We know from decades of unnecessary wars, and years of covid authoritarianism, that propaganda works. But it doesn’t work all the time. It hasn’t worked in convincing Americans to surrender their freedom so that government can “fix” the weather. As Biden preaches “climate emergency,” Americans must remain vigilant in protecting their privacy and freedom.
The foundation of our economy is the patent. If you invent something, you need a patent. We assume that without patent law, society would be stuck in an economic malaise. We’d be stuck in the Dark Ages. However, that isn’t true. The opposite is. Patents hold our society back and keep us stuck in economic malaise. We are in the Dark Ages compared to what we could be. There is no evidence that they increase innovation and productivity. In fact, they do the opposite.
Patents can inhibit innovation by reducing its profitability. No one wants to innovate because there’s no reward for doing so. There are two exceptions to this, however. There’s the pharmaceutical industry and the chemical industry. In those two industries, the cost of litigation because of the patent is $4 billion. The profit from those patents was $15 billion. That’s almost quadruple the cost. For every other industry, litigation costs $12 billion and profitability was $3 billion. It’s almost a reverse.
So, why do companies even bother with patents? Protection. If you have a patent, you can protect yourself from someone else with a patent. Google spends billions on defensive patents. Twitter has openly acknowledged this by saying that “…employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.” Most industries resort to patent litigation when they’ve stopped being innovative. They then resort to needing protection.
Companies like Apple or IBM or our small businesses and start-ups would still be able to succeed without patents by being the first to market. Their status as first movers would ensure strong brand recognition and customer loyalty. This would provide them a shield so that if someone copied their creation then they’d still be more successful. It would also encourage innovation by allowing time to develop cost-efficient ways of developing said product and rewarding those who invent the better product, the one more customers buy. Generally, the eruption of innovations that lead to a new industry are almost never because of patent protection and are instead from competition. Without patents, companies would be locked in a competitive environment where they’d have to innovate to survive, leading to the birth of many new industries. Music is like this. There are so many artists and so many innovations that anyone can get swept away if they fail to change in any way. The first to market and the better the song gets brand loyalty and continued success. Patents stop that from happening across industries.
Patents can do more than just hurt the economy. They can hurt people. Big Pharma games the system to secure monopolies on their products, removing any form of competition. This has resulted in the top twelve brand name drug prices rising 68% since 2012. The EpiPen has seen an increase of 500%. Insulin costs $100 a syringe in the United States because of the patent system stifling competition. In other countries, it’s less than 10% of that.
Now, eliminating patents for pharmaceutical industries could hurt them due to the high cost of development and the ease at which it takes to copy drugs. To counter this, we can set up a prize system. Such a system would lower drug prices by eliminating drug monopolies and create an incentive to innovate, especially for orphan drugs for rare diseases. It would place a burden on the taxpayer (which I don’t like), but we can cut taxes to offset the costs of the prizes.
Some claim that patents don’t protect monopolies. They claim patents prevent monopolies as long as the market is unregulated. However, a patent is a regulation. Just as a regulation tells you how something should be made or how much it produces of something, a patent tells you who can make what. It, like all regulations, restricts the individual. An unregulated market, a completely free market, could not have patents because a patent is a regulation.
Abolishing patents is not a left wing issue or a right wing issue nor a capitalist issue or a socialist issue, it is an issue of innovation and prosperity. It has been endorsed by figures across the political spectrum such as the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, the laissez-faire socialist Benjamin Tucker, and the more centrist founder of Georgism Henry George. It would lead to innovation in all industries, creating a competitive private sector. It would allow us cheap, high quality drugs and make our pharmaceutical industry a modern marvel. The first to market gets the bigger reward as genuine competition demands. It is the solution to our economic malaise, putting us into a hyperspeed toward the future. If we truly believe in liberty, we must liberate ourselves from patents, the enemy of innovation.
