It has been a very impressive year for the Associated Press. A few months ago, Julie Jacobson of the AP published tragic photos of a US Marine after both of his legs were blown off in Afghanistan. Not only did she receive a verbal whip lashing from the Obama Administration, but for a brief moment, a respected and mainstream media outlet exposed Americans to the graphic and utter horror of war.

While scanning over the New York Times today, I was pleased to see that the AP is now currently investigating the corporate food giant Monsanto, accusing them of

using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Monsanto has had a long history of bullying their way around the country and the AP should be commended for adding to their laundry list of sins. But despite the article’s claims, Monsanto’s excesses are the products of state intervention, not capitalism.

Monsanto owns patents on the genes of nearly 90% of America’s soy and corn products, and when these seeds eventually blow onto neighboring smaller farmers, Monsanto sues them for a violation of their intellectual property “rights.” They have even sued farmers for saving Monsanto’s patented soybean seeds.

Monsanto uses its government-granted monopoly to intimidate and violate the true property rights of its neighbors, which exposes intellectual property (IP) for the misguided policy that it is.

Human beings have inherent rights in their bodies and in their homesteaded property (the manipulation of matter) that can never be violated. These rights come not from God or governments, but from our reason, and as social beings who depend on each other for survival, enforcement of these rights is essential for cooperation. As the great Ayn Rand put it:

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.

IP law, however, creates artificial scarcity out of a non-scare entity (ideas) by giving individuals a government-backed monopoly on its use and distribution for an arbitrary amount of time. This protection violates the rights of other individuals by putting restrictions on how individuals, like the farmers against Monsanto, use their property.

There is also virtually no evidence suggesting that intellectual property law encourages inventions, creation, and boosts the arts. In fact, when examining the record of anarchic or near-anarchic market societies and institutions (like medieval Iceland and common/merchant law), property rights were better respected, peaceful commerce expanded, and technological innovation flourished; and all of this without the government club.

Monsanto is an all too common feature of the US economy: a statist creature that benefits from  patents, licensing, and farm subsidies to strangle its less politically-favored competitors. It also doesn’t hurt having one of their former attorneys, Justice Clarence Thomas, upholding plant patents in the highest government court in the land.

Luckily, supporters of organic and local farming are starting to wake up and realize that their industry would be far better off in freer markets, liberated from the government’s controls (whether indirectly through IP or directly through subsidies) that allow the strong to legally prey on the weak.

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For more of Robert’s work, please visit his Libertarian Examiner blog.

Last Thursday, the House Finance Committee, by a vote of 43-26, voted to approve an amendment to finally audit the Federal Reserve.

As Rob and I discussed in an earlier roundtable podcast, the Paul/Grayson amendment is attempting to audit the Fed, which would mean a public disclosure of all its most recent economic activity, especially what it has done with TARP funds.

Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post sums up the importance of this vote very well.

The measure, cosponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), authorizes the Government Accountability Office to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the Fed’s opaque deals with foreign central banks and major U.S. financial institutions. The Fed has never had a real audit in its history and little is known of what it does with the trillions of dollars at its disposal.

It may seem like a small battle that has been won, but what this vote can possible represent is the slow, but necessary, exposure of the Federal Reserve, which is one of the, if not the most, corrupt government institutions in the US.

Created in 1913, the Federal Reserve is a quasi-private bank with virtually no oversight that has the ability to control the flow of credit (through the manipulation of interest rates). By lowering interest rates, the Fed’s policies create an economy drunk on credit, and many businessess or ventures that would have never been started suddenly start popping up all over the place. When this artificial bubble pops, as it did in 2008 (and in 1929), the painful bust ensues.

This expansion of the monetary supply is essentially inflation, which is a hidden tax, directly harming the poor and middle-class the hardest. In almost 100 years, the Fed-induced inflation has caused our money to lose almost 95% of its value.

The Fed is also a tool of the schemers and central planners that always tend to gravitate towards DC. Without a central bank that can literally create money out of thin air, wars would have to be funded through direct taxation, which might cause many more Americans to grab pitchforks when handed the bill for empire. Welfare, too, becomes much easier to fund when there is no limit to the goodies that can be spread around.

The existence of a centralized bank whose strings are pulled by the government is absolutely incompatible with a free society. Karl Marx once wrote that there are two crucial things to destroying a market based economy: the levying of an income tax and the centralization of credit into state hands. As a firm defender of free markets and the sovereignty of every individual, the very existence of the Fed is an institutionalized evil that I oppose unconditionally.

So it’s no surprise then that all of the influential Beltway types are opposing this amendment. From the war-mongering “conservatives” at the Heritage Foundation to former Wall Street crooks Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, the DC establishment is shaking.

The Paul-Grayson bill, with over 300 trans-ideological co-sponsors in the House, will hopefully be the first of the Federal Reserve’s many corrupt bricks to fall.

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Fore more of Robert’s work, please visit his Libertarian Examiner blog.

To hear the story while standing on Wall Street, our troubles will soon be over.  Barely a year after the “Great Recession” began, the perpetrators of the first global financial meltdown seem to be doing alright.  The Dow again reached the psychological milestone of 10,000 points.  Goldman Sachs reported they have tripled their profits in the past year.  And the unwieldy big-risk, big-reward mergers and acquisition business seems to be back after a long and noticeable absence.

Wall Street seems to be headed to a very merry Christmas this year after the humbug holiday they designed.  It’s a turnaround nothing short of pure miracle.  Many predicted Wall Street wouldn’t survive the winter, let alone the year.  The resurrection of that financial Lazarus proved that money can buy miracles.  The going market rate is about two and a half trillion dollars.

