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Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas
Jim Harper
“What can be said about copyright that doesn’t anger somebody somewhere?”
“Not very much,” I said in answer to my own rhetorical question at the beginning of a December book forum on Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess (Mercatus Center, 2012).
Copyright and other intellectual property laws are controversial: Some libertarians regard inventions of the mind as the rightful property of their creators. The Framers, they point out, empowered Congress to secure these rights to authors and inventors. Others lament these laws as information regulations that conflict with natural rights.
The latest turn in the copyright controversy is the Librarian of Congress’s decision no longer to exempt the unlocking of (newly purchased) mobile phones from the proscriptions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other words, consumers can no longer use their phones on a different network without the original carrier’s permission, even after their contracts have expired.
Derek Khanna, the former Republican Study Committee staffer fired after penning a memorandum strongly critical of current copyright law, called it in The Atlantic the “Most Ridiculous Law of 2013 (So Far),” and a petition asking the president to reverse the Librarian’s ruling has more than 87,000 of the 100,000 it requires to get the White House’s response.
We won’t necessarily get into that particular issue on March 20th when we hear from Ronald Cass and Keith N. Hylton, authors of the book Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas. But Cass and Hilton argue against the notion that changing technology undermines the case for intellectual property rights. Indeed, they argue that technological advances only strengthen the case for intellectual property rights.
In the view of Cass and Hylton, the easier it becomes to copy innovations, the harder to detect copies and to stop copying, the greater the disincentive to invest time and money in inventions and creative works. Intellectual property laws are needed as much as ever.
Register now for this March 20 noon-time event. It’s the latest in a long series of Cato events examining copyright and intellectual property, subjects on which libertarians often find themselves divided.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Mainstream Reporter Tells The Truth About Audit The Fed And The Creation Of The Federal Reserve
When someone in the mainstream media goes out on a limb to tell the truth, then the rest of us should go out of our way to applaud that effort. Reporter Ben Swann of Fox 19 in Cincinnati is one of the few local television reporters in the United States that consistently tackles the tough issues. As you can see from his “Reality Check” archives, he regularly does reports on the Federal Reserve, the emerging police state, the loss of our freedoms and liberties, the advance of globalism, the economic collapse, political corruption, etc. etc. That is one reason why his YouTube channel is rapidly approaching a million views. In his most recent Reality Check, Ben Swann asked this question: “Is auditing the Federal Reserve really necessary?“ In just four minutes, Swann covered the creation of the Federal Reserve, where money comes from, the 16 trillion dollars in secret loans given out by the Fed during the last financial crisis, and why an audit of the Fed is so important. It really was extraordinary to watch a local mainstream news reporter tell the truth about these things. We could definitely use about 1000 more reporters just like him.
The video of Ben Swann’s recent Reality Check is posted below. If you have not seen it yet, it is definitely worth the 4 minutes that it takes to watch it….
What in the world would this country look like if we had hundreds of other real journalists such as Ben Swann that were willing to tackle these kinds of issues head on?
Certainly nobody is perfect, but when a reporter like Swann is willing to go out on a limb and attack the Fed we need to applaud his efforts.
The mainstream media is supposed to hold those in positions of power accountable.
But most in the mainstream media treat the Federal Reserve with kid gloves. It is incredibly rare to hear any real criticism of the Fed by mainstream reporters.
If the mainstream media was actually doing their job, then perhaps we could get some answers to some questions that have gone unanswered for a very long time.
For example, Zero Hedge has published a “smoking gun” that proves that the Federal Reserve was heavily involved in manipulating the price of gold long after the gold standard was abandoned. If you have not read that piece yet, you can find it right here.
I would love to know to what extent this is still going on today, and why nobody ever asks Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about this.
Another mystery that I would like to see addressed is the trillions of dollars of “off balance sheet transactions” that are unaccounted for at the Federal Reserve. This was brought up once during a Congressional hearing, but nobody seemed to have any answers. Video from this hearing is posted below….
As you can see from the video, nobody in the federal government seems to have any idea what is really going on over at the Fed.
But the Fed has more power over our economy and over our financial system than anyone else does.
Isn’t it about time that the American people got some answers?
The Federal Reserve is at the very heart of our debt-based financial system that was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.
The Federal Reserve (and virtually every other central bank in the world) is not accountable to the people. The Federal Reserve has created a perpetual debt bubble that is designed to systematically transfer the wealth of the American people to the banks. In this system, the total amount of money and the total amount of debt is designed to continually expand.
Since the Federal Reserve was created, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by well over 95 percent and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.
But nobody seems to want to hold the Federal Reserve accountable for any of this.
