StephanKinsella.com

Ron Paul visited Loyola University-New Orleans last week–here is a picture of him (center) with Bill Barnett II (left, seated), Walter Block (seated, right), Dan D’Amico (left, standing) and John Levendis (right, standing). As Michael Barnett told me, “Heroic — the greatest living libertarian [Block], the greatest political figure of all time [Paul], and the greatest living economist [Barnett II] all together at one place!” Okay, he’s a little biased maybe, but each of these contentions is arguably true. What an amazing assembly!

Treehugger.com is thrilled at the effects of the recession: Amazon Deforestation Drops 46% In One Year reports that “2008-2009 was a better year for the rainforests, with logging rates dropping 46%. The lowest it’s been since these groups started monitoring in 2004.”

As a friend said, this just underscores the very real fact that environuts hate prosperity. And they hate energy too. As environut Paul Ehrlich infamously said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

And this is the real reason the alleged environmentalists oppose nuclear energy, even though it is an obvious way to combat “global warming” and pollution. (See Green Nukes, where some greens actually admit it; Nuke Me; Nuclear Spring; Re: Nuclear Spring; Dam Nukes; Greenpeace to advocate nuking the earth?; Access to Energy.)

These fake “environmentalist” misanthropes basically believe humans are a cancer on the earth. These anti-human, anti-industrialist sickos are the real enemies of humanity.

Some good pieces:

• Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto, by Lew Rockwell
• The Toxicity of Environmentalism, by George Reisman
• Environmentalism Refuted, by George Reisman
• George Reisman’s Capitalism, chapter 3B, “The Ecological Assault on Economic Progress”
• Environmentalism or Individualism?, by Robert James Bidinotto

By me. From here (slightly edited):

Hey, I know–let’s trust the same government that imposes FDA costs, taxes, and regulatory roadblocks to set up a patent office to hand out patents to give you partial ownership of others’ property to incentivize you just enough to overcome the costs they imposed on you on the first place with the FDA and taxes and regulations. Beautiful! And if that’s not “enough” incentive, establish a government panel of “experts” to give you “enough” of a reward paid by taxpayers. Beautiful! I like it!

[On the latter point see See Libertarian Favors $80 Billion Annual Tax-Funded “Medical Innovation Prize Fund”; $30 Billion Taxfunded Innovation Contracts: The “Progressive-Libertarian” Solution.]

Related

• Post-scarcity, Superabundance, Money, and Star Trek Space Cadets
• Rothbard on Libertarian “Space Cadets”

I’ve ranted before about conspiracy theorists — see, e.g., On Conspiracy Theories. I have several problems with such views.

First, they are usually not needed; and they are usually maintained by people who have a naive view of the state. For them, if we can just get rid of the bad guys (and often they are Jews, bankers, capitalists) and elect good ones, things return to normal. Second, the state is evil on its face. It kills hundreds of thousands of people in the open. It is able to do this because it has succeeded in deceiving the people as to its legitimacy (see Hoppe’s Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order). Third, it ignores the fact that the state has internal rules (see Alfred G. Cuzán‘s classic paper “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?, apparently “revisited” by Cuzán in 2007 [see draft]). People who rise inside the state are good at following these rules; and you can be sure opponents inside the state would latch onto violations of them (remember Clinton being impeached for someting minor?). Fourth, the ‘toids usually have no evidence.

Anyway, Vijay Boyapati brought to my attention this priceless reaction by Rothbard (in a 1989 Q&A after a speech) to a questioner’s suggestion that “the government” is trying to spread AIDS.

This starts about about 49:50:

Rothbard: I never heard of that.. I don’t know anything about that

‘toid: It sounds far out.

Rothbard: Yeah it sounds far out. I don’t see any evidence to that effect. My favorite story about the government medicine was the swine flu caper if anyone remembers that – (interrupted)

‘toid: – what’s the difference?

Rothbard: well that was documented.

[continue reading…]

As previously noted here, I presented a speech in July at Mises University 2009 on “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism.” The audio is available here and the video was just made available. It’s below. As previously noted, this presentation was different than others I’ve done in the past on IP, partly because, as it for students, I tried to start from the ground up, and also to integrate the proper approach to IP with the essential principles of libertarian political philosophy. Thus part of the talk summarized my view of what libertarianism is, and then applied it to IP; this summary view of the libertarian framework was distilled from a more elaborated version, contained my chapter What Libertarianism Is, which appeared in the Hoppe Festschrift, Property, Freedom and Society. An article based on my speech is forthcoming in Liberty magazine.

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

I was talking with Kevin Carson about the problems with the “contractual” model of IP “that so many people grab at in desperation” (for more on this see here and here). Carson said:

As Cory Doctorow put it, a computer is a machine for copying bits. If you put a cultural artifact into bits, it’s going to get copied. And anybody whose business model depends on stopping people from copying bits is f*cked, plain and simple. As horrifyingly accurate a prediction as Stallman’s “Right to Read” is of the copyfascists ideal world, I think it’s about as plausible a threat as Khrushchev’s plan to catch up with the West by 1970.

See A very long talk with Cory Doctorow, part 1; also Cory Doctorow, Microsoft Research DRM talk and Copying Is What Bits Are For.

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

As reported here:

AP: Speaking of technology, how has the band been affected by the digital turn the music industry’s taken?

Cray: Not too many people get the million-selling plaques anymore and all that stuff like that. And a lot of bands survived just on selling records and didn’t think about touring so much. And a lot of bands based their whole careers on just getting that one hit. But it has affected a band such as ours, but only in a different way. I mean, it would nice to have had the same kind of sales more recently as we had in the past, but we started playing in bars and as long as it’s fun, we’ll continue to do so.

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

Steve:

You can’t make this stuff up.

As reported on Patently-O,

Earlier this week, the USPTO issued a design patent to Google that covers the “ornamental design for a graphical user interface [GUI] … as shown and described.” Pat. No. D. 599,372. Design patent coverage is essentially defined by the images include in the issued patent. Here, the image looks roughly the same as the company’s ubiquitous Google.com homepage. (See image below.)

To be clear, many patent professionals would argue that it is misleading to ever simply call this “a patent.” Rather, it is a design patent. Design patents have severely limited scope, only cover ornamental designs rather than technological advances, and are very frequently found invalid when challenged in court. The USPTO has been granting design patent protection for screen shots and icons for many years. However, to my (limited) knowledge, none of those design patents have ever been enforced in court. …

Dashed or “ghost” lines in the drawing indicate features that are not claimed. Thus, patent would be infringed by someone using an identical layout even if they replaced the “Google” mark with their own mark. You can note at the bottom that the design patent drawing is marked with a circle-c ©. That indicates that Google is also claiming copyright protection for this layout. In addition, in the design patent, Google indicates that it is also claiming trademark protection for portions of the layout and – perhaps – for the layout as a whole.

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

“The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” by Stephan Kinsella, Mises Daily (Sept. 4, 2009).

“The time is ripe to concisely restate the basic libertarian case against IP and provide links to some of the key anti-IP publications.
read more…”

[Mises cross-blog; Against Monopoly cross-blog]

In response to this idiotic Facebook status meme making the rounds: “[user name] No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day,” I set my own Facebook status, per Anthony Gregory’s suggestion to:

Stephan Kinsella thinks no one should die being bombed, shot or tortured by the U.S. government. The same institution that has murdered and imprisoned millions of innocents and loots trillions on behalf of Wall Street will never have the best interests of the weakest people in mind. More government control over medicine will only empower the imperialists in DC. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.