Hearing that sound in a local library always annoyed me, especially when it came from one of the librarians. I'm always hearing on the news how libraries are struggling. They should be thankful. A group of young people, like my friends and I, chose one as our haunt. I live in a middle-sized town on the west coast.  I'm not going to give you any more details than that, because I don't want you to come looking. I'll be honest, I don't think the reason my friendship group is now me, myself, and I is unique to our manifest destiny-era ramshackle wooden local library. I'm holding out hope that it is, though, so I'm going to do everything I can to make sure nobody comes snooping around. This is a warning, not an invitation. We started hanging around and eventually in the library last year. With the protests and lockdowns, traveling into LA or one of the other large cities didn't have the same appeal. It certainly wasn't an enticing prospect for our parents. So either by parental law or not wanting to drive a few hours just to get your windshield smashed. We spent the summer of our sophomore year finding things to do in our sleepy hometown. Since the bowling alleys and cinemas were closed, or members only for the time being, the local library ended up being our port of call. There were five of us, me, Jackson, Henry, Beth, and Laura. For context too, we were your typical nerdy geek bunch. I'm aware that the library isn't the first choice for many folk my age, but we weren't cool enough to go driving around the desert or find somewhere to drink liquor stolen from our parents. What we were cool enough to do is get really interested in any of the niche topics found in the old dusty volumes on the shelves. Week one was Peruvian horticulture, week two, the naval advances of 19th century Holland.  However, despite how dry these topics might be, I'd give anything to have another Friday night PowerPoint showdown at Laura's or hear Jackson tell me about the raunchy extramarital affairs of an obscure architect only famous for designing some kind of bridge in the 1790s. I miss them. It's only been a week, but I miss them all so much. It was the evening before one of the aforementioned PowerPoint lecture and pizza evenings that everything went wrong. The topic was the history of female satisfaction. Laura had picked the topic for that week, and since she was dating Jackson, this made for a lot of jokes in Uendo and over excited teenage whispers and giggling, shh, the librarian was not happy. Her harsh hisses pierced my eardrums every 20 minutes or so. Genuinely, we did try to keep the noise from our little corner of the maze of shelves to a minimum. There's only so much self-control board teenagers can exert, however. This is your last warning. After a few hours, we all looked up to see the aging librarian. She was stood above us, arms crossed, her raised in face locked in a scowl. Keep the noise down. I won't be. With that, she stomped off back into the labyrinth of spines and pages. What did she mean by that? Laura said, one eyebrow raised. I think she means shut up, Laura. Jackson replied, grinning.  I know that, Einstein, but why did she say I won't be able to tell you again? Does she think we're going to go somewhere? That is a weird way to say it, I shrugged. But she is old, like way old. I think she's been the librarian since my dad was a kid. Jackson stood up, whatever. She should just be happy someone's actually used in this place. I gotta take a leak. He strode off, following the librarian into the dusty gloom. He's going to read all the notes he's been making, I bet. Henry said, grinning and pointing to the book he'd left on female anatomy. Laura went red, and we all howled with laughter. It was loud. Too loud. What the? We heard Jackson, even above our mirth. In an instant, we stopped laughing. Jackson? Laura called out. Her trembling question was answered. As soon as her lips closed, the response came from everywhere, all at once. And it wasn't Jackson. The voice was thin and sharp, somehow faint in my ears, but a deafening roar by the time it reached my brain. It seemed to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. A homeless sound ringing from the gaps between covers and unopened pages. A horrible sound, far worse than any reprimand from the librarian. It sounded more mechanical than human, like a thousand typewriters scraping together to make an imitation of speech. Jackson. Beth and Henry both said this time, Laura had stood up, fists clenched. Again, the hiss rolled from under shelves and out of the floorboards. It was louder this time. Longer. It scratched my ears and caused spots of light to crackle at the outermost edges of my field of view. Beth started to cry. Still no response came from Jackson. Jack? Shhh. This time I was the one ushering silence. I raised a finger to my lips. The other held in the air, telling the others to wait. As soon as we stopped, so did the noise. One moment the air was electric with malicious static, and the next, you could have heard a pin drop. We waited for a few moments, not saying a word. I could hear nothing except the occasional sob from Beth and the thudding of my heart and my ears. Then from the shadow maze of shelves, there came a soft thump, like something heavy being dropped to the floor. Or someone. Now, as you can probably guess, my little group of ragtag misfits wasn't what you'd call brave. If we were, we'd have spent our summer somewhere much less tame than the library. However, while not brave by any measure, I was the most adventurous of the group. It's the reason I was the only one out of Jackson, Henry and I that didn't get too much hassle from the athletic kids or stoners. Yes, I may not have gotten into trouble for fights or cigarettes, but in detention they still had respect for the guy that nearly blew up the chemistry lab and hacked the school computers to run Minecraft back in fourth grade. I mentioned this not to brag, but because I don't want you to think I abandoned Laura, Beth and Henry. One of us had to go and find Jackson after hearing that thump. I was the only one it was ever going to be. They couldn't have moved even if they'd wanted to. I gave Laura a nod and put my fingers to my lips again, hoping the message was clear. I slowly crept forward towards the shelves.  But it was only Beth sobbing and shaking her head at me slowly. I didn't want to show her I was as scared as she looked.  Laura took her hand and I continued onwards. I tiptoed between shelves for what felt like hours. I read once that adrenaline can distort your sense of time. Even factoring in the fact that my fighter flight response was an overdrive. I was still walking much, much longer than I should have been. The longer I walked, the stranger and more unfamiliar around me the shelves appeared. The gray steel modular shelves gradually gave way to warped wooden units. The books they contained had odd titles. By authors I either didn't recognize or knew by their infamy outside of literature. The expendability of man by H. Himmler, trends in upholstery and leatherwork by E. Geen and lust and lucrativity. My story by H. Weinstein. The fonts on the spines were jagged and odd. And after a while the titles paid no attention to punctuation or capital letters. Some didn't even have an author. Burn them by a guy. Ha ha ha, the children are bleeding. And more. The weirder the books and shelves got, the more the light changed. The library wasn't well lit to begin with. Maybe shutters and decades of dust did a good job of keeping the West Coast sunlight out and the strip lights overhead hadn't been replaced since the 1970s at least. Well the lights that were overhead I should say. I looked up when I realized that the ceiling above me and the yellow flickering lights that hung from it had gone in their place. There was nothing above me stretched a void and emptiness that faded to inky blackness barely a few inches above the shelves. A cloud of impenetrable shadow rolling above this unfamiliar section of the library. However, I was not in darkness. If anything, the place I was in now was better lit than the library I knew. I glanced down at my hand holding it above my arm frowning. I looked down and turned around on the spot heart rate rising with each shuffling step. I had no shadow neither did the shelves even underneath them was lit as if someone was shining an industrial strength flashlight in every spot at once. It was a harsh white light with no source one that made things look sharper and more in focus than they should. As I said, I was adventurous and I had a rebellious streak, but I was never brave. Beth Henry Laura. I called out breaking my cardinal rule. My voice trembled and cracked. I could feel my bottom lip start to wobble. I'm not ashamed to admit that Jackson I stammered. There was no response. Not even from the presence that had hounded us just after Jackson vanished. Not that I was complaining. There was nothing but silence. Librarian lady. I hazarded. Still nothing. The silence seemed to press down on me stifling my words before they could echo farther than a shelf or two. I couldn't even hear a ringing anymore. I could hear my heart pumping in my chest. But I realized there was no rhythmic rushing of blood against my eardrums. I was about to turn and run as fast as I could back to the group when this place where no human should tread decided to respond. I heard it a few shelves over an unmistakable wet squelch of something large and organic falling from very high up. Jackson. I'm proud of myself for the fact that in that moment concern for my friend safety superseded my growing terror. I skidded nearly to a crash after hurling myself towards the intersection between rows. I turned in the direction of the thud ears both straining for further sounds and trying to ignore the fact my shoes were silent on the threadbare carpet. I stumbled into the shelving crossroads just in time to catch a glimpse of something or someone striding purposefully away down another alley of oddly titled books. An alley that was in the exact direction the sound had come from. I didn't have time to take in too many details as I followed despite my limbs better judgment. I just saw a thin leg in dark gray suit trousers and overly polished black boot and the swish of a dusty dark velvet coat tail. I was relieved and still am to have found the bookshelf aisle where the squelch had come from was empty. Now that I know what I just chased, I count my blessings that the others must