Dakota Hensley is a native of Kentucky who identifies as a left-Rothbardian. He’s written for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, The Federalist, and The American Conservative, among others.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the media reported the inflation rate—that is, the Consumer Price Index‘s rate of increase—to be 1.3 percent for June 2022 and 9.1 percent year over year (for the last twelve months). This shocked markets and investors because economists’ median forecast had been 1.1 percent for June and 8.8 percent year over year. This shock would have been much greater, however, had the annual inflation rate been reported as the CPI’s compounded annual rate of change for the month or quarter. This calculation method would have revealed the stark reality that double-digit inflation is not just a specter looming on the horizon but is here right now. According to computations I made using the interactive economic data website (FRED) of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRB of St. Louis), the annualized inflation rate for June 2022 was 17.1 percent, while for the second quarter of 2022, the rate was 10.5 percent.
Let us compare these two methods of calculating the annual inflation rate using the figures in the preceding paragraph. According to the BLS, CPI changes are “a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.” To say that the monthly inflation rate is 1.3 percent, then, means that the CPI increased by 1.3 percent from the month before. Similarly, a year-over-year inflation rate of 9.1 percent means that the CPI rose by 9.1 percent over the past twelve months. This way of calculating the annual inflation rate is backward looking, because the most recent monthly rate is heavily outweighed by the previous eleven months’ rates.
In contrast, calculating the annual inflation rate by compounding and annualizing the most recent monthly or quarterly rate of change in the CPI gives a better idea of what inflation currently is and how it may be trending. For instance, the 17.1 percent compounded annual inflation rate reported above is derived by assuming that the 1.3 percent monthly rate of change for June continues unchanged for the next eleven months. If the monthly inflation rates appear to be volatile, the compounded annual inflation rate for the last three months may also be computed in a similar manner. As noted above, the compounded annual inflation rate for April 2020 to June 2022 was 10.5 percent. In any case, this computation method is forward looking and more useful for analyzing the implications of fresh inflation data and recent events’ likely impact on the inflation trend.
Now this may seem like merely a technical matter, but some forms of data presentation are clearer and more useful than others, especially during a time of rapid inflation. Presenting the inflation rate as a year-over-year calculation obscures shorter-term but substantial fluctuations that may occur and what they portend for the future, especially if inflationary expectations are beginning to become unhinged. Furthermore, presenting inflation data in annualized form permits clear and easy comparison of inflation rates in periods of varying length. For example, up until January 1997, the FRB of St. Louis, which for many years was the most “monetarist” and inflation conscious of the regional FRBs, displayed inflation rates with “growth triangle” in its monthly release (suspended in March 2015), National Economic Trends (NET). The triangle, which resembles an intercity mileage table on a highway map, consisted of compounded annual inflation rates for each of the nineteen immediately preceding months and for all series of consecutive months in that range, totaling 190 rates in all.\
The man supposedly in charge of the Uvalde response, school district police chief Pete Arredondo, continues to make excuses and straight-up lie about the situation. Consider this version of reality coming out of Arredondo and his spokesman, as reported by the Texas Tribune:
One remarkable aspect of the coverage of the Uvalde shooting is how quickly the narrative has gone praising police heroics to exposing the law enforcement agents’ complete, total, and shameful failure. Simultaneously, police apologists’ excuses have repeatedly changed as well.
Among these excuses has been the claim that the Uvalde police were just a small-town force and that with better funding—they always call for more funding—the police wouldn’t make these “mistakes.” It is also claimed that larger state and federal police personnel would never have the same problems.
Thanks to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s report released this week, we now know that a majority of law enforcement officers at the Uvalde massacre were from state and federal agencies and that the total law enforcement personnel numbered a remarkable 376. Yet, even as these “first responders” continued to amass personnel and equipment, they chose to prioritize officer safety over children’s safety.
Clearly, the excuses about an “underfunded” and undersized local police force hold no water. The presence of dozens of well-armed state troopers and federal officers did not lead to immediate action against a single untrained gunman. This was a systemwide failure of law enforcement. Yet, unfortunately, the narrative over the behavior of law enforcement at Uvalde has zeroed in on the idea that it’s all entirely the fault of a small number of local officials.