However, for millions of Americans still out of work, this miracle on Wall Street is not the holiday season heartwarmer they are going to flock to theatres to see.  The spectacular reports of stunning profit and rebounded value have yet to translate into jobs for the double-digit percentage still unemployed.  While growth has returned to 37 metro areas, the hiring outlook for states like California, Ohio, Michigan and Rhode Island remain bleak and, to make matters worse, unemployment benefits for many are about to run out.

If it were even possible for the American taxpayer to be *more* fist-fucked after last year’s bailout of Wall Street, it seems a year later we went from elbow- to shoulder-deep.  The unique and unprecedented lengths we went to save their necks – requiring the federal government to flush dump trucks of money onto Wall Street’s problem -  were sold to us as in keeping with our best interests.  We *had* to give them the bank, they told us, otherwise we were going to be using our currency for wallpaper and lining up our children in bread lines.

And now, the same people who said we were in such extreme crisis, are now ready to collect the biggest bonus payout ever recorded. What did this stimulus stimulate, apart from the bank accounts of the same irresponsible hoods that got us in this mess?  A year after we inject cash into “shovel-ready” projects, were are the great public works that should be employing the taxpayers who bore the brunt of the mortgage crisis?  And where is Obama’s Treasury Department with a pair of uniformed officers and handcuffs for each of these villains who ripped off an entire country this year?

They are likely already planning their Christmas vacations.  Before they ship off for their Maui holiday in your Hawaiian shirt Santa Claus suit with a fat sack of presents we bought, perhaps they could toss us another lump of coal on the way out.  For Christmas’ sake.

A new currency has emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area.  A metropolitan area among America’s most ravaged, the city’s unemployment stands at 10.7% in August.  This year it is easier to get laid off than laid (which, for this town, is pretty damn severe).  In such desperate times, people strive to extract value from all their assets, even the most unlikely ones.  And with the 1 October beta launch of the latest shit-hot product from Google, those unlikely assets include free invitations to beta web software.

Google Wave invites have become the new currency of San Francisco.

As of this writing, there were no less than eight nine ten ads soliciting Google Wave invites on the Bay Area’s Craig’s List.  $75 seems to be the most frequent asking price for the invites, with no offer lower than $40.  And what’s more insane, is that they are moving.  One post in Santa Clara reported selling three for $40 in less than three hours.

Update: 12:45pm
As of now there are still 4 left.

Update: 2:40pm
There are now only 3 left.

Update: 3:20pm
There are now only 2 left.

But who are these people selling someone else’s free software for fairly serious cash? I found out by contacting four of these sellers posing the same question:

“Do you think it is kind of a dickhole move selling Google Wave invites?”

The responses were revealing.

James A. was asking for $40:

People are willing, apparently, to pay even more, so I don’t really. If it’s worth that to people, why not sell it?

Albert N. wanted a whopping $75:

Nope, just trying to make a buck from something I don’t need – kinda like the folks who scalp event tickets.  What do you think they’re worth?

I’m pretty sure Korey L. told me to go fuck myself:

If you don’t want it don’t buy it. =)

But it was Brandon L. who was the most honest of the bunch, fessing up to the true motivation folks are flooding Craig’s List with Google Wave ads:

Yup, it probably is in some circles.  But, seeing as how I was one of the fortunate ones to get the invite first, and there is a recession going on, and I’m just trying to put my kids through college, I’m selling it.  Thanks for playing.

When two MIT students sent a camera into space that took photographs of the curvature of the Earth, NASA bureaucrats were hopefully beginning to worry about their jobs. The most eye-opening fact about this incredible scientific achievement is that Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh spent only $150 on what it takes NASA billions to do.

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

Just as importantly, these pictures of the Earth didn’t require confiscating a part of anyone’s income to do so (unlike NASA). These two students paid for this entirely out of their own pockets, which provided the incentive to find a way to cut costs. Their launch also didn’t pollute the environment or subsidize pointless studies, as NASA launches tend to do.

Defenders of NASA claim that it the program essential for the development of new technologies. But commercial markets are far better at inventions and breakthroughs because their research is designed to provide a product or a service (and make a profit). Telstar I, the world’s first telecommunications satellite, was a product of AT&T’s drive to provide a better communication service (only later to be used by the Defense Department). The telephone, personal computers, the Internet, Velcro, Tang, Tempur-Pedic mattresses, hand-calculators, and the hundreds of products created from the advantage of integrated circuits and semiconductors; all of these have advanced our lives not by the coercive taxation of a government program, but through the mutual benefit of buyer and seller.

So what’s the point of NASA again? It’s just one of the federal government’s big, tremendously expensive fireworks shows, like those buzzing Blue Angels. When NASA fires rockets into space or lands a billion-dollar golf carts on Mars, it’s a big, public display. It is objective and visible, “there it stands!” Beyond these modern-day pyramids and castles are the subjective costs, spread around the entire population through taxation. How many goods and services weren’t provided to the marketplace so that we could watch a bureaucrat walk on the moon? We will never know.

It’s time to get rid of NASA. Immediately we would save at least $17 billion a year, and scientific advancements will begin to finally address our needs and concerns in a competitive market. If NASA were de-funded, the private sector could begin to deliver services that are actually valuable to consumers, things NASA barely emphasizes, like employing robot satellites that gather information about the Earth to supply the high commercial demand for more accurate weather forecasts and geological assessments. Robot satellites can also accomplish most of the things that more expensive manned flights do, but when a government is in charge, costs don’t matter.

As two MIT students have proved, NASA is a series of expensive publicity stunts, distractions from the costs of its wastefulness. It’s a shame Americans are still forced to pay for this nationalistic PR.

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For more of Robert’s work, please visit his Libertarian Examiner blog.