have picked that moment to start making noise. That's the only reason I can come up with for for why it wasn't waiting for me when I came around the corner. As it was, I was still alone, at least I could see where the sound had come from. There was a book laying face down and open on the floor. I'd never seen a book so large or thick in my life. The cover was moist and reflections from an unseen light danced across its slick surface as I edged closer. I could see that the pages were wet too. They were dripping. A dark puddle was forming. If I didn't know better, I could have sworn it moved every so often. No, not moved. Breathed. It was almost imperceptible, but at regular intervals the spine rose and fell a fraction of a fraction of an inch. I dismissed the observation at the time, but, well, let's just say the 2020 vision hindsight brings isn't always a welcome thing. Once I was a few steps away, I could see the leather bound volume was indeed leaking. Just enough to give it a coat of foul smelling grease that pulled around it. I didn't have too long to inspect this though. Only a moment passed between my reading the title and me running back towards the others, tears streaming down my eyes and the loudest scream I've ever mustered tearing my throat apart. The skin bound book was called The Sanctity of Silence by Jackson Bridger. I only knew one Jackson Bridger and his voice sounded far too much like the shrieks that followed me as I charged down the impossibly endless rows of books. I must have been running impossibly fast because I found myself back at our corner in only a few minutes. If I wasn't already sobbing, I would have started then. All three had gone. There was, however, another damp, seeping book on the ground. This one was smaller than Jackson's and the words scarred into the cover read volume control for dummies by L. Eastley. I don't need to spell it out for you. I'm sure I knew an L. Eastley Laura. I don't know what compelled me to bend down and open the front cover. Probably some twisted counterpart of the same curiosity that led to the bully proofing chemistry lab incident. The wetness on the leather felt greasy, a substance that reminded me of both oil and phlegm. That wasn't what immediately grabbed my attention, though. The first thing I noticed was how warm the material was. I know warmth is usually calming, but at that moment it was exactly the last thing I wanted. From a book whose cover reminded me of human skin. When the cover fell open and the first page revealed itself, I nearly vomited. It was Laura's face. Well, a picture of her face, I hope at least. Her once attractive features were twisted and crushed as though she'd had her head violently forced against a photocopier.  The picture, it looks so real, realer than a photograph. I don't know how to explain it, but it looked clearer and more realistic than if she'd stood in front of me. Shaking, my shameless curiosity moved my fingertips across the image of my missing friend. What color remained in my own face drained. The page was bumpy, rough, although barely. If I wasn't touching it, I'd have had no idea it wasn't flat. It also didn't feel like paper. Paper isn't that soft. That warm doesn't have fine hairs only detectable by the lightest touch. I nearly screamed when I felt the light tickle of an eyelash. I didn't have time to, though. The picture of Laura opened its eyes. The next few moments are a blur. I must have dropped Laura. No, I can't think like that. The book that looked like Laura, because the next thing I knew, I was in the entrance way to the library, the normal entrance to the normal library. I was on my backside, covered in tears and the oily phlegm from that book. But I was in the real world.  The old woman glared down at me, shh, she hissed. I was about to wail in protest to tell her something horrible that happened to my friends that she needed to run when my words caught in my throat. Something dripped on my exposed ankle, something thick, greasy, and warm. I felt my gaze slowly pulled upwards to the ancient woman above me, drawn with horror to what she clutched between her frail arms. She was carrying two books.  The faint folds and stretches around her hands, wriggling and twitching too clearly to ignore. What made me scream, though, were the titles? I never found out what Henry's volume was called. Seeing the words, I never told him I loved him. The life in quiet times of Beth Stanford was enough. I've never been so glad to see sunlight. I threw myself out of the double doors before the librarian or the thing she was working for had a chance to punish me for my loud transgressions. As you can guess, it didn't take long for the police, not to mention Jackson, Henry, Beth, and Laura's parents to start asking questions. I haven't been able to answer them. I haven't been able to say a word for a week now. The only reason I'm not a suspect in their disappearance is the state the local sheriff found me in. By his reckoning, no guilty person would turn up at a police station coughing up their own blood and terrified. They haven't found any bodies or the books. I haven't written down what happened until now. Nobody in my town would believe me anyway. I wouldn't have. What I have been doing since then is research. This is why I'm begging you to stay away, not just from my library, but any of them. You're probably wondering whose leg I saw before I found the book about Jackson. I was wondering the same thing, despite the trauma my curiosity had to know. It was when I found an article in the archives of a local paper from the early 1900s that I got my answer. It was a piece from 1902 titled Local Library Brings Literacy to Ex Prospector Town. There was a photograph in the article, a photograph of a building I recognized instantly as the same library my friends and I made the grave mistake of going to. Something in one of the windows caught my eye. After mucking around with a contrast and brightness in Photoshop for a bit, I saw what it was. Instantly I knew I was looking at the thing responsible for my friends never leaving that library. It was a person, although it was impossible to tell if they were male or female, broad shoulders and wide hips framed an impossibly narrow waist. It was wearing a dark gray suit and velvet overcoat, vintage by today's standards, but decades ahead of where fashion was in the 1910s. In its spindly arms, it held the stack of thick volumes bound in a material I recognized instantly. But the thing's face, it made me snap my laptop shut. It didn't have a face. It didn't even have a head. Its neck extended almost twice as far as any human neck I'd seen. It ended not in a head, but in a massive face sized ear, an ear that was facing something in the room, but turned towards the screen in the few split seconds before my laptop ended up smashed below me. I've not done any digging since then. I don't know, and I don't want to know. I'm currently in the process of starting trauma counseling and speech therapy. There'll also be funerals to attend once they finally give up searching. As I said, this is supposed to be a warning. Day away from libraries. Because in every old photograph of one I looked at in my first therapy session, I could clearly see the silhouette of the librarian of the other library, waiting in the shadows for anyone that disturbs their books and their silence.


Let's sing a song you don't hear every day It's your old friend calling again Hello, sweetheart, it's Mylon Ed Mcconnelly, a Latin lamp man again Have you heard this one lately? There she goes on her toes All dressed up in her Sunday clothes My best girl Just like sweet Rosie O'Grady She's just a sweet little lady She calls me up now and then And she calls me down only when I get too smart Since we've been acquainted The church is newly painted I guess the preacher was wise from the start What a pal, what a gal Just as sweet as frivolous sal My best girl Play a little for your finger Play for her, play for her She calls me up now and then And she calls me down only when I get a little bit too smart Since we've been acquainted The church is newly painted I guess the preacher was wise from the start What a pal, what a gal Just as sweet as frivolous sal My best girl Yes, and all the gals are my best gal And speaking of the best Do you know how they give out ribbons at the county fair For the best in this and that, huh? Well, they ought to give out a prize for the best store In courtesy to customers in the county Why, do you know how our store would walk off with the first prize ribbon every time? It's easy for us to be courteous You know you see because our customers are always so happy with the things they purchase at our store That it makes us happy just to watch them feel unhappy A lot of happy in there, but it's good isn't it? And one of the greatest little creators of happiness we have in our store Is our selection of Aladdin electric lamps with whip-a-lights shades All they're beautiful, beautiful, so smart looking, so lovely So, oh, pardon me, here I go getting carried away by those wonderful Aladdin lamps again You come on in our store, honey, and you'll be so carried away by our Aladdin lamps You'll carry away an Aladdin lamp, I bet you Yes, sir, and now for our hymn In the land of faithless day I is the city four squared It shall never pass away And there is no night There shall wipe There is no death No pain And that's all for today, honey This is smiling Ed McConnell, the Aladdin lamp man, saying bushels of love And thanks for listening Be with us next time, cause we'll be back to sing our song You don't hear every day When we all come calling again


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The Johnson County Trail be holding a snow moon h 24th. Being outside at n your perspective on the can seem a little bit fo it's very surprising how can provide and you wind a lot of the same things just in a different way. offers out patient med for addiction, counseling accepting Medicare and al is hard. Regret is harde care. Pikeville, Whitesp 5660. Find them on Face is the last full moon of wants to take advantage o people out to enjoy an ev the stars alongside a mo late. Anyone is welcome but remember to bring a and a flashlight. We do a little bit more of a c not even start a hike int the payoff is in getting snow moon, glistening acro I think it will be well w later saturday night acti will begin at 8 PM on the saturday, february 24th. you can visit the johnson committee, Facebook page.