Nearly Four Hundred Law Enforcement Officers at Uvalde
This was no matter of a small police force being overwhelmed by events. According to the Texas Tribune, the state’s report on Uvalde
reveals for the first time that the overwhelming majority of responders were federal and state law enforcement: 149 were U.S. Border Patrol, and 91 were state police—whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places.” There were 25 Uvalde police officers and 16 sheriff’s deputies. [School district police chief Pete] Arredondo’s school police force accounted for five of the officers on the scene. The rest of the force was made up of neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. marshals and federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers.
In total, 376 law enforcement officers were at the scene.
Not all of these officers were present from early on in the incident. But within minutes, armed police officers showed up and choose to not take action against the gunman. Soon, more weapons and protective gear arrived. And police still chose to do nothing. As victims bled to death in the classroom with the gunman, dozens of federal, state, and local personnel were standing around in a grim “comedy” of errors. No one took responsibility or took action for more than an hour. By far, the most enthusiastic action from police could be witnessed in how officers harassed, attacked, cuffed and generally mistreated the parents of dying children at the scene.
So, let’s dispense with the claims that the reason the police stood around in Uvalde was because this was a police force of country bumpkins who “lacked training.” It took the presence of nearly three hundred state and federal officers for officers on the scene to take action—more than an hour later. This was against a single untrained gunman with a weapon no more powerful than what the police themselves possessed.
AS I SAID…it’s the common denominator. Mind altering drugs that are being prescribed that were not in use back in the 1970’s and 1960’s or farther back. And no, I’m not a doctor or medical mafia member. I’m someone who uses reason, logic, and common sense to come to the conclusions I come to. It is called critical thinking. And the evidence points to mind altering substances that DOCTORS are giving out to patients as the culprit.
Do we need MORE GUN CONTROL? Or BETTER PRESCRIPTION DRUG CONTROL? Reason, logic and common sense should dictate the correct answer.
A mass shooting is defined as an incident where four or more people are shot. So far this year, the numbers average out to 11 mass shootings per week. 2021 saw a total of 692 mass shootings throughout the year.
Year 2022, just the first six months: – January: 41 mass shootings, 59 dead, 128 wounded February: 43 mass shootings, 40 dead, 174 wounded March: 52 mass shootings, 47 dead, 217 wounded- April: 66 mass shootings, 75 dead, 271 wounded- May: 67 mass shootings, 87 dead, 324 wounded-June: 68 mass shootings, 78 dead, 275 wounded- These numbers accumulate to a total of 386 people dead and 1,389 people wounded.
I’m not sure how The Scotsman reporter Rachael Davies who wrote the article on 05/07/2022 came up with May and June numbers…but hey, that’s main stream media for you!
Now let’s take a look at mass shootings in the USA before 1968 and we will go back as far as 1954. 1968 was the year massive gun control reform was passed with the Gun Control Act. One of the provisions was that no longer could a rehabilitated felon ever have possession of a firearm. Let’s look at mass shootings prior to that day and realize that firearms were taken to school by boys who were going hunting afterwards and could be seen in the back windows of their pickups. That you could easily obtain firearms from a Sears & Roebuck catalog without back ground checks at all and have one sent directly to your home with no FFL dealer involved.
Year, 1968. Country USA. Mass shootings,
ONE: The Robison family murders, also referred to as the Good Hart murders, were the mass murders of Richard Robison, his wife Shirley Robison and their four children; Ritchie, Gary, Randy, and Susan on June 25, 1968
1967 NONE
1966 TWO
On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death the previous night, Charles Whitman, a Marine veteran, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, and then opened fire indiscriminately on people on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 14 people, including an unborn child, and injured 31 other people. The incident ended when two policemen and a civilian reached Whitman and shot him dead. At the time, the attack was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, being surpassed 18 years later by the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre.
It has been suggested that Whitman’s violent impulses, with which he had been struggling for several years, were caused by a tumor found in the white matter above his amygdala upon autopsy.
