StephanKinsella.com

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.

Technology drives me nuts. I have gone 100% Mac at home, and love my iPhone, but I still have a PC at work. So the Outlook calendar needs to be on my iPhone and also preferably on my Macs (an Air and an iMac). Until recently what I did was use google’s sync program to sync Outlook with google calendar; and I synced iCal on my two Macs with google calendar too. And the iPhone uses exchange to get to my Outlook calendar.

One problem with this is that google calendar is limited in some of the recurring events functionality; so I need to create it in Outlook or iCal.  Anyway now I have Snow Leopard and got Exchange working with that–see red lines. So now in iCal I see the same event twice: once locally, and once in the exchange account. That’s fine because I can not show one of them. If I cut the google sync between Outlook and Calendar, then my local calendar evens on iCal will not sync any more to Outlook, and thus won’t show up on my iPhone. So I have to keep using google sync between Outlook and Google Calendar anyway … rendering Snow Leopard exchange (for calendar) superfluous. I have thought about using Mobile Me (green) to sync all this together too. It’s just a mess. Auuggh.

For now I think I’ll skip Mobile Me, and use Snow Leopard’s exchange only for local address book and mail syncing, but not for calendar, since that’s handled already with the above approach.

Despite a potentially crippling patent injunction against selling Word that Microsoft is battling on appeal, Microsoft, via a senior lawyer, is nevertheless calling for a global patent system “to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world”. Yep–despite the big hit they just took due to i4i’s patent, Microsoft is concerned about the “unmanageable backlogs and interminable pendency periods” of national patent systems, which have 3.5 million patents pending. You heard that right–Microsoft thinks more is “needed to be done to allow corporations to protect their intellectual property.” What, do they want i4i to be able to get sextuple, instead of just triple, damages? To jail Microsoft board members?

Microsoft’s lawyer repeats the tired old bunk about patents being necessary to promote innovation, yada yada — “By facing the challenges, realizing a vision, overcoming political barriers, and removing procedural obstacles we can build a global patent system that will promote innovation, enrich public knowledge, encourage competition and drive economic growth and employment.”

Two good things about this: (a) a global system would, possibly, reduce the number of patent lawyers; and (b) I was feeling sorry for Microsoft over the Word injunction, but now don’t need to anymore.

Update: Let me add that I think this has no chance of happening. The patent lawyers in countries around the world would block it. The way the system works now, you file a patent application first in your home country, and within a year or two (depending on whether you use the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) or Paris Convention procedures), you can file corresponding patent applications in other countries or regions claiming a priority date based on your first country’s filing date. But you have to pay filing fees, sometimes translation fees (which can be astronomical), local attorney fees, and local maintenance fees in each country you want the patent to issue in. Let’s say it costs $15-20k for a patent to be filed and ultimately issued in the US. Well you might want to have the patent filed also in, say, the European Union, Japan, China, Brazil, Canada, India. So now we are up to well over $100k-200k.  And that is not even global. Under a global system presumably you would file once and it would be enforceable in every country in the world party to the treaty. It might be more expensive than the current $20k for a single country but far less than cost of filing in multiple countries now. So presumably under a global system, you would file a patent infringement suit in the appropriate court, and if you win, you just take the judgment to local courts in whatever countries the defendant is competing with you and have that country’s courts enforce the judgment as a mere formality.

This would make global patents easier and cheaper to get and easier and cheaper to enforce. Presumably people would want to use European or American local patent examining offices for quality purposes, so it would tend to put out of work the patent bar in “Southern” (third world) countries. You can expect a mobilized patent bar in most countries to fight this. Such proposals have been around for decades, and never go anywhere. Thank God for protectionist lawyers!

[Mises Blog cross-post; Against Monopoly cross-post]

Today, Professor Hoppe turns 60–happy birthday, Hans!

In honor of his birthday and achievements in the cause of economic science and liberty, he was presented with the Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe festschrift at the end of July during Mises University 2009–about a month early. And today, the Google books version has gone up too.

[Mises blog cross-post; LRC cross-post]

It’s a tragedy Rothbard died in 1995, before he could finish his History of Economic Thought series. At the time of his death, he had only published volumes I and II (epub and PDF files available here; Mises catalog). However, as noted in the Mises store entry for Vol. III, The History of Economic Thought: From Marx to Hayek, although he “died before he could write his third volume of his famous History of Economic Thought that would cover the birth and development of the Austrian School, through the Keynesian Revolution and Chicago School,” “he had already mapped out the entire project.” And, it turns out: it’s on tape! “Fortunately, the Mises Institute had Rothbard lecture on his discoveries and analysis of this period while he was researching the topic. The tapes were only recently discovered. We re-mastered them, and put them on a single MP3-CD: nearly seven hours of lectures.”

And, they are also available in free MP3 downloads here, and listed below.

Update: The links below now also contain transcriptions of the lectures (thanks to a donation from Thomas Topp), which I have stitched together as a single file (PDF).

[continue reading…]

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[From my Webnote series]

Related:

• The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld 
• Libertarian Answer Man: Libertarian Liability Theory, Behavior, and Intentional Action
• Libertarian Answer Man: Strict Liability; and Tracing Title Back to Adam
• Libertarian Answer Man: Strict Liability; Negligence as “Partially Intentional”
• Libertarian Answer Man: Intent in Action, Strict Liability

From Mises blog. Archived comments below.

