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Great piece in National Review today by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) on eliminating the Export-Import Bank.

I couldn't have said it any better, Senator Lee, though I did try.

Several times.

One or two guys oops, people can write a great app, or a great algorithm, and that's a great thing. Our economy is benefitting and consumers are reaping the benefits of such innovation and creativity that comes as the fruit of the minds and labor of a few.

But some things are really, really expensive and capital intensive to do, like building out and maintaining a 21st Century broadband and rich content network that is constantly innovating new products and services for its customers.

That's one of the reasons why I've never been big on municipal broadband networks, and it's a big reason why, as Marguerite Reardon wrote in CNET, the Comcast merger could be good for TimeWarner Cable customers. In fact, it almost certainly will be.

I had the privilege of speaking a couple of weeks ago at a Cato Institute briefing on whether it is wise or appropriate to include intellectual property protection in trade agreements, specifically in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the major trade agreement that is currently in a pretty vital stage of negotiation. The name of the event was "Intellectual Property in the Trans-Pacific Partnership: National Interest or Corporate Handout?" It was kind of Bill Watson at Cato to invite me to participate, and you can see the video of the event on Cato's website here. You can also see my Powerpoint slide deck here.

My role at the event was to speak from the perspective that intellectual property protections should be part of such trade agreements. I was in the definite minority, as both the other two panelists and the moderator are all skeptical of IP protection in general, and certainly don't think we should be using trade agreements as leverage to ask our trading partners to raise their IP protection standards. But I was happy to play that role.

A few hours ago Francis Gurry won re-election (technically, re-nomination) as Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. This is a good thing.

My sources tell me Gurry received 46 votes on the first ballot, 4 votes over an outright majority. At this, the Estonian (7 votes) and Panamanian (10 votes) nominees withdrew.

What would normally then have happened is a second ballot, but after seeing Gurry’s large initial vote, some of the African Group went to the nominee from Nigeria, who had received 20 votes, and told him they were going to switch to Gurry, undoubtedly because they wanted to go with the winner. At this, the Nigerian nominee withdrew, so Gurry was nominated by consensus.

Yesterday we wrote that the 6 percent who answered in a survey that they thought the U.S. has the best tax system in the world were wrong. Already today we have one more reason the 6 percent are wrong: The Tax Foundation released an analysis showing that the U.S. has the 9^th highest top marginal tax rate on personal dividends compared to other countries in the OECD. So, in the U.S., you are highly taxed if you own a business, if you invest, if you save or if you earn income. And some people wonder why so many struggle to make ends meet? Figuring it out is not exactly an exercise in the advanced engineering of spacecraft.

When President Obama performed his infamous “You didn’t build that” soliloquy during the 2012 campaign, it obviously hit a nerve. Not because there was anything particularly outrageous with the point he was trying to make, but rather because the phrase was seen to be a revealing slip, and seemed to confirm what many had long suspected about Obama—that he had a dismissive attitude toward the traditional American value of the rugged individual who, though hard work and determination, built a successful business. Your success is not due primarily to your hard work and sacrifices, you see—it’s mostly due to everyone else. Really, we all out here sitting on our behinds are responsible for your success, and we don’t recall seeing any dividend checks lately from you. So it’s time to pay up.

Parents don’t raise children, you see—schools and institutions do. Entrepreneurs don’t build businesses—taxpayers and government bureaucrats do. It takes a village, remember?

It’s just a slight step from there to conclude that, since you don’t really get the credit for your success—since we all really had more to do with it than you did—it really ought be us, not you, who gets to say how your capital gets used. After all, you didn’t build that. Next thing you know, we’re wresting control of the means of production from the capitalists, because after all, they didn’t build that—the collective we did.

This is crap. The creator and builder has always been an American hero to all but that small, disgruntled minority that believe you must take from the creator to redistribute to others. In capitalism, as in any moral system, the builder and inventor and creator is a hero, and is deserving of his or her success. Because their success is simply the fruit of their labor, and everyone is entitled to the fruit of their labor as their possession. It doesn’t get much more basic than that.

But the mob still lurks out there, demanding that they are a better judge of how the fruit of your labor should be deployed than you are. I’ve long argued that the primary locus of this essentially nihilistic and even Marxist thinking is today being focused on intellectual property, and I’m sad to say that the latest iteration showed up in, of all places, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, in “Sorry, Writers, but I’m Siding With Google’s Robots,” a February 7^th op/ed by James Panero, a thirty-something art snob who, ironically, doesn’t seem to have a very high view of art—or at least of art that is protected by copyright.

Today, the U.S. filed an official complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against India for its domestic content requirements for solar panels.

Domestic content requirements are prohibited in most cases under WTO agreements.