Internal Revenue Service IRS tax news. Get an automatic six more months to file. All taxpayers can use IRS free file to request an extension, but first an attempt at a joke I apologize in advance. The IRS is trying to take down my business again, but I won't go silently into that good night.  That'll show them. IR2022-71, March 29, 2022, Washington. The Internal Revenue Service reminds taxpayers that if they're unable to file their tax return by this year's April 18 deadline, there's an easy online option to get more time to complete their return. That's basically filing the extension here. A couple things to remember. The reason that we're filing the tax return and paying the tax is to avoid the sticks that the IRS wields and those sticks have to do with penalties and interest. There's two different sticks that we're trying to avoid that they can hit you with here. One is for the late filing penalty and then the interest imposed on that and the other is the late payment penalty and the interest imposed on that. So if you have a filing requirement that you're going to be extending but you owe money at the same time, that might then avoid the stick and reduce the penalties for the late filing, but they also still want their money on time. Remembering that how the tax returns basically work or how the IRS wants to get paid is, for example, in tax year 2021, they want to get paid during the year, which most people do with the W-2 withholdings. We shoot to withhold a little bit more, not just because we want to get a refund at tax time, but because we want to avoid the stick of penalties and interest for late payments or under payments. If you're making actual payments to the IRS, you might have that last payment that's going to be made for tax year 2021 and 2022, for example, and just note that if you file an extension, that doesn't mean, of course, that the IRS doesn't want that payment. You also might be asking, well, what if I switch to a Schedule C type of business and I don't know how much I owe them because I haven't got my bookkeeping straight and I don't have the paperwork to basically figure out how much I owe. The point is that we need to estimate it because they want to get paid early. They want to get paid as soon as possible, so we've got to estimate in some way how much we owe them, again, to avoid the penalties and interest. So taxpayers who need more time to complete their return can request an automatic six-month extension to file. An extension allows for extra time to gather, prepare, and file paperwork with the IRS. As however, taxpayers should be aware that an extension to file their return doesn't grant them an extension to pay their taxes. They should estimate and pay any owe taxes by their regular deadline to help avoid possible penalties and interest. They must file their extension no later than the regular due date of their return. The free file and extension form for free individual tax filers, regardless of income, can use IRS free file to electronically request an automatic tax filing extension. So you can go to the free file to do the extension process. It should be a pretty easy process typically to file the extension. The fastest and easiest way to get an extension is through IRS free file on irs.gov, irs.govv, irs.govv, v for victory over the tax preparation. Okay, taxpayers can electronically request an extension on form 4868. There's a link to that here. Filing this form gives taxpayers until October 17th to file their tax return to get the extension. Taxpayers must estimate their tax liability on this form and should timely pay any amount due. Get an extension when making a payment. Other fast, free, and easy ways to get an extension include using the IRS direct pay, the electronic federal taxpayer payment system, or by paying with a credit card or debit credit card or debit card or digital wallet. So if you owe money when you're filing the extension, then you can basically just pay them with the online kind of formats, the direct pay and so on and so forth. And as long as you assign it to the proper place, meaning an extension for tax year 2021, that in essence will automatically file the extension as well. So if you owe money, that's another fairly easy way that you could basically process the payment and file the extension in that format. There's no need to file a separate form 4868 extension request when making an electronic payment and indicating it's for an extension. By the way, you might be asking, well, what if the IRS owes me money? I expect a refund. Then the extension is not as big a deal to the IRS because if you don't file and they pay you later, then you basically gave them a loan. That's not as big a problem for them. If you owe them money, it is a problem because of the time value of money. They want their money sooner. So the IRS will automatically count it as an extension. So important reminders on extensions. The IRS reminds taxpayers that a request for an extension provides extra time to file a tax return, but not they're emphasizing this again. They already said this, but not extra time to pay any taxes. Payments are still due by the original due deadline. Taxpayers should file even if they can't pay the full amount by filing either a return on time or requesting an extension by the April 18th filing deadline. Avoid the late filing penalty, which can be 10 times as costly as the penalty for not paying. Taxpayers who pay as much as they can by the due date reduce the overall amount subject to penalty and interest charges. So obviously they're incentivizing people to pay if they can pay what is due when it is due by assigning penalties and interest. So you would be better off due to penalties and interest paying what you owe when it is owed. But if you can't, then you want to go on an extension. And if you can't pay and you need to file like a payment plan type of thing, then you want to set that up because again, those types of things help you to be in compliance. And that's what the IRS is trying to incentivize. And therefore you're going to be reducing penalties and interest to do those kinds of things. So the interest rate is currently 4% per year compounded daily. The late filing penalty is generally 5% per month. And the late payment penalty is normally 0.5% per month. The IRS will work with taxpayers who cannot pay the full amount of tax they owe other options to pay such as getting a loan or paying by credit card may help resolve a tax debt. Most people can set up a payment plan on irs.gov, irs.gov, gov for victory over the taxes to pay off their balance over time. Other automatic extensions. Certain eligible taxpayers get more time to file without having to ask for an extension. These include U.S. citizens and resident aliens who live and work outside the United States in Puerto Rico get an automatic two month extension to file their tax returns. They have until June 15th to file. However, tax payments are still due April 18th or interest will be charged. Members of the military on duty outside the United States and Puerto Rico also receive an automatic two month extension to file. Those serving in combat zones have up to 180 days after they leave the combat zone to file returns and pay any taxes due. So if you're in the military and in a combat zone, thank you for your service. The iris is gracious enough to extend the due date a little bit until your life is in danger, which is nice. So details are available in publication three armed forces tax guide. There's a link to that here. When the president makes a disaster area declaration, the irs can postpone certain taxpayer deadlines for residents and businesses in the affected area. People can find information on the most recent tax relief for disaster situations on the irs website. The deadline to submit 2021 tax returns or an extension to file and pay tax owed this year falls on April 18th. Instead of April 15th because of the Emancipation Day holiday in the District of Columbia. Taxpayers in Maine and Massachusetts have until April 19th. What? What's with that? Maine and Massachusetts having until April 19th. Apply it to the whole country. Why don't you like you did with the Emancipation Day? That's what I say, but no one listens to me. Whatever, but in any case, if you're in Maine and Massachusetts, you got until April 19th, 2022 to file their returns due to the Patriots Day holiday in those states. And there'll be a link to some of this stuff here. There'll be a link to this in the description.


