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The House of Representatives has just taken a major step toward reducing the U.S. trade deficit: ending the crude oil export ban. 

In 1975, when gas lines were long and voters’ tempers were high, Congress passed legislation prohibiting U.S. crude oil exports. The country had seemed to peak its oil production a few years earlier and was on a gradual crude oil production decline, and Congress wanted the country to keep every drop it produced. 

We'll, here's some good news: The House voted today to lift the senseless and outdated ban on U.S. crude oil exports.

And while this may seem like a no-brainer, there are any number of no-brainer pieces of legislation that Congress isn't bothering to move, so this is progress.

There is no argument against allowing U.S. crude oil exports except for an extreme anti-fossil fuels mindset, which is as unrealistic as it is wrong.

Here's a piece written by IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews on why the ban is outdated and should be repealed.

It's important for the Republican Congress to be passing this kind of commonsense legislation that the majority of the American people support, even if they suspect President Obama is going to veto it.

Let him. Force him to explain his rationale to the American people. Get him on record, and force all other Democratic candidates and elected officials whether they agree with the President or not.

One of the things that is so frustrating people right now is Congresses not bothering to pass good legislation because of the threat of a veto. In this baseball playoff season, Republicans need to stop playing wiffleball and start playing hardball.

You could hardly have a more fluid situation than what is going on right now with regard to future Republican House leadership, so this blog may be out of date before it’s finished. But as I’m writing, several people are maneuvering for leadership positions, and the general grassroots mood is that they want a “real conservative.”

(Of course, what a “real conservative” is differs literally from activist to activist. If they agree with you down the line on every single issue, they are a “real conservative,” and if they disagree with you on anything, they are a RINO. Apparently. Which is the biggest problem the conservative movement has right now. It’s principles, people. Anyway . . . )

One candidate who some feel is the “real conservative” for Speaker of the House is Jason Chaffetz from Utah. Chaffetz is an interesting case. Is Chaffetz the “real conservative” option?

Well, yes, the Obama administration doesn’t like Chaffetz, but that’s largely because he chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and thus has been looking into Executive Branch.

But conservatives mostly define themselves by their principles, and one of the pretty bedrock principles is constitutional federalism. On that front, Chaffetz is troubling, for at least two reasons.

Last year I was invited by Bill Watson of the CATO Institute to make the case as to why it is critically necessary for U.S. negotiators to insist on strong IP provision in our trade agreements.  Intellectual property-intensive industries account for about two-thirds of U.S. exports – it would be malpractice for our negotiators NOT to work to prevent foreign theft of American innovation.

(I think I got the better of my fellow panelists at that event—you can watch it and judge for yourself.)

The TPP negotiators are in Atlanta this week trying hard to work through the last few, toughest issues, and Bill is back at it again, this time arguing that the United States should not only allow, but in fact demand broad exceptions to copyright in the laws of our TPP trading partners.  This again proves what I said last year – that the TPP debate is not really about trade, it’s about people who want weaker intellectual property rights.  (Bill was kind enough to reference this piece of mine in his, which is always nice.) Ok, so let’s have that debate.

Public Citizen is highlighting a cancer victim who is protesting at the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) meeting in Atlanta.  

Public Citizen quotes the protester as saying: "When you have breast cancer today, you can’t wait 8 years or 7 years or 6 years for a treatment to become available or affordable. When you have cancer, even a one-year delay in affordable medicine can be a death sentence. That is why we call this proposed provision of the TPP a ‘death sentence clause.’  If it passes, thousands of women like me will die waiting.” 

We previously blogged about the new Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a voluntary agreement among advertising agencies and bureaus to address the problem of brand advertising on rogue websites that promote illegal and harmful content such as copyright piracy and malware. These rogue websites exist largely because they have been able to profit by attracting advertising dollars because of their high traffic volumes. The question has always been: Why would a company with a valuable brand want to associate their brand with such disreputable activities? The Trustworthy Accountability Group is set up to address this problem.

Last week, a major global advertising company, GroupM, announced that they will require all of their media partners (places where they place advertising) to receive certification from the Trustworthy Accountability Group. So this is a huge first step toward achieving the goals of the TAG.

You may be victimized today by those who are either economically ignorant or purposefully deceitful into thinking that good employment news was released today. In fact, you might even hear that the Federal Reserve has at last achieved one of its policy mandates of “full employment.”

Now, it’s true that economists do not define full employment as a zero percent unemployment rate. It’s actually impossible to ever reach zero percent unemployment, so economists have typically defined full employment as an unemployment rate of somewhere between 3.5 and 5 percent. [During the Reagan years, full employment was casually considered to be an unemployment rate of around 4 percent.]

