As detailed in Part 1 of this article, property rights are a fuzzy concept that must be interpreted in light of prevailing circumstances surrounding a particular instance. Intellectual property rights are particularly fuzzy and have changed markedly in their economic effect as technology has advanced.

Property rights are a fuzzy concept, not an absolute. At one extreme, George, first Duke of Sutherland in the early 19th century, depopulated half Scotland to replace tenants with sheep — that is the attitude of the Disney-lobbied copyright bill that extended copyright on Mickey Mouse until 2023. At the other extreme, French philosopher Pierre […]

“’Expletive deleted’ the lire” snarled President Richard Nixon, according to a Watergate tape transcript released in 1974. While the sophisticated sneered at Nixon’s crudity, young London bankers like myself admired his keen understanding of Italy’s importance in international finance. In any case, within the next year or so, citizens across the Euro zone, but particularly […]

If Marty McFly, hero of the 1985 time-travel movie “Back to the Future,” had traveled 30 years back from today, to 1973, his musical disconnect would have been much less. Traveling from 1985 to 1955, he moved from heavy metal to “Mister Sandman.” Today, unless he specialized in rap music, the teenage time traveler would […]

A Cato Institute seminar on business ethics Friday highlighted for me how much the excesses of the ’90s were due to misguided ethics teachings.

2002 just missed being a Bear Super Bowl — a year in which the stock market drops 25 percent. Yet the odds must still remain that 2003 or 2004 will produce such a Bear triumph, the first since 1974, when the Bears won by a drop of 29.72 percent on the Standard and Poor’s 500 […]