Legal System

[An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Steven Ng, is

Patent and copyright, to take the two worst manifestations of IP, are nothing but state monopolies that violate property rights. IP is antithetical to capitalism and the free market.

Crystal meth is a horrible drug, but it is also a cheap date, the poor man’s cocaine.

The 17th-century Dutch Protestant Hugo Grotius, deeply influenced by the late Spanish Scholastics, developed a theory of natural laws that he boldl

Legal or not, destruction is animal-like behavior. It's one thing when it is done by wild pigs. But when identical forms of destruction are sponsored by the state, we are talking about a form of brutality that is purely man-made.

The economy is now a networked economy. Some people even say that in this networked world centralized managerial hierarchies are obsolete; in the future, they will be replaced by decentralized, disaggregated, peer-to-peer communities.

Antitrust keeps superior products and marketing strategies from harming rivals, but halting such innovation harms consumers. It inhibits superior firms from passing on their efficiencies to consumers in lower prices.

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has <a href="http://store.mises.org/Democracy-The-God-That-Failed-P240.aspx">noted</a>, democracy is owned by no one. But neither is representative government. Both are marked by infantilized societies: time preference shortens, current consumption trumps wealth-producing capital formation, tax burdens increase, and government debt swells.