The Latter-Day Liberty Podcast, episode 19. Hello everyone, welcome back to the Latter-Day Liberty Podcast with your hosts, Matt Kent and Daryl Portzline. Once again, we are here talking about a very interesting topic. Today, we're going to be discussing intellectual property and intellectual property rights and how they're protected and maybe some of the, I don't know, problems that come along with that. In order to talk about that, we've actually got Stefan Kinsella with us. Stefan Kinsella is a practicing patent attorney, a libertarian writer and speaker, director of the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom and founding and executive editor of Libertarian Papers. We really do appreciate him being here. We want to welcome him to the show. Welcome Stefan. Hey, glad to be here. Awesome. Okay. So, digging right in, like I mentioned in the intro, we wanted to talk about intellectual property and so, first off, before we get started, I did want to make sure that we're all starting off on the same footing on the same page. So, when we talk about intellectual property, not necessarily how you and I might view it, but how it normally is referred to, what are we talking about when it comes to intellectual property? Well, okay, so we have, this is such a hard topic to discuss in a short timeframe and I've struggled with it over the years. If you do a short version of it, people aren't going to get it. Intellectual property, most people think of it as, so most people just think of, you know, to them, laws in the background, laws there to protect what's important in life, right, in a legal sense. Property rights, land, cows, I don't know, cars, contracts, owning your wife, whatever. Just a joke, just a joke. But and so, most people also understand that the intellect is part of what makes us human and what's important, right, so the way we create things, we create wealth, the way we have transformed the environment is through our intellect and that involves intellectual creativity and innovation, right, scientific innovation, engineering innovation, machines and also artistic and other types of creations and the law has sort of, for various reasons, which we can go into if we need to, but has grown up to protect those types of interests as well and people naturally think that the law should protect things that are like economically valuable and important to them. So intellectual property, I would just say from the common person's point of view is a subset of the things that property rights or law protect and intellectual property primarily protects inventions, which is covered by legislation called patent law and it covers artistic or creative, artistic creations, right, which is covered by copyright. There's other things called trademark and trade secret, but that gets us too far afield. So most people sort of think those are subsets or types, maybe weird types, but types of property law or property rights. But, you know, from the perspective of libertarians who've looked at it closely, we have, or at least I have a lot of problems with it. And by the way, I'm a patent lawyer, as you guys know. So I actually practice this. I've been practicing since 1992 or 1993 as a patent attorney. So I know the field very well and, you know, I tried for years to find a justification for what I was doing for a living. And I wasn't satisfied with Ayn Rand's justifications and other people's justifications. And so I searched and searched and searched and searched.  And that's because this is actually contrary to property rights. And we can go into that if you want. But my view is that intellectual property is nothing but a restriction against competition, it's a protection, it's protectionism, and it's completely contrary to justice, property rights, the common law, free markets, everything. Contrary to what most people think about it. Yes. And let me latch on to kind of something you said there. And maybe you can elaborate a little bit. So you're actually, it sounds like you're actually advocating that intellectual property is not really property at all.  Right. Well, over the years, as I've discussed this with thousands of people, I've come to think that that way of putting it is like, like the question is not what's property. So we have to go back to why we're asking the question, what's property? What do we mean, what do we mean by the word property? Um, the word property is just, I mean, if you think about it etymologically, it just means a characteristic or a feature of something. It's a property of that thing, right? So I think what happened was we, we recognized in the dawn of human history that there's the possibility of conflict over scarce resources. And some of us sort of becoming civilized and we preferred cooperation to violent conflict. So there naturally emerged norms or rules that determined who could use a given resource when there's a conflict. So you, if there's a conflict over a resource, there's a rule that says, who's the owner of that thing? Who is the proper owner of that thing? Who's the proprietor of that thing? That's where the word property comes in. Who's the proper owner of that resource? So the word property really means who's the proper owner of a thing? And then we naturally just start using casually in informal speech, the word property to refer to the thing. But in reality, the right way to say it is here's a resource that people can have a conflict over who has a property right in that thing or who has, who is the owner of that thing. So to call the thing, the property is a little bit confusing. Because when you ask the question, you just ask, you're saying, is that thing property or not? That's never, the question is never is a thing property. The question is, is this thing something people can have a contest over? And if so, who's the owner? Who's the property owner of that thing? The question is never is, is it property? And so the objection to intellectual property is not that ideas and recipes and innovations and inventions. The objection is not that they're not property. The objection is that to try to recognize them as property in the law all always necessarily undercuts the existing property rights of owners. And the reason is that let's just take a patent, which covers an invention, a new idea, a new way of doing something, a new mousetrap, or let's take a novel by Shakespeare or play by Shakespeare or a novel by, you know, some modern author. J.K. Rowling, for example, the Harry Potter author. These ideas or patterns are simply information, but it always has to be stored or represented on an underlying substrate or physical medium, because information can never exist in an abstracto like by itself. It can't just be free floating. It has to be in patterning of an underlying material thing. That's how information exists, even if it's in your brain.  So information can never exist on its own. It's always an in patterning of a thing. But that thing is already owned because it's a scarce resource that someone has ownership of, according to normal property rights. So if you were to say, for example, if you own a red balloon, you own the red balloon. But if you say, because you own the red balloon, you own redness. Well, then that means that you own everyone else's red balloon or everyone else's red thing in the universe, right? So that would give you property rights in their things that they've already owned. So the fundamental problem with intellectual property is not that the things represented are not property, is that they're not scarce resources. And when you try to assign resources in them, you cannot do it. But what you end up doing is reassigning resources and already owned scarce things. So it basically intellectual property always amounts to a type of theft, a type of institutionalized theft or reassignment of resources. Could you elaborate on that just a bit more? Like I mean, I've I've looked into this as well. And I and this is something that actually very much intrigues me. How how does that end up being a theft? You know, but because like so. So let's let's take I ran for I ran is one of the premier defenders of intellectual property. So she would say, for example, that the reason you should have the intellectual property or patents and copyrights is because the foundation of rights is the creation of material values or values. OK, now that's one argument she has. Now, I think that's completely flawed and we can go into that if we have time. But she also says, like in Galt's speech, she has a Howard John Galt saying no man may initiate the use of force against another person. So that's like a foundational libertarian principle. We all sort of we recognize that fundamentally the only way to violate individual rights is through force. Now, force is an actual material thing, right? Force means the physical manipulation of a scarce resource because force can't manipulate ideas. I mean, force only manipulates physical things. Just think about the the non aggression axiom principle or the non initiation of force principle that even I ran propounded. She said, you cannot hit another person. So what she's saying is, as long as you don't physically manipulate or invade the borders of someone else's body or the things that they've acquired, then you're not violating their rights. So she recognized and I think libertarians recognize that really in the end, when you're talking about rights, OK, rights are something that are enforceable in the law, in other words, forces in there for a reason because physical force is used to actually wrestle control over a given resource. So if let's take us, let's let's transport it to the modern realm. I sue you for infringing my copyright. OK, now, I don't really want your ideas. What I want is your money. So I want to use this law as an excuse to take your money. So our dispute is really over your money. Or if there's a patent lawsuit, OK, if I sue you for infringing my patent, like let's say I'm selling EpiPens and I'm selling them for a thousand dollars a piece, even though it cost me a dollar each to manufacture, I'm selling them for a thousand dollars each because I have a monopoly because the law, the patent law says no one else can make an EpiPen. OK, this is actually slightly reflective of an ongoing suit right now. Although there's the FDA is involved as well, but just an example. If I if if I'm selling these pins for a thousand dollars a pop, I'm making a monopoly profit. If someone else starts making a competitive EpiPen with their own factory, their own resources, I can use the force of the courts and the force of the state and the force of the law to make them stop selling that pin. So I'm basically assuming control of their factory. In other words, I'm assuming a property right. What I really want control of is there is their factory. I want to have a legal right to veto how they use their factory. And in the law, that's called a negative servitude, which is type of property right. So I'm using the patent law to assume control of how they use their own property. And as I said in copyright, I'm using copyright law. I'm using the force of the state and the courts to use state force to tell people you can't make a copy of this movie. You can't make a you can't make a sequel to this novel. You can't publish it on your own paper. So I'm basically using these laws as an excuse to assume control over how they use their own resources that they that they owned. So that's why I say that patent and copyright law and actually all forms of intellectual property law are disguised forms of theft because they basically reassigned property rights from the natural owners to people that the state grants intellectual property property rights to. OK. And and and I really like that that example that for me, that that clears up quite a bit of the I don't know if I would see the theoretical side, but you know, the explanation behind it. So when this comes up and I've had these discussions with with quite a few people, including a friend of mine that's that's very liberty leaning, you know, but that whenever it comes to this kind of stuff, I feel like with intellectual property, we talk about patents and we talk