Just what in the world is going on here?
In a previous article about auditing the Fed, I listed some more questions that I would like to see someone ask the Federal Reserve….
If the Federal Reserve is supposed to prevent shocks to our economy, then why have there been 10 different economic recessions since 1950 and why are we about to enter another one?
Was the Federal Reserve involved in the manipulation of Libor?
What role did the Federal Reserve play in creating the housing bubble that resulted in our unprecedented housing crash?
Why has the value of the U.S. dollar fallen by 83 percent since 1970?
Why is the Federal Reserve paying U.S. banks not to lend money?
Why did Barack Obama nominate Ben Bernanke for a second term as head of the Federal Reserve when Bernanke has a track record of failure that makes the Chicago Cubs look like a roaring success?
Why is the U.S. national debt more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913?
Why were the Federal Reserve and the personal income tax both pushed through Congress in the same year in 1913?
Why does the Federal Reserve argue that it is “not an agency” of the federal government in court?
Why do all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank?
Most Americans are pinning their hopes for an “economic turnaround” on the upcoming election in November.
But the truth is that until something is done about the Federal Reserve it isn’t going to matter very much who is in the White House.
As I wrote about yesterday, the total amount of all debt in America has grown from about 2 trillion dollars to nearly 55 trillion dollars over the past 40 years.
Yes, we should blame the American people for being really stupid about debt, but we also need to keep in mind that this is exactly what the debt-based Federal Reserve system was designed to do.
We have been enslaved by design and most Americans do not even realize what has happened.
Let us encourage reporters like Ben Swann to keep speaking out about the Federal Reserve, and the rest of us need to keep speaking out about the Fed too.
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Other • Money from Nothing: A Primer on Fake Wealth Creation and it
Money from Nothing: A Primer on Fake Wealth Creation and its Implications (Part 1)
March 12, 2012
Frequent contributor Zeus Y. explains how the financial system creates fake "wealth" from nothing and why the entire delusional scheme is imploding.
"Only God can create… value out of nothing"—Justice Martin V. Mahoney in First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Jerome Daly.
"(I’m) doing God’s work." – Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein
Introduction:
What is fraud except creating “value” from nothing and passing it off as something?
Frauds interlink and grow upon each other. Our debt-based money system serves as the fraud foundation. In our debt-based money system, debt must grow in order to create money. Therefore, there is no way to pay off aggregate debt with available money. More money must be lent into the system to make the payments for old debts. This causes overall debt to expand as new money for actual people (vs. banks) always arrives at interest and compounds exponentially. This process is called financialization.
Financialization: The process of making money from nothing in which debt (i.e. poverty, lack) is paradoxically considered an asset (i.e. wealth, gain). In current financialized economies “wealth expansion” comes from the parasitic taxation of productivity in the form of interest on fiat lending. This interest over time consumes a greater and greater share of resources, assets, labor, and livelihood until nothing is left.
Only in a debt-based money system could debt be curiously cast as an asset. We’ve made “extend and pretend” a quaint phrase for a burgeoning market for financial lying and profiteering aimed toward preventing the collapse of a debt- (or lack-) based system that was already doomed by its initial design to collapse. This primer will detail the major components and basic evolution of fake wealth creation, accelerating debt expansion, hollowing out of the economy, and inevitable financial implosion.
Stage one—Fiat money origination, multiplication, and distribution
The U.S. Federal Reserve System (“The Fed”): A private, non-transparent entity, formed in 1913, representing and serving private, profit-driven banks that creates money from nothing (fiat) and to which the U.S. government has delegated and effectively ceded its constitutional power to coin money.
The Fed essentially lends our “sovereign” public money to us at interest, paying for things like government debt with more debt, thus expanding debt. By contrast, the Fed currently gives away money to its constituent private banks at zero percent interest, allowing those banks to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, which yield a 2-3 percent interest mark-up to be paid by taxpayers, adding to citizen debt.
Fractional reserve: Private fiat fabrication of exchangeable public “money” as a bookkeeping entry through “multiplication” of public fiat held in private bank reserves. Holding 100,000 dollars of depositors’ money may allow me, as a bank, to lend out 1,000,000 dollars. By what authority? None, really, just my say-so and my action.
In the court case referenced in the heading quote, Justice Mahoney ruled against a bank acting in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in its efforts to foreclose upon and “buy” a U.S. citizen’s house by simply creating “the entire $14,000.00 foreclosure purchase in money or credit upon its own books by bookkeeping entry.” Further, “Mr. Morgan (the plaintiff/bank representative) admitted that no United States Law or Statute existed which gave him the right to do this.” (First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Jerome Daly)
Stage two—Delusional, unregulated value assignment, manipulation, and expansion
After money is created out of thin air, other market mechanisms have been propagated to magnify, funnel, and package value-from-nothing further still, creating financial vehicles that add more numbers without adding more value.