So, with today’s announced creation of 173,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate of 5.1 percent, some are celebrating. But they are wrong.

In an interview with CTV News, IPI's Tom Giovanetti gives his assessment of Thursday night's Fox News Channel Republican debate. 

"It was a fabulous debate," said Giovanetti. "It showed how much energy there is on the Republican side."

Right now, literally as I type this, Australian trade negotiators are reportedly resisting U.S. demands for increased protection of pharmaceutical and biotech innovation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. They are no doubt motivated by the warnings of Australian academics and researchers that Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which the Australian government uses to control drug prices, will be weakened or undone altogether by extending the period of data protection for biologics, among other provisions.

The sky-is-falling warning from these academic critics of the pharmaceutical industry is that protecting the products of innovation will necessarily result in dramatic price increases, which Australia (and Australians) will no longer be able to afford.

Interestingly, Australian academics made this exact same argument in 2003, warning Australia about the treaty that was then being negotiated, the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA).  

I have before me a copy of a paper published by The Australia Institute, entitled “A Backdoor to Higher Medicine Prices? Intellectual Property and the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement,” by Dr. Buddhima Lokuge, Dr. Thomas Alured Faunce, and Richard Denniss.

The paper predicted that the Australia-U.S. FTA would result in dramatic increases in the cost of prescription drugs in Australia.

“This paper examines five leading medicines near the end of their patent lives in Australia. Based on PBS expenditures for these drugs in 2003, we estimated the potential cost of likely changes to IP provisions under the FTA to the PBS and Australian taxpayers. The costs accrue over a four-year period from 2006 to 2009. . . . The ‘central case’ estimate is that the additional cost of these five drugs alone, as a result of IP provisions in the FTA, will be more than $1.12 billion with a lower estimate of $850 million and an upper estimate of $1.56 billion.”

But they were wrong then, and they’re likely wrong now.

A piece in today’s Dominion Post (New Zealand) finds that warnings about higher drug prices as a result of free trade agreements are baseless, as least as far as facts are concerned:

“We can't assume medicine costs will increase if some patents or Intellectual Property protections are extended. Speculation about rising medicine prices under the TPPA mirror concerns Australians voiced over the U.S-Australia FTA. However, since signing the FTA in 2005, Australia's spend on pharmaceuticals has remained stable and the rate of expenditure has decreased. In 2006 Canada's pharmaceutical spend decreased after implementing an eight year data protection period. Similarly, after Japan increased data protection in 2007 to eight years, pharmaceutical spend decreased and health care spend increased by the year 2010.”

On Monday, a writer named Fran Quigley had a piece published on the Foreign Affairs website that was highly critical of some of the provisions in drafts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

We’ll get around to dealing with the arguments in Quigley’s FP article in a separate blog post.

Quigley’s title of “Clinical Professor of Law in the Health and Human Rights Clinic” at Indiana University tells us much of what we need to know. If you merge health and human rights, you have already decided that access to every bit of the latest health care technology available is a human right, and if it’s a human right, it’s your right to have it for free, or for something very close to free.

That makes Quigley an activist more than an analyst of the provisions of the TPP. A look at his cv demonstrates that Fran is a social justice crusader, a proponent of the labor movement, and a neighborhood organizer type.

For the past two years, Chairman Goodlatte of the House Judiciary Committee has been conducting a comprehensive review of the copyright system, mostly through a series of topical hearings. Many of us who defend copyright against the barbarians saw this process as a threat--as an opportunity for copyright critics to vent before Congress and demand wholesale changes to copyright law. Fortunately, and rather surprisingly, that’s really not what happened. In the course of the hearings, very few aspects of copyright law were revealed as being out-of-step with today’s marketplace and current technology.

In fact, in a recent letter, the Internet Association itself said that existing U.S. copyright law “has adapted well to Internet era.”

One thing that DID come out of the hearings, however, is the need to modernize the Copyright Office itself. Even though the copyright industries now contribute more than $1 trillion to U.S. GDP and comprise 6.7% of the U.S. economy, the Copyright Office itself is still housed as a subset within the Library of Congress, and is widely recognized to be underfunded.

A few weeks ago Americans for Limited Government Foundation published a paper by Dr. J. Wesley Burnett of the College of Charleston on "Moving to a Free Market Agriculture Policy." It's a great, short survey of U.S. agriculture policy, especially of recent policy changes, and the role of U.S. agriculture in global agriculture markets. If you're looking for an accessible way to get up-to-speed on federal agriculture policies, this paper is a great means of doing so.

I was drawn to the paper because it also touches on sugar policy reform, something I've written on a couple of times recently for IPI. The paper endorses a multilateral approach to solving the sugar subsidy problem, as I have also suggested.