law, which defined both the rights of the people and the government and the duties people owe each other and their government. T...