The question of how to objectively determine damages for negligence (tort) in a libertarian system often arises. There is not much solid, libertarian analysis out there on this issue–the answers are usually either positivistic and assume some presumptive validity of common law rules; or they are libertarian but without much mooring in any coherent libertarian legal theory.

I don’t have a fully-developed view of this but I have touched on these matters in some publications and have always meant to return to this issue. I haven’t done so yet, but given the lack of much systematic libertarian treatment of this I will set forth below some tentative thoughts on how to approach this issue. [continue reading…]

At Recovery or Stagnation?, a Mises Circle held in San Francisco on August 29, 2009, there was a great Speakers’ Panel featuring Walter Block, Thomas DiLorenzo, Douglas French, and Robert Murphy. Great comments on the current financial mess.

One thing that especially interested me were Walter Block’s comments from about 12:45 to 13:35, where he distinguishes between economic theory and one’s ability to predict or forecast. Sure, having a sound understanding of theory can help, but it cannot make your predictions foolproof. For example one’s understanding of the business cycle might lead you to recommend buying gold; but then the state might confiscate gold soon after that.

This brings to mind some discussions I’ve had about the nature of economics and its role in investing or forecasting. My view is the Misesian-Rothbardian-Hoppean one, which I understand to be that the future is uncertain, but not radically so; that knowledge of economics laws can help, ceteris paribus–but that usually other factors are dominant. The skill of forecasting is called the understanding, or verstehen; but it is not merely “luck,” as some in thrall to monism-scientism are wont to deride it. Peter Klein mentioned to me that the question of why or how someone has the better skill at forecasting is really meta-economics—more of a psychological field, which is studied at Effectuation, from a Kirznerian perspective. It could be that one reason Austrian investors don’t dominate is that economic understanding only gives you a second order marginal advantage over others, that psychological or other factors are more important.

In other words, the better your economic understanding, the better a forecaster you can be. The future, while uncertain, is not radically so, and knowledge of economics helps constrain the possibilities. So ceteris paribus someone with a better understanding of economics would be a better investor. The problem is the ceteris is not usually that paribus; that economic knowledge is only a small factor of investing success, since it depends also on other factors, which apparently usually tend to dominate-other factors such as the possession of capital to invest; your access to certain knowledge or data; and your investing ability or knack, the leftover part that is more art, that Mises called verstehen. Possible, in times of a typical Austrian business cycle bust, sound economics could play a bigger role in one’s ability to forecast, which could explain why Austrians like Schiff and others are standing out right now.
[continue reading…]

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Boudewijn Bouckaert‘s great article, What Is Property? (Summer 1990 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy) has a nice comment on the need for property rules:

The notion of scarcity serves at the same time as the most important explanation and justification of property rights arrangements. Scarcity is explicitly the rationale for modern “law and economics,”[48] and it is implicit in several older works of other legal philosophers and theorists.[49] It is argued that scarcity will involve a dimension beyond mere allocation when two or more persons consider one good as a means for the satisfaction of their wants and when the use they intend to make of it is incompatible. One cannot reduce this distributive scarcity to mere allocative scarcity because this would require the possibility of weighing utilities by a super-individual authority. Because distributive scarcity is unavoidable, only three outcomes are possible: (1) permanent conflict–the assignments of scarce means are the result of the use of violence, ruse, and tactical games;[50] (2) resignation–a resource becomes the object of competition, both parties withdraw, and such withdrawal means isolation and a massive drop in world population; (3) rules–assignments of power over scarce resources to individuals, groups, families, the government, and so forth. Not only is it difficult to imagine how one might provide reasonable arguments for the two first solutions, but these solutions also would imply tremendous costs to the working of society. As a consequence, distributive scarcity can be considered a probable explanation and a compelling justification for some arrangements of property rights in society.

Update: Boudewijn Bouckaert, “From Property Rights to Property Order,” Encyclopedia of Law and Economics (Springer, forthcoming 2023).

Disney to buy Marvel Comics for $4B. Disney “will acquire ownership more than 5,000 Marvel characters.” The most popular ones, such as Spider-Man (who used to be my favorite until he swooned over Obama, revealing his fascist mindset), are not that old–Spider-Man was created in 1962. One can only imagine the Disney lobbying that we can expect when Spider-Man’s term nears expiration…

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

My question to Roderick Long, in this thread:

Roderick, a better question is: why aren’t more libertarians women? I mean if we are mostly male, then 40% of us should just have an operation. Why don’t we?

Matthew “Yglesias” says that parents who send their children to private schools should be taxed and charged even more, to penalize them for harming public schools by withdrawing their “resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect.”

So not only should they pay public school taxes. Plus private school tuition. But they should be taxed even more by the state for not participating in the state’s propaganda farms. For not harming their kids by subjecting them to indoctrination, danger, and inferior education. I am not kidding. This is sickeningly evil. And look at his cackling fiendish friends, saying “Countdown to tiresome idiot smarmily suggesting Matt’s a hypocrite for having this opinion…3…2…” and “Matt’s a hypocrite! Just kidding.”

This is the most evil proposition I’ve heard in some time. A person like this would not last long in a free society. What scum.