Mises Blog Posts

Mises Daily has one of the most powerful, withering attacks on antisemitism ever. By Mises himself: The Socialist Calumny Against the Jews, from Omnipotent Government. [Mises]

[From this Mises blog post] A discussion in the comments section of a post about blackmail brings up an issue about which many libertarians are confused. This concerns the idea of “harm.” Libertarians often condemn “harming” others, and this is fine so far as it goes, if it is kept in mind that “harm” here […]

In view of the recent passing of Paul Samuelson, it may be worthwhile to recall the “Symposium: On the Occasion of the Eighteenth Edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economics” in the Summer 2005 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, which contained Samuelson and Rothbard: Two Texts and Two Legacies, by Shawn Ritenour, and Samuelson’s […]

Against Intellectual Property has been translated into Italian by Mr. Robert Newson: Contro La Proprietà Intellettuale (.doc file). Translations into Spanish, Polish, Portugese and Georgian have been made as well. [Mises; AM]

I was a guest on the Bill Handel Show today discussing the libertarian perspective on blackmail, with reference to the Tiger Woods and other cases. (See my post Blackmail should be legal: the case of David Letterman.) We also touched on common law versus legislation (see my Legislation and Law in a Free Society), intellectual […]

John Perry Barlow‘s 1994 Wired article, “The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age,” tagged: “(Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)”, is a classic. Written at the dawn of the Internet, it’s amazing how non-dated it is. It’s a fascinating, well-written, and insightful paper about the problems […]

So says Adam Mossoff, Objectivist law professor, here: Just FYI, I am just about to complete my first draft of my article, tentatively titled, “A Value-Based Theory of Intellectual Property,” in which I explain why intellectual property rights are a fundamental property right. In fact, my thesis can be summed up as: All Property is […]

“The patent system: End it, don’t mend it“–“From AIDS to Android phones, research shows that intellectual property rights are detrimental to the social good.” Superb, concise piece in The Christian Science Monitor, by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly. It is common to argue that intellectual property (IP) in the […]

From my comment on this thread [IP and Artificial Scarcity; archived comments]: Re the issue of the prices charged for things like apples etc.–see my post Imagining the Fate of Copyright in a Future World (archived Mises blog comments). Imagine 1000 years from now, if we still have these ridiculous IP laws ….  Say you need some music–to […]

On the Mises blog, I noticed one of the frequent commentators on IP-related blog threads, one Bala, used to defend the IP position but of late had been taking an anti-IP position. We discussed this privately and I asked him to give me a short write-up about his thought process as he changed his mind […]