Classic article by der Hoppster now available online: Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization - From Monarchy to Democracy , Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines , Vol.5, 2, 1994; also published in John Denson, ed., The Cost of War (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
From your friendly neighborhood WalterBlock.com webmaster: online versions for literally dozens of Professor Block’s articles have been added to his publications page tonight. Thanks, in part, to the scanning and coding efforts of his tireless Loyola assistant Charles
The Techdirt post Court Rejects Online Terms Of Service That Reserve The Right To Change At Any Time spurred me to post a comment about this, collecting some of the thoughts I’ve had about such matters for a long time. As I note there, my own theory of contract is presented in my article A Theory of Contracts: Binding Promises, Title Transfer, and
As I noted in The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC , the state grants patent monopolies and then uses antitrust law to attack the beneficiaries of those monopolies. As one commentator noted in a related thread , “It is amusing, watching one agency of government applying a system whose entire purpose is the creation of monopolies, and
Tom DiLorenzo, in his new book, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution - And What It Means for Americans Today (see his The Founding Father of Constitutional Subversion ), shows how Hamilton helped to subvert the superior (and more libertarian) Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution. But though
My article “ Intellectual Property and Libertarianism “ was published in the December, 2009 issue of Liberty ; the March 2010 issue features the following exchange in the “Letters” section.p> Philosophizing IP Thanks to Stephan Kinsella for questioning the justice of intellectual property (”Intellectual Property and Libertarianism,” December
A Baltimore startup with less than 5 employees, WhoGlue , is suing Facebook for patent infringement, based on a patent it previously--unsuccessfully--tried to unload at a patent auction. The patent, no. 7,246,164 , is for a “Distributed personal relationship information management system and method”. In essence, they claim that Facebook infringes
I previously noted that NTP used the patent system to wring over $600M out of RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone. As noted by Mike Masnick , now RIM has coughed up another quarter billion dollars to another company, Visto (”coincidentally” a licensee of NTP). A quarter billion dollars--everyone yawns. Masnick asks, why did NTP have
No, not me. Michael F. Martin , a patent attorney with Drinker Biddle [now McDermott]. The March 2010 issue of Liberty (which also features a letters exchange regarding my December 2009 Liberty article, Intellectual Property and Libertarianism ) features the following guest reflection by Mr. Martin: Sane and sound — “The hallmark of sanity is to
I posted the following comment to Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post Competition and Google Book Search : Cory, Google is not perfect but the attacks on them for attempting this seem to me to be demonizing the wrong party. The problem is copyright law–a state legal system. The state is, as usual, to blame. Why some people are trusting the same state
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
