In a section entitled, The Sluggish European Union, Richard Sandhusen’s book, Marketing, describes the economic problems of the EU– highlighting, among other things, the inefficiency of the “extensive social welfare system” and a sub-par work ethic:

An extensive social welfare system that the Europeans can no longer afford in the competitive global economy, including expensive systems of health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, and family aid that havie defined European social and economic policies since World War II. In Germany, for example, 37-hour work weeks, fully paid maternity leaves, and 40 days off each year are mandated. In France, the four-day work week is becoming a mandated reality. These social payments help keep deficits high and, with no broad consensus to change the welfare systems, are difficult to cut. Since World War II, Britain is the only government elected on a plank to reduce the size of government; in France, labor protests paralyzed parts of France at the prospect of minor cuts in social payments in 1996.

Lots of Americans point to the way it’s done overseas as if to say this is how it should be in the States, but they often don’t consider the downside. Social welfare systems are slowly crippling the European economy, according to Sandhusen, and he goes on to say that the formation of the EU (with its protectionist attitude toward international trade) may be an attempt to prolong the solvency of these economies without yielding to necessary reforms.

Lawrence Lessig, champion of the Creative Commons licensing concept, and opponent of patent protection and intellectual property, has announced that he is shifting his focus to studying and helping to end corruption in the American political system. After spending the last ten years battling America’s (admittedly) corporate-inspired drive for extended copyright terms, Lessig evidently discovered that the underlying problem of public policy-making is corruption (Where the hell, exactly, is the rock you’ve been living under, Lawrence?), and, oddly, he arrived at the conclusion after listening to Barack Obama, Al Gore, and an “anonymous” dirty old “Republican of prominence".

I like the Creative Commons, and I’ve often found Lessig’s blog fascinating, but my initial reaction to this particular blog post is utter shock at the apparent obtuseness of this learned scholar and suspicion that his treatment of the subject of political corruption will be biased towards Democrats whom he admires. His posts following the announcement have referenced Barack Obama and John Edwards as examples of corruption fighters. Whether or not they are, I’m not going to get into, yet. I need time to think about this and arrange my thoughts. This is just my initial reaction. But, certainly, if Lessig is going to guide his study of the subject by focusing on people he already perceives to be above corruption, he is going to learn very little and do an incredible disservice to the members of academia who will eventually read whatever he writes on the topic.

Some people on the other side of the political spectrum who are immediately coming to mind are, of course, Ron Paul, who represents the polar opposite of Obama and Edwards politically, but whom no one could claim to be more principled or less corrupt when it comes to policy-making, and Senator Tom Coburn, who actually wrote a book all about corruption in policy-making. Will Lessig pay any attention to these guys? Or will he ignore them, because they may have valid philosophical objections to his positions on patents and intellectual property? If he does, all the next ten years of his life will amount to is a demonstration of the corruption of his own thought process.

It’s not as if Lessig’s immune to unreasonable arguments:

This is a thought I’ve often had in the debates I’ve been a part of, especially with respect to IP. Think, for example, about term extension. From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a “no brainer.” As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea – both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

Well, gee, Lawrence, I’m sure it’s because they’re all idiots. I mean, it’s not like they could have any reasonable objections, since everyone operates under the same philosophy and no one thinks creators of intellectual property ought to be able to choose the nature of its use in the future.

I’m all for a scholar of prominence and widespread respect undertaking a thorough study of the corrupted process of policy-making in this country. That would be an extremely useful contribution to the (remarkably small) body of knowledge on the subject and of which most common citizens are unaware. But if it’s actually just some politically biased charade of that, well, then we have problem.

Edited July 3, 2007. Removed questions regarding Lessig’s reference to Milton Friedman and term extensions. Friedman, with other economists of note, filed an amicas brief in relation to Eldred v. Ashcroft arguing the lack of economic benefit of term extension.

A recent chat about the plausibility of the Golden Rule has given me pause to consider the dynamics of a Utopian society whose participants would govern themselves solely by that paradigm. It was proposed that such a society could not possibly exist, for there would be certain people who would not care whether others were nice to them and who would use that rationale to be indifferent, or worse, downright mean to others. I find fault with that proposition on multiple levels:

Chiefly, while there might be some in such a society whose values are so obscure as to lead them to mistreat other people, it is unreasonable to suppose that this would be the condition of a majority of people in that society. First, the closer the number of people with obscure values approach to a majority, the less of a problem it would actually be, as their values would no longer be obscure. Second, that proposition cannot include the many rotten people in present society who simply don’t want to observe the Golden Rule. These people are prone to self-justify by saying they wouldn’t care if someone treated them the way they treat others. The premise of the Golden Rule is not whether or not you care about how you’re treated, but how you want to be treated. These rotten people may very well justify their rotten actions in order to avoid having to actually observe the Golden Rule, but it’s self-evident folly to mistake their self-justification for the truth of their values. These people, given a choice, would choose to be treated the same way as most other people in present society would choose. And, in any event, the premise of the society is that the participants do observe the Golden Rule.

Additionally, the society that would operate in such a way would not have to completely eliminate all injustice in order to exist. It could exist simply through socialization. Societies have bred contempt among their participants, as well as camaraderie, patriotism, racism, and laissez faire pacifism. It’s unreasonable to think that a society could not, then, socially accept the Golden Rule as the primary principle of human interaction.

Were it to occur in a free market society, where competition thrives, there would be achieved a level of peacefulness, equity, and fairness that would almost certainly be unlike anything present society has yet experienced.

I have no intention of turning this weblog into a Ron Paul advocacy platform, all recent evidence to the contrary. But I found this video from YouTube very moving, and I urge you to take the next couple of minutes to watch it from start to finish.

My discussion of Ron Paul’s ideas are relevant to a weblog that discusses Capitalism and Culture, because his ideas represent a very deeply rooted and growing sense of disenchantment within the zeitgeist by the present state and direction of our government. I’ll be talking about that a lot more in future posts, but, for now, just watch.