Swine Flu vs. Tuberculosis

Ron Paul talking about the swine flu, tuberculosis, the dept. of homeland security, and the swine flu hype in 1976....



Here is a bit of swine flu propaganda aired by the Federal Government's Department of Health and Human Services:

Monetary Policy in One Lesson

Here is a worthwhile article to read regarding the Federal Reserve and how they increase the money supply. Spoiler... it has to do with credit creation (loaning money that doesn't exist).
Central economic planning is a bitch.

Intellectual Property, government-created monopolies

Jeffrey Tucker writes a fair amount about Intellectual Property at LewRockwell.com
Here are links to his articles...

His latest article

His archives

Gold and Silver investing with Robert Kiyosaki and Mike Maloney

Very important video to watch.

In a nutshell, buy silver and gold... wait... then sell and buy real estate.

This is why I am so pessimistic

I listen to / watch a lot of what Peter Schiff says.

He was one of Ron Paul's economic advisors (that is how I discovered him).

Here he is on an Aussie show discussing things with an Aussie economist. If you believe what he says - and I do - the future looks very bleak. Get outta the dollar while you can!







This next one is from 9/12 when he was on CNN America Morning talking about Fannie and Freddie.

My new favorite website (I think)

http://mapper.nndb.com/ (main page)

http://mapper.nndb.com/start/?map=2268 (John D. Rockefeller Jr.)

http://mapper.nndb.com/start/?id=22532 (Dick Cheney)

Click on John D. Rockefeller's map page above. Isolate people, expand nodes, etc. Go to File - Open Map. Then explore the wonders. If you are like me, the Rockefeller page will keep your attention for the first 5-10 minutes. I anticipate being on this website for quite awhile on Sunday.

Bookmarking... now.

Intellectual Property revisited

A couple weeks ago I made a blog post about a beef I have with Intellectual Property. I decided that I wasn't giving my argument its due justice without doing a bit more reading on the topic.

*Edit:
CBC Radio had a 1 hour long program about copyright laws titled Who Owns Ideas? that you just HAVE to listen to.

Stephan Kinsella wrote a 71 page book about Intellectual Property. This is a must read book that is free on PDF at Mises.org. It really isn't even 71 pages because of all the references/appendices/etc. It's probably closer to 50ish.

Here are some of the notes I jotted down while reading (I decided to start taking notes on the books I read):

Types of Intellectual Property:
*Patents – 20 year life span
*Copyrights – life of the author plus seventy years
Trademarks
Trade secrets
(*)The Intellectual Properties that create the most conflict.

There is no evidence showing that Intellectual Property (IP) Laws increase innovation. It is better argued that they actually decrease it, especially when taking into account the amount of money spent on IP lawsuits that could otherwise be spent on more research/development. A 20 year patent on an idea merely grants a 20 year government-granted monopoly to the person that filed it or thought of it first. This keeps out competition, which forces people to improve. Society is then at a loss of the innovations and improvements that would normally exist. The cost of living is artificially kept high and the quality of our products are kept low.

The book also goes into Property Rights vs Intellectual Property rights. The root purpose of having property rights is to prevent conflict over scarce resources. Ideas are not scarce resources, thus there is no conflict over them. It is only when Intellectual Property Laws are created that the ideas become scarce.

A quote from Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to Isaac McPherson):
“He who receives an idea from me,
receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he
who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening
me.”
(Ironically, Jefferson was the first patent inspector in the United States, even though he had a lifelong skepticism towards it.)

I took more notes than this, but this is a blog, not a book.

To finish this post, I would like to pose a few questions:
Would companies cease to produce new things because they know it would get copied/improved upon by other companies/people after the new product was created, or would they continually put more effort into improving their own products (as well as other companies' products)? Would books no longer be written if the authors know that the words could be freely distributed after circulation? Spend a little bit of time thinking about these questions and what our world would be like if these 20 year monopolies over ideas hadn't been granted over the past 100+ years.