On November 12, 1966, 18-year-old Robert Smith shot and killed five people, 4 women and a toddler, and injured two others at the Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona. All seven victims had been shot and one of the victims who initially survived her wounds was stabbed in the back.
The shooting is considered to be the first copycat mass shooting with Smith indicating that he had wanted to kill more than Charles Whitman, the perpetrator of the University of Texas tower shooting earlier the same year.
1965 ONE
Late on the night of April 24, 1965, Michael Andrew Clark, who lived in Long Beach, California, left home in his parents’ car, without their permission. In the back of the car, he had a Swedish Mauser military bolt action rifle equipped with telescopic sight and a pistol he had removed from his father’s locked gun safe along with a large quantity of ammunition. Early the next Sunday morning, he climbed to the top of a hill overlooking a stretch of Highway 101 near Orcutt. As the sun came up, Clark began shooting at automobiles driving down the 101 highway.
Two were killed and six more were wounded as the shooting continued for hours before Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office deputies rushed the hill and Clark committed suicide as they closed in. A five-year-old-boy wounded in the head died a day later bringing the total to three dead for the rampage.
Reportedly the two men killed at the scene of the shooting were attempting to assist others who were trapped in a vehicle which had been hit by the gunfire.
The 1954 United States Capitol shooting was an attack on March 1, 1954, by four Puerto Rican nationalists who sought to promote the cause of Puerto Rico’s independence from US rule. They fired 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols onto the legislative floor from the Ladies’ Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber within the United States Capitol.
The nationalists, identified as Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began shooting at Representatives in the 83rd Congress, who were debating an immigration bill. Five Representatives were wounded, one seriously, but all recovered. The assailants were arrested, tried and convicted in federal court, and given long sentences, amounting to life imprisonment. In 1978 and 1979, their sentences were commuted by President Jimmy Carter. All four returned to Puerto Rico.
Was there a lack of guns? Obviously not. There were M1 Garands from WWII that the NRA purchased and made available for a low price to members as part of the Civilian Marksmanship program. There were M1 Carbine from WWII and lots of 1911 .45 pistols, lots of WWI Springfield rifles, lots of lever action rifles that could hold 7-10 rounds. There were shotguns from Belgium, there were pistols from Germany and Poland.
Some schools in the south had civilian marksmanship classes to teach children marksmanship and how to properly handle firearms.
Inspired by the corruption of Wall Street bailouts and the recklessness of the Federal Reserve, a man known only as Satoshi Nakomoto created a new tool to fight central bankers: Bitcoin. A decade later, Bitcoin became the best-performing asset in the world—without the support of any government and despite attacks from some of the world’s largest banks.
At the same time, some states in the US rediscovered their constitutional right to promote gold and silver. Texas went so far as to create its own gold bank.
Now in 2022, global inflation is the highest in recent memory and the elites are determined to weaponize currency against the public. These same people who brought us lockdowns, supply-chain disruptions, and rising inflation now want to remake the monetary system to control and track every aspect of our lives.
Today, of course, PC is obsolete—replaced entirely by the far broader concept of “woke,” which goes well beyond language. And to be sure, “woke” is so vague and so overused as to be a poignant example of George Orwell’s meaningless words,
Language is a critical tool for communication among humans; we cry “watch out” when a speeding car hurtles toward a pedestrian. We also think of language as a cognitive tool for society at large, since all human learning is closely tied to how we learn and process language.
Yet sometimes we forget language is also an important social and cultural institution. And like all institutions, it is subject to corruption, in the form of capture by elites with agendas quite contrary to those of average people. Since language shapes our understanding of all human interactions, academics from all disciplines—but particularly social scientists—ought to pay more attention to linguistic corruption. When language becomes politicized, managed, and policed, we ought to notice, and we ought to fight back.
