Chronic Murmuring

"which would presumably would include intellectual property rights;" this sounds like a departure for you. Have you changed your views on this?

Ludacris is from the A-T-L...Mystikal is from Nawlins. Suck de heads offa dem der crawfish.

I know way too much about rap.

Ludacris is from the A-T-L...Mystikal is from Nawlins. Suck de heads offa dem der crawfish.

I know way too much about rap.

Right. I knew that. I used to live in New orleans, then moved here, and I couldn't remember which of those guys from which place. I just knew they were from places where I'd lived.

I'm glad you know more about rap than me, Russ.

Matt - I actually have been rethinking my entire position on that lately. I think I still more or less agree with everything I used to say, which is essentially the idea that ideas cannot be stolen in any sense at all. But, I think I also now wonder if IP laws might be valuable from the perspective of society. I guess when we were going over externalities in class last year, I began to think about how the private benefits of inventing do not equaly the social benefits of invention. Therefore, a case might legitimately be made for something to be done to help increase those marginal private benefits. Monopoly rights like patents or copyrights could be one such way. Direct subsidies to pharmaceutical companies might be another. Also, privatization of the FDA might also be a way. It currently costs a pharmaceutical firm north of $500 million to get a new drug to pass FDA approval, which is the main reason why those monopoly rights are so important to that industry. But if there was possibly a more efficient monitoring institution that did what the FDA does (like Underwriter's Laboratory), then it would lower the marginal costs of research and design, and could decrease the length of time for patents for that industry. The sooner that the monopoly rights do expire, the market for that good becomes competitive, and the price will most likely fall substantially (it's obviously inflated under a monopolist scenario) to the marginal cost of the drug (which will be very low) and the supply will increase. But as it is, the monopoly right needs to be long enough such that drug co. invest in r&d. But it might be possible to decrease the length of the patent life without decreasing r&d if you can make the FDA tests not nearly so costly for the firm.

So, in other words, looking just at that industry, I think I agree that the chemical designs for the drugs themselves are not property. But I'm also around 90% convinced that in a free market, the socially optimal amount of drugs will not be created because the private benefits to firms is not equal to the social benefits. And since there are these positive externalities, there's a reason for the state to help the process along.

In other words, in my mind, it's a question of efficiency and not ethics. The laws are valuable because they help balance the benefits from drug creation against the marginal costs. But I don't see any idea-creation as somehow "belonging" to the inventor/creator. It's an important point to me, but to most, I guess it's probably not.

So I definitely support the expiration of these laws at some point. I think their life should be long enough to encourage some certain amount of drug creation by firms. But, I would like to hear more about making the FDA more efficient. If you could make the FDA far more efficient - reducing the time it takes for drugs to pass inspection, reducing the costs to firms, whatever - then you would lower the marginal costs of research and design. This would mean that patents could be shortened, and yet firms could still continue to invest at the same level as before. Yet, society as a whole would benefit because the drugs would enter into a competitive environment much more quickly, which would drive price down to marginal cost and increase quantity supplied.

As far as music goes, I think it's generally a much different situation. I'm less sympathetic to that as I am to the reasons for why pharmaceutical companies need monopoly rights, mainly because I think the copyrights are too restrictive there since they do not expire for a long time. And that becomes very inefficient at a certain point. John Frame has this great article on copyright law in which he complains about the hurdles he has to go through, as a music minister, each week to get music for worship services. He has to deal with the CCL all the time, who charge churches royalty fees for using each hymn and song. I suspect - but I haven't thought about it - that these laws could be relaxed and it would enhance the market, rather than hurt it. But I need to think about it some more.

Ludacris went to GA State, I think. I saw something that he was on where he mentioned that his posse is pretty much made up of all his college friends, which I think is kind of funny because he has this whole street thug persona but he actually is middle class and has a college educated posse.