Mossoff: FTC is Threatening Property Rights
Years of FTC reports and litigation have shaped patent law with and without Congress - Watchdog.org
“There has always been a tension between the antitrust laws and patent law,” Adam Mossoff, co-founder of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property and professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, told Watchdog.org. “[A]ntitrust authorities have historically been very skeptical [of innovative companies] and have tended to find so-called monopolization activities when in fact it’s just the evolution and development of a new market that never existed before.”Mossoff and others worry that the commission has undermined property rights, threatening companies’ incentives to invest and innovate and encouraging foreign countries to disregard IP protections, all the while basing its enforcement actions on theoretical injury to consumers, rather than demonstrated harm.[...]"Caught up in a 'moral panic' over IP, the FTC is trying to remedy uncertain consumer 'harms,' Mossoff said, while threatening innovative companies’ research-and-development-driving revenue streams. By calling the stability of intellectual property rights into question, the FTC could undermine the 'web of commercial transactions, thousands of commercial transactions' that go into every smartphone, ever car, and many more products. Those commercial webs depend, he said, on companies knowing whose IP is what, and what it’s worth."
Obamacare: Repeal and Replace Should be Two Separate Processes
We should debate all of these replacement ideas on the same day we pass Repeal, but we will have to separate the debate into at least two different bills because there is no consensus with leadership on replacement. While the vast majority of Republicans have come out in favor of the principals of our replacement bill, some in leadership have offered starkly different ideas.Republican leadership wants to keep several variations of ObamaCare:1. Leadership wants to keep ObamaCare-like subsidies to buy insurance but rename them refundable tax credits (families will be given up to $14,000 dollars of other people's money)2. Leadership wants to keep the ObamaCare Cadillac tax but rename it a tax on the top 10% of people who have the best insurance.3. Leadership wants to keep the individual mandate but instead of mandating a tax penalty to the government they mandate a penalty to the insurance company (can it possibly be Constitutional to mandate a penalty to a private insurance company?)4. Leadership wants to keep $100 billion of the insurance company subsidies from ObamaCare but call them "reinsurance". (Why? Because insurance companies love guaranteed issue as long as the taxpayer finances it!)Conservatives don't want new taxes, new entitlements and an “ObamaCare Lite” bill. If leadership insists on replacing ObamaCare with ObamaCare-lite, no repeal will pass.
Well said Senator Paul.
Video: Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth
Stephen Knott talked about his book, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth. In his book, Mr. Knott questions the accuracy of the historical accounts written about Alexander Hamilton and examines the Founder’s legacy. Mr. Knott also highlights the Broadway musical “Hamilton” and its impact on restoring Alexander Hamilton’s reputation.But the BookWhistleblowers of Corrupted Climate Science Speak out
Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.[...]None of the billions spent on research amounted to anything — none of the models proved reliable, none of the predictions were borne out, none of the expected effects materialized. The Arctic ice cap hasn’t disappeared, polar bear populations haven’t declined, hurricanes haven’t become more common, malaria hasn’t spread, temperatures haven’t continued to climb. What did materialize was fraud after fraud.[...]Likewise, a much heralded claim that 97 per cent of scientists believed the planet was overheating came from a 2008 master’s thesis by a student at the University of Illinois who obtained her results by conducting a survey of 10,257 earth scientists, then discarding the views of all but 77 of them. Of those 77 scientists, 75 thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produced the 97-per-cent figure that global warming activists then touted.