about copyrights. And when I talk about getting rid of those, the argument for those things usually turns utilitarian, right? There's there's always the reason is is is for the benefit of everybody else. And the first thing that usually comes up is, you know, how would we incentivize people to invent things? I mean, you look at the Wright brothers, right? They came up with the the the airplane specifically for the patent. Anyways, what would you say to that? Well, there's so many. So the problem with people that are in favor of IP is nine tenths of the time, they really don't even understand the IP. They're in favor of like they'll even the proponents of it will confuse trade secret trademark copyright and patent. And I understand that because it took me a while to learn it myself as a specialist, but they're in favor of a system they don't really understand. And then if you point out the numerous obvious injustices, I mean, I can give you a thousand examples. They will just say something like so they have two responses. They'll say, well, I'm not in favor of that. OK, or they'll say, well, even regular property law has injustices. So they're almost saying, well, yeah, it sucks, but what you're in favor of sucks, too, so the whole world sucks. So there are they don't really have a positive argument. Their argument is that, well, I don't know. So if you say, well, OK, if you're if you're not in favor of the current system, what exactly are you in favor of? And they'll say, well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. And you're like, OK, well, I don't know what I'm defending. And then they'll say, well, I'm not in favor of state law legislation. I'm just in favor of natural IP law. And I'll say, well, what does that look like? They say, I don't know. And I'll say, well, but you're defending the current IP system, which has all these injustices, which you every one I come up with, you agree is unjust. They'll say, I'm not in favor of the current IP system. And they say, well, let's abolish it. They say, no, I don't want to abolish it. So there are against people that want to abolish it. So that means they're effectively in favor of it. OK, so that's kind of the the the framework for how you how how these people approach this matter. And even though I don't understand it, I want to get people that will enforce it for me. Something I don't necessarily I can't explain, but I do want. Yeah, so they say they're not in favor of it, but there are against people that want to abolish it. And yet they don't have a theory of the system that would be better. So I would say there's a couple of problems with their argument. Number one, with a utilitarian argument. Well, there's so many problems, we can only go into a couple. There's the Austrian argument that values cannot be cardinally measured, right? Values are subjective and they're not interpersonally comparable. And even if they were, it would be unethical to take money from A to give it to be just because B would be better off. They still theft. I mean, that's kind of a fundamental ethical principle. So there's so many problems with it. But another problem is they don't have any evidence to back up their case. All the evidence that I can find, right, from done by empirical minded economists and other researchers is either ambiguous or they conclude we can't figure that out, right? Or they just say, we don't know. Or we kind of think it's our intuition. They have no evidence, really. All the evidence indicates that copyright and patent both severely distort and retard innovation. So all the empirical evidence we have is that at best it causes a lot of problems. So if you were just a pure, utilitarian, empirical minded person, you would have a heavy bias against intellectual property law. You would say, look, let's not restrict people's natural liberties to trade and compete and to have free speech and freedom of expression. And by that, I mean to publish books, to publish criticisms, to quote things, right, or to innovate, to build incrementally in other people's innovations or to compete with them, to do what they're doing in the market by having similar products. This is what we call the free market. So patent laws obviously restrict that and copyright laws obviously restrict what you can publish and what you can say and what you can perform and what tattoos you can have on your face. I mean, this is literally true. So just it seems like the obvious view of this is that it restricts liberty. So if you're at all liberty minded, then you would have to have an argument to overcome this. In other words, the burden proof is on you. And if your argument is utilitarian, there's just no evidence there. So that's less like the first reply to the utilitarian is to say, provide your evidence because the evidence I've seen is against intellectual property. There is just no proof and it's just common sense. How would give the government giving a monopoly to someone for 20 years over an innovation, which allows them to stop competition? OK, which obviously would retard people from innovating in that area because they can't sell products that they come up with in that area during the period of a monopoly. How would that even be expected to incentivize innovation? It doesn't. It simply doesn't. All it does is incentivize someone to reveal their secrets earlier than they otherwise would. That's called disclosure in the patent law in order to get a monopoly. But they're doing it to get a monopoly to have higher prices on products. OK, so that's one argument. The second argument, which is more fundamental, I would say is when someone says to me, hey, cancella, you're against patents, but what's the incentive to innovate without patents? Now, the presumption to their question is that the purpose of law is to come up with incentives for people to innovate to the to the optimum amount. I guess, I mean, my answer is I don't really care. The purpose of law is to protect property rights and to do justice and to solve disputes when disputes arrive and to let us live in cooperation and peace together. The purpose of law is not to ensure that there's the optimum amount of mouse traps in the world. Right. The purpose of law is not to ensure that there's the optimum incentive to innovate in the world. That's like a central planning type of you. It has nothing to do with libertarianism, nothing to do with free whites. I don't know why people even ask the question. So I actually get annoyed when people ask me, well, and by the way, most of the time, the questions are not serious. They're disingenuous. So someone will say something like, how am I supposed to make money as a novelist in your world? You know, like it's like it's a challenge. Like if I don't give them an answer, then they're going to be a favor of statism. Like, you know. And so but sometimes I'll say, OK, well, here's how a novelist can make money. You could you could do it, J.K. Rowley, that you could write novels. You could sell them on Kindle. You could tell your fan. You could build a fan base. And you could you could consult on movies by giving them an imprimatur. You know, you could say I have the sequel coming out. And if I get 10,000 people on Kickstarter, giving $10 each, you know, whatever, there's ways people could come up with. And so as soon as you answer the question, they'll say, OK, well, how am I going to make money if I'm a poet? In other words, they will never stop with their questions because they're not really serious about their they. They want a guarantee that whatever their vision is of the ideal society is going to be supported is very similar to the libertarian dilemma when people say, OK, you want to get rid of the welfare state. I'll agree with you. If you can guarantee that there will never ever be a poor person ever in your libertarian society is not taken care of. So they want to guarantee it. They want us to say, who's going to take care of the poor? And you say, well, charity is going to take care of them. And there won't be as many poor people because we'll be richer. That's not good enough for these people because they want a guarantee. But of course, there's no guarantee in the state because the state's going to collapse, right? And there's going to be poor people created by their policies. But they just want to think that they're in favor of a guarantee, right? It's the vision of the anointed. Self-congratulation is the basis of social policy. Right. There's kind of an unfair standard there. Definitely seems seems that way. Now, I kind of wanted to to make this a little bit more real because you actually kind of asked opposed, you know, kind of what a very common question and said that often these questions are disingenuous. I have a very similar question from a listener who actually just so happens to be my dad, one of our three listeners. And he is actually he is actually a musician and he he composes music on occasion and he hasn't really gone very far with that. But he said, you know, if I wanted to take composing more seriously and and write compositions and try to make money off of that, how could I possibly make money off of that? Right. People could just copy it for free. And so what would you what kind of at least what kind of ideas do you think could could help ease ease his mind on that? OK, well, there's a few things. First of all, I don't mind answering questions if they're like serious, like people just curious, like how would it happen? But if the premise of the question is unless you unless you show me a way that's guaranteed for me to make an income, then I'm not going to support what you're in favor of. Then they're not really in favor of liberty or justice, because their goal is to make sure they have a guaranteed income. I mean, it's like having an argument with someone who's on Social Security and you say, look, I'm a libertarian. I think we should abolish Social Security. They're like, well, how am I supposed to get my income? If I mean, that's not really the right question to be asking. OK, but I would also say the following things. Number one, empirically, and I think common sensically, we all know the truth is that most people create artistic works not for monetary profit. This is just the way the world works. People create and even even inventions, they do it for other reasons and they can profit from that in various ways. Second of all, in today's digital world, whether we have copyright law or not, there is piracy that is widespread. It is and this is one reason I'm against these laws is because they're unnatural. They're unnatural because you just cannot stop the spread of information, which is what these laws try to do, but they always fail. They have people that are victims of these laws, people that are in jail because they copyrighted too much, they pirated too much. But there's going to be millions of people that skirt these laws because it's just unnatural. So the point is, whether you have copyright or not or not, if you have a new innovation or a new idea, people will be able to copy it, emulate it, build on it and pirate it, whether there's copyright law or not. And in fact, of course, that's the movie, the movie studios, for example, and the book publishers face and the music industry faces this right now. As soon as they release a new song that's popular or a new movie, there are millions, if not billions of pirated copies available right away on the Internet. This is happening right now. OK, so whether we have IP law or not, this is a reality that the producers of this content have to face. So the question that your father is asking is basically if we didn't have IP law, how would what would we see? Well, we would see what we're seeing right now. We would see a world where copying is easy and you have to deal with that and you have to find ways around it. OK, now, in particular cases, music, production, novels, we can we can we can we can predict what probably would happen, which is that a novelist could do what I proposed earlier, like J.K. Rowling could write the first Harry Potter novel as an as a welfare mother, what she did on the subway or whatever she did. And then she gets a following. She sells