property rights

Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Most people assume government police are tasked with stopping robbers, but a little-known legal fiction effectively allows the cops to become the robbers.

The infamous Kelo decision which turned the “public use” clause of the 5th Amendment into a “public benefit or a revenue enhancement clause” is but a tip of a dangerous iceberg.

There are some people who simply, bizarrely do not like intellectual property. Some are full-blown Leftists – who do not like private property at all. (But don’t you dare try to take for the Collective the smart phone on which they’re Tweeting their disdain for private property.) Others are to varying degrees small “L” libertarian. Who somehow bizarrely delineate between physical property (which they’ll protect) and intellectual property (which they won’t). Who would have arrested a thief leaving Tower Records with an armful of CDs – but who is even as I type downloading-without-paying that exact same music.

While Scalia’s time serving on the Supreme Court influenced a wide range of issues, his critical analyses and carefully crafted opinions on environmental issues had an outsized impact on environmental policy and law. Scalia’s vote was often the difference between protecting individual liberty against attempts to expand government power and rulings that would have imposed the misanthropic wishes of radical environmentalists on the public.

In today’s edition of the Heartland Daily Podcast, Isaac Orr, Heartland Research Fellow for energy policy, joins H. Sterling Burnett to talk about his newly released study on the impact of frac sand mining – Social Impacts of Industrial Silica Sand (Frac Sand) Mining: Land Use and Value.

The World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Council (short for “Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights”) will meet next week in Geneva. At this meeting, representatives of “least developed countries,” or LDCs, will request that they be exempted from having to enforce pharmaceutical patent rights for as long as they remain classified as LDCs.

In a welcome show of bipartisanship, the U.S. Senate took a significant step in the direction of freer global trade in April. The Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 (TPA), cosponsored by Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), is designed to fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a landmark trade agreement currently under negotiation by the United States and 10 other Pacific Rim countries.

The Internet ecosystem just added a new tool to preserve the property of rights holders even while encouraging greater use of broadband. The Motion Picture Association has announced the launch of a new search engine called WheretoWatch.com.

A fundamental fallacy of our time is that democracy is the open-sesame to peace, freedom, and prosperity. The political events surrounding what was called the ill-fated “Arab Spring” a couple of years ago was a based on the idea that “democracy” would solve all the problems of any society. But democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.

It is a rare occurrence when Hollywood produces a film that neither glorifies the welfare-warfare state, nor vilifies capitalists and businessmen. Yet that is exactly what Marvel Studios has managed with the Iron Man series. In the character of Tony Stark we see the pinnacle of the capitalist fantasy: an ingenious businessman who values property rights and self-defense, and who does not compromise those fundamental rights in the face of government intimidation and force.

The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unlawful and unreasonable search and seizure. Yet that protection is being slowly eroded away. Thanks to the “War of Drugs” and the “War on Terror” government, at the state and federal level, has worked alongside the courts to gradually diminish the range and force of the protections that were meant to be inviolable rights of all citizens.

In a little “frontier” community in northern New Mexico, a national property rights battle is playing out with huge national implications and almost no one knows it is taking place. The outcome of two lawsuits that are pending against Mora County and its Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance have the potential to impact an individual’s ability to use and profit from his or her own land—not just in New Mexico, but from coast-to-coast.