I make this very point in an upcoming article titled “Evolution or Corruption: The Imposition of Political Language in the West Today,” which will be published this fall in the Italian journal Etica e politica (put out by the University of Trieste Department of Philosophy). The article argues that top-down impositions, rather than natural evolution, often drive changes in language. It analogizes the linguistic “marketplace” with the market for goods and services. Impositions are akin to central planning, while evolution is akin to spontaneous order in the marketplace. The former occurs when elites in politics, media, journalism, and academia attempt to influence both the words we use and the meaning of those words. This is invariably in service of a statist agenda, just as economic interventions serve preferred interests at the expense of overall wealth and efficiency. The constant use and repetition of the word “gender” (a term relating to grammar) when we should use “sex” is one obvious example of imposed, corrupted language in service of a political agenda (trans). By contrast, the Middle English “whilst” sounds odd to our ear today—having naturally evolved into “while” without obvious or heavy-handed direction.
The great Spanish Austro-libertarian economist Jesús Huerta de Soto applies Carl Menger’s theory on the evolution of money to language:
Thus there is an unconscious social process of learning by imitation which explains how the pioneering behavior of these most successful and creative individuals catches on and eventually extends to the rest of society. Also, due to this evolutionary process, those societies which first adopt successful principles and institutions tend to spread and prevail over other social groups. Although Menger developed his theory in relation to the origin and evolution of money, he also mentions that the same essential theoretical framework can be easily applied to the study of the origins and development of language, as well as to our present topic, juridical institutions. Hence the paradoxical fact that the moral, juridical, economic, and linguistic institutions which are most important and essential to man’s life in society are not of his own creation, because he lacks the necessary intellectual might to assimilate the vast body of random information that these institutions generate. On the contrary, these institutions inevitably and spontaneously emanate from the social process of human interaction which Menger believes should be the main research in economics.1
Today, it appears linguistic interventionism is alive and well in the West. Language is a subset of culture, albeit a very important subset, and we can hardly expect progressives to leave it alone. Like culture, language is not property, and it cannot be “owned.” But it can be influenced and steered by linguistic vandals seeking to topple old understandings and leave us all overwhelmed and demoralized by the ever-shifting new terminology.
These countries never attacked US but hate US due to an empire building foreign policy. Wouldn’t life be better for all if limited our battles to the free market?
No longer just an ‘alternative route’ on a drawing board, the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is paying dividends in a time of global crisis. And Moscow, Tehran and New Delhi are now leading players in the Eurasian competition for transportation routes.
Tectonic shifts continue to rage through the world system with nation-states quickly recognizing that the “great game” as it has been played since the establishment of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the wake of the second World War, is over.
But empires never disappear without a fight, and the Anglo-American one is no exception, overplaying its hand, threatening and bluffing its way, right to the end.
End of an order
It seems no matter how many sanctions the west imposes on Russia, the victims most affected are western civilians. Indeed, the severity of this political blunder is such that the nations of the trans-Atlantic are heading towards the greatest self-induced food and energy crisis in history.
While the representatives of the “liberal rules-based international order” continue on their trajectory to crush all nations that refuse to play by those rules, a much saner paradigm has come to light in recent months that promises to transform the global order entirely.
The multipolar solution
Here we see the alternative security-financial order which has arisen in the form of the Greater Eurasian Partnership. As recently as 30 June at the 10th St Petersburg International Legal Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin described this emerging new multipolar order as:
“A multipolar system of international relations is now being formed. It is an irreversible process; it is happening before our eyes and is objective in nature. The position of Russia and many other countries is that this democratic, more just world order should be built on the basis of mutual respect and trust, and, of course, on the generally accepted principles of international law and the UN Charter.”
Since the inevitable cancellation of western trade with Russia after the Ukraine conflict erupted in February, Putin has increasingly made clear that the strategic re-orientation of Moscow’s economic ties from east to west had to make a dramatically new emphasis on north to south and north to east relations not only for Russia’s survival, but for the survival of all Eurasia.
Among the top strategic focuses of this re-orientation is the long overdue International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
On this game-changing mega-project, Putin said last month during the plenary session of the 25th St Petersburg International Economic Forum:
“To help companies from other countries develop logistical and cooperation ties, we are working to improve transport corridors, increase the capacity of railways, trans-shipment capacity at ports in the Arctic, and in the eastern, southern and other parts of the country, including in the Azov-Black Sea and Caspian basins – they will become the most important section of the North-South Corridor, which will provide stable connectivity with the Middle East and Southern Asia. We expect freight traffic along this route to begin growing steadily in the near future.”