them for ninety nine cents on Kendall and then people start pirating her. She makes five thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars. I don't know. But then she gets a worldwide following and she says, hey, all my million fans out there, I have a new novel out there. And as soon as I get, you know, one hundred thousand people to give me five dollar pledge to buy my novel, I'll release it. So she's got five hundred thousand dollars right there. And then five movie studios start moving in to make a movie version of the first novel, which they can do freely because there's no copyright. And one of them says, hey, I'll get more, more of her fans will come to my movie if she endorses it. So they offer to give her one tenth of the royalties if she reviews the script and endorses it so she can get deals that way. And then she can have novel number three and four and five. You know, a musician can obviously, you know, I just went to the Coldplay concert in in in Dallas, much to all of my friends dismay because apparently Coldplay is no longer cool. I don't know. I took my 13 year old there. I thought they were pretty cool. But I still like them. They prop, I think I estimated just by ticket sales, et cetera, for for like a three hour concert in Dallas, they probably made half a million dollars or a million dollars each that one night from purely performing on stage. Even if they had given their music away for free or it had all been pirated, they would have made a million bucks each in one night. OK, because of popularity had nothing to do with copyright. People want to see people perform live. So for music, people can perform live for novels. They can do sequels or they can do endorse the movie rights or they can get a job teaching English because they're a well known novelist. There's any number of ways you can profit. And this is just two examples. The problem is when you give answers to these questions, the answer the questions will be nonending because they will just turn to the next question. Well, what if I want to make origami bird figures with my paper clips? How am I going to make money off that in your world? I don't know. This is, you know, I can't give an answer for everything. I can just tell you that we should abolish patented copyright law. Yeah, and and and I think that personally, I have I mean, kind of like what you're saying that if you want to know what it would look like without these laws, it's kind of already happening. I mean, you just you cannot keep the innovation that's going on down. It's it's going to keep coming back. And I'm just I think that we need to I at least personally have a lot of faith in in the ability of I mean, entrepreneurs have been dealing with tough situations and figuring out how to monetize things for for thousands of years. And I think that they will will be able to continue figuring out ways to do that as the spread of information becomes easier and easier. Well, I think so, too. But I think we have to realize there are some things that is going to be hard to monetize and people will find it difficult to find ways to monetize. But you know, the free market judgment of that is you shouldn't be doing that. I mean, if you can't do something that turns a profit, just don't do it. Well, I'm going to say most of those things are probably hard to monetize now. Anyways, right? Like that. Well, of course, they're hard to monetize now, too. So the only way to monetize it, the way to understand the real implication of this IP view is that some advocates of it, some of the like some of the utilitarian advocates, like even like Bernie Sanders, number one and Alex Tabarak, a libertarian, they say that we should replace the patent system instead of giving people monopolies over their inventions, right? Which obviously harms competition and innovation. We should have we should let there be free competition and innovation. But the government should take tax dollars, give it to some kind of special committee.  But they're talking like $80 billion a year for medical innovations. Now, I'm a patent lawyer, so I understand that the patent system is very wide in scope and covers hundreds of fields of technology, medical devices of which is just one narrow slice. So if you take this idea and you extend it on a principal basis to the entire field covered by patents, in other words, if you say, OK, let's replace the entire patent system with a taxpayer funded reward system. OK, so you have to multiply this 80 billion, which is just for medical innovations by all the the entire circle, the entire pie of innovation that the patent system is designed to incentivize. We're talking like $20 trillion a year. I'm not joking. I mean, this is maybe even more. So it's like, you know, the federal governments, I mean, the United States GDP is 16 trillion a year. The federal government's tax revenues are about 4 trillion a year. We're talking 20 trillion a year or more to replace the patent system with sort of an efficient utilitarian version of it. Now, what does that tell you about the damage that the actual patent system is doing? It's probably retorting innovation by trillions of dollars a year. Right, because that's because that's what they want to replace it with. That's what that kind of thinking leads to. It leads to taxes and government grants of privilege and government grants of taxpayer money, redistribution of income. The entire thing is completely, completely. It's like the most antithetical thing to the free market you could think of. And yet these people, these hucksters, have been booed with us in the thinking that it's a property right. So they call it intellectual property used to be called, by the way, the patents patents originated in something called the Statute of Monopolies in 1623 in England and copyrights originated in the Statute of Ann in 1709. And yet you now have it called intellectual property like it's a natural property right, which is completely wrong. It's not a property right at all. It's not natural at all. It's completely a creature of legislation and completely the result of government attempts to reduce competition, right, to protect favored people from competition and to restrict freedom of press and freedom of speech through copyright law. See it now. And OK, and I I am totally when you've gone through some of these numbers, I've read I was reading another article the other day specifically about the medical license or the medical patents and stuff like that and medical devices and that alone as well. You've you've brought up in the past that, you know, it actually kills people because you can't get medications out in time for people that, you know, and it just I don't know that kind of stuff. Well, OK, let me interrupt real quick and you can continue. But I just listened the other day to the Yaron Brooke podcast. Yaron Brooke is like the leading objectivist guy after Leonard Peacock, I guess. And he had Adam Mossoff, who's the leading objectivist proponent of IP on and they had a whole episode just like in the last week or two on intellectual property. And it's the most it was like two hours of the worst. It would take me like 20 hours to do to Fisket, right? As like every other sentence was so bad, but in the middle of it, someone someone called in and they said, what about the EpiPen, right? So this EpiPen example, they said, oh, this guy brought the EpiPen and because of patents, he's raising the price really high. And so these guys start snickering and Adam Mossoff says something like, oh, well, the EpiPen, see, this is another example of people don't understand IP and they criticize it. He goes, the patent expired a long time ago. The reason that they can charge so much is because the FDA gives them a monopoly. So first of all, I'm not actually sure that he's right, there's no patent on it because I think there's an ongoing patent lawsuit. But let's let's assume he's right. What he's saying is what he's saying is we should criticize an FDA granted monopoly, but not the patent monopoly. It expired a long time ago. So during the first 20 years when there was a monopoly, that was OK.  So my point is the FDA and the patent system both combined to create monopolistic protections from competition, which cost prices to go up. And it does literally cause supply to go down. And it does literally cause deaths. And there are documented cases of people that have died because they can't get medicines because there is a limited supply because there's only one supplier and they can't supply enough in a given surge or whatever. Right. And I've got cases on my website at C4SIF.org, which documents some of this stuff. There's there's something called Fabry's disease, just FABRY, Fabry's disease. People have died because there's only one supplier of the drug and the FDA combined with patent protection has limited the production of supply in America. So people think this is academic. It's not just that it's not just you have to pay $15 instead of $14 for an ad deal or something. It's really causing restrictions of supply and causing people to die, like literally. This is awful. Now, this is awful. When you put it that way, I think you've got us convinced. So this will probably have to be our last question. But I wanted to get your thoughts on. On maybe maybe other. So taking us back to a definition of property or at least this idea of scarcity is important when we're talking about property rights. Yes. What about property that's not as tangible as things like land? But is still scarce in a sense. So the only example I can think about the top of my head is like radio frequencies. Your use of a radio frequency could interfere with my use of the same frequency. Is it OK to have a right in that kind of property? Or what are your thoughts on that? Well, I've written on this before. I'm I that's one of the more gray or difficult areas. Just like rights on the moon or rights in the atmosphere or rights in the ocean or air or airspace like, you know, where the where the airplanes fly, fly, things like that. But the the fundamental thing to recognize is that the ultimate issue, the ultimate function of property rights and the ultimate definition, ultimately, property rights is a property right is the exclusive right. Well, it's the right to exclude, actually. I we can't get into legal theory here, but it's not the right to use. It's the right to exclude other people from using. So for example, if you have a gun, it doesn't mean you have the right to use it because some ways that you could use it could hurt other people. It means you can stop other people from using it without your permission. Same thing with your body. You have the right to prevent other people from using your body. So ultimately, rights are negative. The rights to prevent other people from using a given resource that you could have a conflict over. Right. So ultimately, a property right is the exclusive allocation of the right to use or the right to exclude the use of a given resource over which people could have a conflict. If there's no possibility of a conflict, there's no purpose to a property right. So property rights are always, always necessarily some kind of indication of a who the owner is of a given right. OK, so when you come to the more gray area cases, the difficult questions like electromagnetic spectrum, what you asked about with a radio wave question like who can broadcast in a given area. The the law that has arisen in the common law in the Roman law has largely been based upon these common sense, more or less libertarian notions that recognize that look, we have a scarcity of resources. Sometimes we have a conflict and when we have a conflict, we have to decide who is the better owner of that resource. So we go to some kind of neutral tribunal, a court or a judge or an arbitral committee, whatever, right? And we try to find who's the best person that has the best claim to this resource. And we can come up with arguments for this. And that's all we can do in such situations. We can say, look, I inherited it from my father or I was the first one to use it or I got it by contract from this guy, but we come up with arguments, right? And then we try to do