Friday Hodgepodge

Editor's Note: I'm taking Monday and possibly Tuesday off from blogging. Happy Labor Day!

Notable Commentary

"[W]ealth is not distributed by society: it is produced and traded by the people who create it." -- Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, in "How the Campaign Against Economic Inequality Undermines Political Equality" (PDF) at The Journal of Law and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 100-115.

"This simple legal and commercial fact -- copyright could not secure the real value represented in an innovative computer program -- explains why in the mid-1990s there was a shift to the legal doctrine that could provide the proper legal protection for the innovative value in a computer program: patent law." -- Adam Mossoff, in "A Brief History of Software Patents (and Why They're Valid)" (PDF, 2014) at George Mason University Law and Economics Research Papers, No. 14-41.

"My body and my organs are mine -- not mere means to others' ends." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Should the Government Require Your Consent to Be an Organ Donor?" at Forbes.

"Many who rightly attack the dollar as debt-based money, seem happy with bitcoin because the debt backing it is removed." -- Keith Weiner, in "Bad Ideas About Money and Bitcoin" at SNB & CHF.

"We offer this insight: [Bitcoin] speculation converts one person's wealth into another's income." -- Keith Weiner, in "Hidden Forces of Economics" at SNB & CHF.

My Two Cents

At fifteen pages each, both academic papers above (the one by Watkins and Brook, and the other by Mossoff) are relatively short. They also both offer concise, clearly-written arguments for their respective positions. Having just read Equal is Unfair, I was impressed at how well Watkins and Brook conveyed that book's arguments at such short length. Mossoff's paper likewise cuts through lots of popular (and judicial) fog regarding what software is and why it should be patented. I highly recommend both.

-- CAV