Leverage: The practice of arbitrarily multiplying one’s alleged value in order to acquire controlling interest in another property. This mechanism is a favorite of now-discredited corporate raiders and leveraged buy-out firms that currently go under the euphemism “private equity firms”. This claimed private equity can be a fictitious multiplication of self-assessed asset value used to buy a controlling interest in a productive company.
Typically the acquired company is put into debt, its real assets hollowed out and harvested, and then the acquired company is allowed to go bankrupt thus making a killing for the raiders while destroying the ability of displaced workers to make a living. (Unhinged: When Concrete Reality No Longer Matters to the Market (and What to Do About It)).
Over the counter (OTC) derivatives: Purely unregulated, non-transparent, and malignant uncollateralized bets and hedges on market movements requiring no assets or stake in assets. Of the over 700 trillion dollars of “notional value” in disclosed OTC derivatives by International Bank of Settlements for 2011, the majority were supposedly “benign” interest rate and currency swaps, not the more toxic credit default swaps. However, it was a Goldman Sachs currency swap with “a fictitious exchange rate” that sunk Greece, nearly doubling its liability on just one deal from about 2.8 billion euros to over 5 billion euros. (luink1) Also remember the undisclosed OTC derivatives market may easily be bigger than the disclosed market.
Rehypothecation: The process of recycling or using the same collateral with multiple deals and entities. Apparently England has no legal limit on how many times collateral can by rehypothecated (link2):
Simply said: when one truly digs in, MF Global exposes the 2011 equivalent of the 2008 AIG: virtually unlimited leverage via the shadow banking system, in which there are practically no hard assets backing the infinite layers of debt created above, and which when finally unwound, will create a cataclysmic collapse of all financial institutions, where every bank is daisy-chained to each other courtesy of multiple layers of "hypothecation, and re-hypothecation." (Why The UK Trail Of The MF Global Collapse May Have "Apocalyptic" Consequences For The Eurozone, Canadian Banks, Jefferies And Everyone Else)
Note: For a concise explanation of the related mechanisms of collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s), synthetic CDO’s, credit default swaps (CDS’s), naked short selling, and high frequency trading (HFT), see When The Market Has Cancer.
Stage three—Usurping democracies and cannibalizing functioning capitalism
A cartel of international wealth counterfeiters have boldly made claims on Greece’s national wealth through super-national entities like the European Central Bank. These claims are not backed by clear legal authority or logic, but they are being enforced anyway, administered by unelected technocrats and “agreed to” by complicit politicians acting against the interests of actual citizens.
Greece (with more countries to come) is being treated like a company town where “costs” (i.e. social services) are to be cut, productivity milked through greater taxation, and debt servitude reinforced. Corrupted capitalism continues thus to metastasize. Now that phantom paper profits are collapsing for the counterfeiters, real assets must be taken over to fill in the gaps.
Greece’s national assets have been put up for sale endangering its national sovereignty and right to control its own property. Greek well-being is being diminished through austerity programs. This has only caused the economy to contract at an accelerating rate. Seizing control of productive assets, and cannibalizing real wealth to feed counterfeit demands seem to be the primary unstated goals of these strategies because the empirical results of these strategies clearly run counter to stated objectives.
Disaster capitalism: (The Shock Doctrine) The intentional infliction of insecurity, suffering, and scarcity on a population to cause panic, compliance, and amenability to exploitation and extraction of wealth. It is a thoroughly vicious business model that operates in plain sight. When abuse no longer has to be organized and covered by conspiracy, one can confirm that capitalism’s illness is in advanced stages. It is amazing how easily assets can be acquired and individual rights denied (as with fraudclosure) when people are overwhelmed by corruption on all sides.
Stage four—Implosion of the body politic or necessary transformation and redirection?
This stage has yet to be fully entered, but the fraying of Greece’s current social and political order sends a strong signal for the future of the wider world: Passivity equates with more abuse and exploitation, more austerity, and greater hijacking of national and personal assets. Active, civil resistance is necessary to stop the loss of public sovereignty to private interests. Creative, viable alternatives to the currently corrupt and fraud-ridden global economic system are vital. These alternatives and the implications of our current counterfeit wealth trajectory will be explored tomorrow in Part 2 of this article.
by Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D. (copyright March, 2012). Zeus can be reached at citizenzeus@gmail.com
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Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Mar 11, 2012 8:46 pm
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