justice in this case. And over time, principles emerge that we call property law, right? Or property rights and these rights people recognize and they are guided by them in society and over time, they get more and more refined as people get more and more wealth and a more capitalist society and they have more and more money to afford to litigate ever more trivial disputes that they otherwise would have settled without any written description of, right? So over time, the law gets more and more granular and gets more and more refined. And if it's more, it's too egregious or people sense that the decision that has resulted in a line of cases, they don't like it. They can contract around it. At least they're aware of what the rule is in the given community. And they can say, look, I don't agree with this rule. Let's have a contract and let's agree to a different rule. So over time, and then the law recognizes the contracts people make because that's part of custom and part of a tradition and part of how people interact and that informs the way you interpret their their future dealings with each other. So over time, the law will deal with these things. To come back to your question, the common law in America was actually starting to develop a common law of property rights in the electromagnetic spectrum, which, by the way, was written about by two great objectivists, thinkers, David Kelly and Roger Donway, who are both friends of mine. And I know and it's called a Lezé Parler. You could look up this little monograph and they were explaining that in the in the early part of the nineteen hundreds, the courts were starting to develop property rights in this new. scarce medium and then the government intervened and created legislation and they created the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, and they just took over the whole thing and they have co-opted it in that way. So it was basically a wholesale expropriation of this entire field of property. So what we have now is not a representation of what we could expect to develop in a in a in a decentralized private system. What we had early in the nineteen hundreds is more of an indication of what we can expect. And so I ultimately am lean towards the way the courts were going, which is that if you are the first one to start using a given scarce spectrum in a given region, then you have a property right in that and other people can't interfere with your communication. Now, it's a complicated area, but that's kind of an indication of how I think it should be approached and would be approached in a private law society. So that's interesting that, yeah, the the market was already solving that problem before somebody else stepped in. It seems to be kind of the the running theme for the for the government as far as I I can see. But well, you know, Stefano, we really do appreciate you joining us today. And we this this has cleared up quite a bit for me. I will put another plug in there for your book against intellectual property and we'll actually put a link to it. It's either on I've seen it on your website and I've seen it on the Mises Institute's website. But it really was that that last I don't know, I would say that the last nail in the coffin for me as far as intellectual property goes. So I would recommend it to others to read as well. But but thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to get to know more about what you're doing or follow you a little bit, is there some place they can go to do that? Yeah, just my my basic website, stephanconcello.com will take them to all my writings and that should get them there. I have a kind of my podcast. I don't really do a regular podcast like you guys do. I just every time I do an interview, I just put this on my podcast. So it's just an RSS feed. It's a collection of of everything I do that's in audio or visual form. Plus, my writings are all all there for free. Awesome. Online. Awesome. Well, we would just appreciate you getting permission to use this one before you do. I'm just kidding. No, that's great. We really do appreciate it. And we will have that link on on the show notes page for this episode. It'll be on LDLpodcast.com forward slash 19. But again, thank you so much for Stefan. Thanks so much. All right. That will wrap us up for today. Thank you so much for joining us. And we will see you again next week. Remember to check out the show notes page for this episode. It'll be LDLpodcast.com forward slash 19. And we'll have all the links in there that you can find out more about Stefan everything that he's doing. And again, I would just that a plug for his book against intellectual property. He makes he he's able to take his time and make all of his arguments in there and it works out really well. So anyways, we will talk to you again later. We'll see you.


The three main anerylation methods, palladium-catalyzed buckwalled, heartwig-type reactions, copper-mediated omen-type and shon-lam-type anerylation reactions, have different advantages and disadvantages depending on the type of reaction needed. Palladium-catalyzed reactions are more efficient and tolerant of steric demands, but require additional ligands. Copper-mediated reactions are faster and less expensive, but require longer reaction times and are less tolerant of sterics. Finally, omen-type reactions are mild and provide access to complex ring structures, but they take longer and are less efficient. This article was authored by Carolyn Fisher and Burkhard Koenig.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation, Disability Income, DI Insurance. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we follow the adage of measure twice, cut once, put in a formal process in place, looking something like set the goals, develop a plan to reach them, put the plan in action, review the results, repeat the process periodically. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia Disability Income, DI Insurance, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Julia Kagan, updated March 14, 2022. In prior presentations, we've been thinking about insurance in general. We then moved to the medical insurance. Now we're thinking about the Disability Income Insurance. Note that if you think about classical kinds of insurance, things like property insurance or things like liability insurance or life insurance were often insured against something that we're hoping doesn't happen in the future, but if did happen, would be financially devastating. Therefore, we would like to insure against that possibility from actually occurring something like our home built burning down, for example, or someone suing us for millions of dollars or us dying prematurely. And this, when we're talking about the Disability Income Insurance, we have a similar kind of scenario to those classical kinds of insurances in that we're hoping that nothing hinders us to have a disability which would stop us from being able to get our income flows, which we and people dependent upon us are dependent upon. So we would like to safeguard against that possibly with some insurance to lower the risk in that. The medical insurance and the dental and the vision and that kind of stuff was a little bit different because when you think about those kinds of insurance, you still have that big medical event that you're safeguarding against, but they also kind of expanded it to cover the normal preventative kind of stuff. So in that way, the medical areas kind of confuses things a little bit when you're thinking about the classic kind of insurance. So just keeping those overall insurance concepts in mind, now we're thinking about what is Disability Income DI Insurance? The term Disability Income DI Insurance refers to an insurance policy that provides income to individuals who can no longer work because of a disability. So if a disability happens, can't work, the income stream that we were dependent upon no longer available, that's a problem, that's a risk, that's a risk we might be able to mitigate with insurance. Disability Income Insurance helps protect people from financial losses if an accident or illness renders them incapable of working and receiving regular income. DI Insurance is available through employers, social security, or insurance companies and comes in short and long term disability coverage. So it gets a little bit confusing in terms of who's providing the disability insurance and what are going to be the coverage kind of types for it. Disabilities are based on a number of factors including a person's age and occupation. Policy pays benefits on a monthly basis. So how Disability Income DI Insurance works? Disability can cause a disruption in income and prevent people from maintaining their standards of living, paying their bills or providing for their families. Clearly that's a problem we would like to ensure against. So it's kind of similar, you can think of it kind of like the life insurance where you actually die making it difficult to pay the bills and support people and so on, but similarly if you're disabled then you can't do the same kind of things you would have been able to do. So as many as 43% of individuals age 40 will have a long term disability by the time they turn 65, that's a scary statistics. Enrolling in a disability income insurance policy can help individuals mitigate any losses that stem from an illness or accident that leads to a short term, short or long term disability. DI Insurance isn't designed to guarantee 100% of your regular income. Instead it tends to replace between 45% and 65% of your gross income. So when you're thinking about the insurance you're typically not thinking, well I'm going to have something if I have a disability I get 100% but typically some ratio or amount of it 45 to 65. As noted above most employers provide their employees with DI disability insurance benefits. This type of program is referred to as group insurance coverage. Benefits are also available to insured individuals and their families through the Social Security Administration, that's the SSA, individuals may choose to purchase DI insurance to supplement existing coverage or if they don't have any insurance at all. Premiums are based on a series of factors including your age and occupation. If you work in a field that has a higher risk of injury your premiums will be higher. Clearly that would kind of be the case because just like any insurance what they're trying to do is have a bigger pool of people. Remember that this is something that we're hoping doesn't happen. Possibly the likelihood is that we're not going to have some kind of disability. But if you take the numbers as an aggregate as a whole then you can make decent projections or predictions on at least the stats and that's how they're going to come up with the rates that they're going to be on the insurance. If you're working somewhere like a police officer or a fireman or woman then of course the risks are higher at that point and you would think that that would have an impact on the pool when they do their insurance calculation. So the amount of income you receive is also factored into how much you pay for coverage the more you earn the higher your premiums. Now obviously the age would be a factor as well because clearly as we get older we're more likely to be disabled at some point unfortunately. And also then the income level is going to be a factor because obviously if they're paying out if you get disabled a percentage of your income that means that if you do get disabled then it's going to cost them more so that's going to be part of their actuarial calculation for the insurance calculation. So those all kind of make intuitive sense if you kind of think about how this whole thing works. Policies pay benefits and the event that illness accident or injury prevents you from performing material or substantial duties for your occupation. Benefits are tax free because the policy holder uses after tax dollars to pay premiums. So special considerations disability income insurance policies contain a specific monthly benefit amount that is based on your monthly or annual income. For instance your employer provided a benefit may be may pay $3000 a month unless