Of course, the details of this dispute relevant to the solar panel industry are important. But this dispute takes place in a much wider trade dispute context in which India has been purposely ignoring and violating the rights of intellectual property rights holders as part of their domestic industrial policy. Particularly in the area of prescription drug patents.

As Sally Pipes writes in Forbes:

Over the last two years, the Indian government has attacked pharmaceutical patents with increasing aggression. In March 2012, it issued its first “compulsory license” for a kidney-cancer drug made by Bayer AG. A compulsory license allows firms to make generic copies of drugs supposedly still protected by patents in exchange for a licensing fee set by the government. The patent holder has no say in the matter.

Later that year, the Indian government revoked Pfizer’s patent on Sutent, which treats gastrointestinal tumors and advanced kidney cancer. No other country has taken such an action.

And in early 2013, India’s Supreme Court denied patent protection for Glivec, which is used to treat leukemia, despite the fact that it continues to be protected by patents in almost every other country.

To date, India has issued compulsory licenses or revoked patents for eight advanced pharmaceuticals.

Back on January 14th, the New York chapter of the Copyright Society hosted a debate between junior law school student Derek Khanna and MPAA Vice President of Legal Affairs Ben Sheffner.

The video has been posted on YouTube.

It's about an hour long, and it's worth a watch. It's a civil discussion, though I think the substantive arguments in favor of strong copyright protection trump Derek's rather facile arguments.

And I forgive Ben for botching our name <g>.

The discussion ranges from the politics of copyright to the economic importance of copyright. It's worth a watch.

House Speaker John Boehner has pretty much said that immigration reform is dead, and the main reason seems to be that the Republican Conference has no confidence that the President would faithfully execute the law that resulted from whatever legislative compromise that might arise in Congress.

Congress might require certain border security tests to be met, for instance, before allowing immigrants with legal status to begin applying for citizenship, for example. But the President might just blow off the border security requirements, as he has blown off any number of legal requirements during his term.

So here's where we are: Our President only selectively upholds the laws passed by the Congress. The normal response in our system to such an abrogation of the office of the Presidency would be impeachment, but since there is no will in the Congress for impeachment, we have reached the point where Congress cannot legislate because it doesn't have confidence that the President will faithfully execute the laws it passes.

This is a sad state of affairs.

All legislation is the result of trade offs and compromises. But if we know in advance that the President will pick and choose elements of the law to enforce or ignore, compromise becomes impossible.

The other normal response in our system would be for Congress to simply refuse to fund the Executive Branch until it begins to comply with the laws Congress passes. But there is no will in Congress to do that, either.

Much of this is the fault of letting the Executive Branch grow too large and have too much power. In a limited government as envisioned by our Founders, you could defund the Executive Branch for 3 months and people would hardly notice. But when you've given the Executive Branch such extensive control over the economy, defunding it means virtually shutting down the government.

In case it wasn't clear enough that the Government Class is in the business of using government power to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers, this idiot spelled it all out for you:

“These transactions are the largest opportunities for people to make money off of government, and so we want to make sure that everybody is included,” Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, said. “It’s a lot of money. It’s enough for everybody. Folks should make sure everybody is included.”

If you don't think corrupt management and Government Class self-enrichment can't turn Chicago into another Detroit, you're kidding yourself.

Lots of stories in the news about prices for Super Bowl tickets dropping for various reasons. Here's one.

Believe it or not, there's a policy angle to this: For those of who believe that markets create efficiencies and are the best way to allocate scarce resources, it's important for us to maintain secondary markets for things like event tickets, and to make sure when you buy a ticket, you have the right to resell it.

We wrote a paper on this topic a few months back, which can be found here.

Last night's State of the Union address, which even many among the Talking Left seemed to agree was a pointless execise, struck me as an exercise in misdirection.

The President started off talking about teachers spending extra time with students, autoworkers working hard, farmers, doctors, fathers and mothers and soldiers. The theme seemed to be "the real state of our union is in our hearts," and it was an attempt to divert attention away from real, empirical measurements of how well we're doing, which is pretty awful.

Consider:

As an early opponent of network neutrality regulations, it’s tempting for me to characterize as a victory today’s DC Circuit Court decision throwing out some of the FCC’s network neutrality rules, and indeed it is a victory—in part, and for now. It’s true that the court threw out the most onerous rule on anti-discrimination, while also tossing out a symbolic anti-blocking rule that market proponents understand was completely unnecessary.

But the Court agreed with the FCC on its authority to regulate broadband services, which means Verizon lost on its core assertion that the FCC had no statutory authority to regulate broadband networks. This is underscored by new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s triumphalist reaction to the case. Everyone spins the results of important court decisions such as this, but the early social media reactions that “Verizon won and the FCC lost” were an uninformed oversimplification.