All Posts Tagged With: "innovation"

The End of Medicine: Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

Social change can be revolutionary, sudden, and swift, but more commonly it moves at a glacial pace. Yet glaciers work great change, and great damage, given enough time. There has been much talk of people leaving the medical profession if government further bureaucratizes health care. But the odds are great that there won’t be any [...]

24Mar2010 | | 6 comments | Continued

How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition

Any consideration of “intellectual property rights” must start from the understanding that such “rights” undermine genuine property rights and hence are illegitimate in terms of libertarian principle. Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed [...]

23Sep2009 | | 14 comments | Continued

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives

Without private property rights, people have incentives to overuse an asset. Conflicting private property rights, on the other hand, create a “tragedy of the anti-commons” in which resources are underused, according to Michael Heller. In The Gridlock Economy, he treats the reader to a compelling array of examples of the tragedy of the anti-commons in [...]

19Aug2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

Do Patents Encourage or Hinder Innovation? The Case of the Steam Engine

Today one of the most controversial issues in economic policy is that of patent law. Is a patent just an extension of property rights to the realm of ideas? Or is it an unwarranted interference by the government into the rights of individuals?

1Dec2008 | | 37 comments | Continued

On Baseball and Capital Markets

Donald F. Grunewald is an attorney. Baseball is a game of rules. These rules are not excessively complex for the simple reason that overregulation and overspecification would hamper the enjoyment of the game. How so? Consider the placement of the defensive players. Other than the pitcher and catcher, who must stand at particular locations while [...]

1Jul2008 | | 2 comments | Continued

Economists and Scarcity

In a world where concerns about the environment and resources dominate political discussion and, for people like Al Gore, are a “generational mission [that gives] moral purpose” to our lives, thinking clearly about these issues is crucial. Economics can contribute to this discussion by providing its perspective on words such as “scarcity” and “resources,” which [...]

1Jun2008 | | 1 comment | Continued

A Sparks Sampler

Editor’s Note: John C. Sparks, who died on March 27, 2005, served on the board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education for many years. In the mid-1980s, following his retirement from business, he served a term as FEE’s president. In memory of this friend of FEE, we reproduce some of what he wrote [...]

1May2005 | | 0 comments | Continued

Government Should Fund Science?

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, is beside himself because the 2005 federal budget contains a 2 percent, or $105 million, cut for the National Science Foundation (NSF). As W. S. Gilbert would say, “Oh, horror!” This, Friedman predicted in his December 5, 2004, column (“Fly Me to the Moon”), will condemn [...]

1Mar2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894

We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, [...]

1Sep2004 | | 100 comments | Continued

Healers Under Siege

Contributing Editor Doug Bandow is a syndicated columnist and the author and editor of several books. He is co-editor of Wealth, Poverty and Human Destiny (ISI, 2003). The Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug to combat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That’s good news for cancer patients in America and around the world. But you wouldn’t [...]

1Nov2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Fallacies of Distributism

Thomas Woods holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College (SUNY) in Brentwood, New York. In certain disaffected pockets of the political left and right, more and more voices can be heard on behalf of an economic and social system known as distributism. According to [...]

1Nov2003 | | 3 comments | Continued

China’s Forgotten Industrial Revolution

We live in a world that has been shaped by a process that began some 250 years ago in northwestern Europe. We often call it the Industrial Revolution because one of its most dramatic features was the appearance of industrial manufacture with the rise of the factory system. However, this was only one element and [...]

1Jun2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

Saving the Environment for a Profit, Victorian-Style

Pierre Desrochers is research director at the Montreal Economic Institute (www.iedm.org). In the mind of the 21st-century environmentalist, Victorian cities and towns evoke images of black coal smoke and unsanitary conditions. For most people of the time though, they were one of humanity’s supreme achievements. Not as clean as the countryside, no doubt, but thriving [...]

1May2003 | | 2 comments | Continued

Unsustainable Development

Sound economic thinking lies in accounting for the secondary results of private and government actions.1 This observation is not limited to economics. It can be applied to all areas of human study, including political philosophy. Once learned, that lesson can prevent a great deal of human hardship. Take, for instance, a concept promoted by left-wing [...]

1Mar2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

From Crystal Palace to White Elephant in 150 Years

Mention the ill-fated Millennium Dome to almost any citizen of Great Britain and you’ll get an earful about one of the greatest government sponsored, scandal-ridden fiascoes of all time. Costing more than a billion dollars, it was a white elephant that bled red ink from its public opening on New Year’s Day 2000 until it [...]

1Mar2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

More Free Than Ever?

In a November 2002 Washington Times column titled “Americans Enjoy More Freedom Today Than Ever,” Jonah Goldberg stated, “Today, we worry desperately about our personal and political freedom even though we are more free today than at any time in our history.” Attempts to measure freedom are inherently difficult because we must weight our freedoms [...]

1Mar2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

What Happened to China?

Asked to pick from among the world’s nations the one with the best prospects for years ahead, an early fifteenth-century futurist would have bet on China. All the indicators pointed to it as destined to outpace every other civilization on the planet. Among the things the futurist might have noted was Chinese technology. In 1400 [...]

1Aug2002 | | 2 comments | Continued
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