The INSTC’s Phoenix Moment
Until recently, the primary trade route for goods passing from India to Europe has been the maritime shipping corridor passing through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, via the highly bottlenecked Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and onward to Europe via ports and rail/road corridors.
Following this western-dominated route, average transit times take about 40 days to reach ports of Northern Europe or Russia. Geopolitical realities of the western technocratic obsession with global governance have made this NATO-controlled route more than a little unreliable.
The International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC)
Despite being far from complete, goods moving across the INSTC from India to Russia have already finished their journey 14 days sooner than their Suez-bound counterparts while also seeing a whopping 30 percent reduction in total shipping costs.
These figures are expected to fall further as the project progresses. Most importantly, the INSTC would also provide a new basis for international win-win cooperation much more in harmony with the spirit of geo-economics unveiled by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013.
Cooperation not competition
Originally agreed upon by Russia, Iran and India in September 2000, the INSTC only began moving in earnest in 2002 – albeit much more slowly than its architects had hoped.
This 7,200 km multimodal megaproject involves integrating several Eurasian nations directly or indirectly with rail, roads and shipping corridors into a united and tight-knit web of interdependency. Along each artery, opportunities to build energy projects, mining, and high tech special economic zones (SEZs) will abound giving each participating nation the economic power to lift their people out of poverty, increase their stability and their national power to chart their own destinies.
Beyond the founding three nations, the other 10 states who have signed onto this project over the years include Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Syria and even Ukraine (although this last member may not remain on board for long). In recent months, India has officially invited Afghanistan and Uzbekistan to join too.
While western think tanks and geopolitical analysts attempt to frame the INSTC as an opponent to China’s BRI, the reality is that both systems are extremely synergistic on multiple levels.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
Unlike the west’s speculation-driven bubble economy, both the BRI and INSTC define economic value and self-interest around improving the productivity and living standards of the real economy. While short term thinking predominates in the myopic London-Wall Street paradigm, the BRI and INSTC investment strategies are driven by long-term thinking and mutual self-interest.
It is no small irony that such policies once animated the best traditions of the west before the rot of unipolar thinking took over and the west lost its moral compass.
And today there is now this headline that subpoenas have been served and the officials (as well as Twitter, YouTube, Meta, Instagram and LinkedIn) have 30 days to respond:
You will not find either story in mainstream media because it is counter narrative. But for people like me, this is one of the biggest news items I’ve seen.
Alex Berenson tried to argue the state-action doctrine in his Twitter lawsuit, but Judge Alsup denied it. This was in Federal Court in San Francisco.
I’m looking at suing Twitter in California state court and if I win, Twitter has to pay my legal expenses and it also means they can’t silence free speech on their platform anymore, which will be a huge step forward for free speech.
This development is a big win because it means that a judge wasn’t convinced by the government’s attempts to dismiss the case. If the case succeeds, it could open up free speech on all these platforms. It would mean that people with vaccine injuries don’t have to hide anymore.
This win in court is more evidence that the narrative will be falling apart soon.
This ruling and the issuance of subpoenas is a solid step in restoring free speech rights on social media platforms.
The decision makers aren’t hearing the other side of the story because voices have been censored, including the voices of millions of vaccine injured people.
As I’ve said before, the key to ending the pandemic is for decision-makers to start listening to the people that are being censored.
So stopping censorship is an important step forward.
Once that happens, we can go back to normal almost instantly since COVID will no longer kill nearly as many people (we’ll use sensible treatment for in-patient and out-patients), the PCR and antigen tests will be properly specified to eliminate the false positives, and we can end all the stupid mitigation measures (like masks, lockdowns, isolation, etc). And we’ll start incentivizing hospitals to save lives instead of killing people. With a handful of changes, I think there’s an excellent chance we can cut the death rate from COVID to insignificant levels.