stated in the policy language DI policies do not coordinate with social security benefits but pay in addition to it look for an index policy that keeps up to date with inflation as your benefits likely won't kick in for some time. So in other words if you're looking at the kind of benefits that they're going to be paying out you also want to be considering well if they're just going to have that amount that they're going to be paying out is it going to be indexed or increased with inflation which for the last you know some time you might not think is a big factor but you know we're going into a period of time now where it might be more of a bigger factor and obviously it's something we want to make sure is in the consideration. Most insurance companies provide plans that carry a maximum benefit period of 2, 3, 5 or 10 years however some company have plans that pay up to the age of 65, 67, 70 or for the rest of your life. Once again the price increases to purchase and extended benefit period. So policies have waiting periods before you're able to receive any benefit payments so these refer to the amount of time or number of days that you are disabled before benefits kick in. So these periods which are also called elimination periods vary by employer and insurer. The most common period is 90 days. The shorter the elimination period the more expensive the premium which of course that kind of makes sense as well just in terms of how you would expect the policies to work. Policies do not pay 100% of an employee salary and may not guarantee job protection but there are certain protections that come with most policies. You got the non-cancellation policies mean insurers can't cancel the policy for any reason unless you stop paying your premiums which is nice. Guaranteed renewable policies allow individuals to renew their policies without any changes which again is nice. This kind of goes into that idea that we often hear in like the medical area where you have the pre-existing conditions and stuff you would think that over time as things change you would like to be able to re-up the policy fairly straightforwardly generally would be nice and if there's not an interruption in the policy then you would think it would be nice if you were able to re-up it without the problems. But the insurer may increase the premiums at any time. So how to get disability income insurance. You aren't required to have DI disability income insurance unlike other forms of coverage such as homeowners insurance so we talked about homeowners insurance in the past often times you're required to do that in part because you got a mortgage on the home and the lender wants you to have that for that reason but in any case but most employers provide their employees with some type of disability insurance as part of their annual benefits package so they may also give the option of additional coverage premiums are paid through regular payroll deductions workers compensation is a form of disability insurance so you got the workers comp disability insurance mandated by the government so that's kind of government mandated disability insurance individuals receive benefits through employers who are covered by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act this form of disability insurance covers injuries or illness as a result of employment compensation usually covers medical fees that are related to an employee's injuries or the equivalent of sick pay during a medical leave so notice once again this form of disability insurance covers injuries or illness as a result of employment so clearly that would kind of make sense because if you get injured on the job then that would be kicking in and part of the benefit or part of the rationale for that is that you don't have it you're trying to say that we're going to cover that if it happened basically on the job which hopefully would lessen kind of lawsuits maybe between people that say people are trying to sue the company for injuries on the company if the insurance can kick in that might be one rationale for it but notice that that would be injuries that happen on the job it's likely that you could have injuries that didn't happen on the job that it would be nice to have some coverage for because you could be in the same circumstance that you can't basically do the job that you were doing before if you have some kind of injury even if it didn't happen from the job the quality and scope of the employer provided and workers compensation coverage may leave a disabled employee short of the protection they require many employer offered plans are part of a suite of coverage and may not pay to the level and employee needs to meet their expenses you can choose to elect supplementary coverage on your own through a private insurance company if you so choose so obviously this is an option that we might want to be considering in some cases so this is especially important for self-employed individuals and small business owners who may not claim workers compensation for themselves employed then you've got the same kind of risks that could be there but you might not have the same kind of coverage due to being the self-employed in the small business for example say a sole proprietor reporting say on a schedule C for example of the tax return as noted above you may qualify for disability benefits through the Social Security Administration however so this is another kind of government funded kind of thing Social Security Social Security disability insurance and supplemental security insurance that's the SSI provide benefits to insured individuals and their families being insured means you worked long and recently enough and contracted through Social Security taxes on your earnings in other words the Social Security program is in essence one in which you can think about us putting money into the Social Security with that usually happens through the payroll taxes so if we work somewhere we get W2 income we pay into Social Security with payroll taxes so you're paying into the system and then we usually think about the money coming out of Social Security at the benefits time which we often think of when we reach like retirement age for example the money coming out but you can also have other components of the Social Security related here for example but generally you would have to have paid the way the system works we have paid into the system and in order to get in order to get generally the benefits of the Social Security system that's kind of like the general rule so this means you don't actually purchase coverage through the SSI the same way you would through a private insurance company you must apply online by phone in person or by mail to begin receiving benefits which are capped changes are made each year by the agency so we'll probably dive into that in a bit more detail in future presentations types of disability income, DI insurance disability income insurance comes in two different types we got the short and long term disability coverage you got the two kinds here we've noted some of the basic components of each below you got the short term disability income insurance let me guess it's for a short term maybe let's see short term disability provides employees with coverage for time spent away from work for a short period of time I told you it's for a short period of time wage insurance covers events such as an illness accident or injury where the employee intends to return to work after a few weeks months or years don't worry boss it'll just be a few years I'm going to take care of my pinky toe and then I'll be back I promise just pay me for like 10 years or something I'll be back most STD policies have a waiting period of 0 to 14 days before the benefit kicks in benefits may only be paid for a maximum of two years two years so we got the max the cap at the two years so we get the long term disability income insurance then I don't know if I mean if I had to get a wild guess on what the difference is there might be a longer time time frame I'm guessing but as the name implies long term disability insurance covers individuals who may experience a long more lengthy or lifelong events employer plans normally work in conjunction with STD plans that's the short term disability plans and obviously that kind of makes sense when you're thinking about the employer that's thinking of you as a going kind of concern or someone that's going to be part of the company after some point in time you would think so this means that individuals begin receiving STD short term disability benefits before any long term benefits kick in put simply long term benefits begin after any short term benefits are fully paid out so you might then have the conjunction of the two you got the short term benefits and then after that has expired possibly then the long term benefits kicking in if necessary the waiting period for the LTD that's the short for the long term disability benefits can range anywhere between a few weeks and several months the maximum benefit goes beyond STD short term disability coverage from a few years to the rest of the insured individuals life the cost of disability income DI insurance how much does it cost to get this kind of thing the final premium for disability income insurance varies and is based on a number of factors I knew it would be it can't just be a straightforward answer here it depends so policy premiums generally range between 1% and 3% of your gross income insurance underwriters also consider age during the underwriting process which would make sense because as you get older it's more likely you're going to hit up some kind of problem you would think the minimum age for applicants is 18 while the maximum tends to be 60 unlike life insurance disability insurance rates for women are higher per unit of coverage than those for male applicants that's that doesn't seem right but obviously you would think that's probably due to the fact that there might be some you know some conditions involved possibly like pregnancy or something that's going to be skewing the actuarial calculation I would I would assume that difference is dependent upon some kind of biological calculation factored into the actuarial numbers but in any case insurers have historically paid more and higher dollar amounts for claims filed by women so that would kind of make sense so if they look at the numbers they're saying hey when I have to pay out the claims they're usually higher for some reason and that and so when they do the calculations they're trying that the premiums end up to be higher so and in any case this includes those those filed during an earlier period of their lives this may be attributed to pregnancy, childbirth and higher rates of depression and autoimmune disorders I would think you know like childbirth and what not could be a costly and taxing experience on the old body but in any case smokers they're always they're always picking on the smokers smokers can also expect to pay as much as 25% more for the same protection as non smokers because of the higher incident of smoker related illness yeah whatever you just don't like the smoking people anyway same kind of calculation there makes sense because you're going to have more issues most likely they can cause disability which would result in higher premiums due to the actuarial calculation and so on when determining premiums providers often place applicants into a carrier and income classifications the basis of these classifications is on the carriers claim experience for these job categories and incomes the classification with the lowest risk pays less obviously that would make sense young healthy person male apparently because they're not likely to get pregnant I would assume then is less like is going to pay the lower premium you would expect because they're less likely to get injured although young healthy men are often more stupid so they might do something stupid or you know a little crazier maybe but in any case apparently they've done the numbers they've run the numbers and you would think that that might result in the cheaper amounts so that's the recap that's the overview we'll talk about it in a bit more depth in future presentations