Michael Arrington at TechCrunch understands the dialectic.

What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.

Whenever something doesn’t make sense, you’re not seeing the whole picture.

Then I figured it out. As I wrote then, the super rich won’t mind at all if we “tax the rich” as it’s currently defined. That’s because people who are super rich don’t really pay taxes. They pay taxes on this year’s income, and capital gains on accumulated wealth. But the only “tax” that can ever touch what they’ve already made is inflation.

All you can do is tax their income this year. That doesn’t touch what’s in the Money Bin.

The super rich love to talk about higher taxes on the rich because it’s a competitive barrier protecting them from competition. If the people making a lot of money today have to pay much higher taxes, they probably won’t ever accumulate enough wealth to be “super rich.”

Yup. There’s the Secret Agenda that the Lower Crust don’t see.

Buffett calls for an increase in all types of taxes – income, dividend and capital gains. That would be a nice triple layer of protection against any newcomers, and still preserve all – 100% – of the $47 billion he’s accumulated until now.

Funny how that works.

Rich people are very good at staying rich. And Warren Buffett is the smartest rich person I know. That’s why he’s able to say feel good bullshit about how he should be paying higher taxes when he has absolutely no intention of letting the government anywhere near his real money.

And that’s the dirty little secret of all these ‘super-rich’ tax-and-spenders; if they feel undertaxed, they could just write a check to the government, but they never will, because what they really object to is the low level of taxation on people who aren’t super-rich yet but are trying to become so … just like them.

Read it.

A while ago two of my students said they were going to ‘turn over’ a large house in a wealthy area near them. I asked why? They said they had it tough, they wanted a new TV, and it was something to do.

I listened, and then explained that just because they were poor they didn’t need to rob a house. I told them that I didn’t even have a TV, which amazed them. I explained to them how my Grandparents grew up in the East End during the great depression. There were few jobs, no money and no welfare. They went without food on occasion, suffered discrimination and had to deal with fascism, yet they emerged from poverty. I explained how they did it: They worked hard, sacrificed for the future, educated themselves, showed respect for the law and other people, had strong families and never gave up. The two boys looked thoughtful for a while and then one said: ‘Yes, but I never had a father to tell me that’.

Read it.

A coalition of nonprofit groups is calling on customers of Amazon.com to cancel their accounts unless the Internet retailer stops resisting a California law that requires more online retailers to charge a state sales tax.

The nonprofits along with several state lawmakers Monday called on Amazon to “stop cheating California” by trying to repeal the law through a ballot referendum.

‘MOMMEEE! JOHNNY HIT ME BACK!’ I suppose it’s ‘cheating’ the robber by attempting to hang on to your wallet.

I guess that, not only are they nonprofit groups, they want to make sure that Amazon is a nonprofit group, too.

I predict that (a) it won’t work; Amazon is just too convenient, and (b) these are customers that Amazon will be just as well off without.

David Henderson celebrates an anniversary.

Today is the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s announcement of price controls on the American economy. He imposed an immediate freeze on all wages and prices that lasted for 90 days. Then he went through the various phases of control, leading to decontrol by 1974. With one main exception: oil and gasoline. Controls remained on oil and gasoline and these controls led to a lot of damage.

We can also blame Nixon for the 55-mph speed limit and the CAFE standards that have screwed up the auto industry from that day to this. (On top of the EPA and Food Stamps.) It’s hard to think of what a Democrat President would have done differently, or worse.

Read it.

Frederick Hess has an interview with the former New York State commissioner of education, David Steiner, who reports: “Because of federal largess, we had at some points in the agency over 40 experts in nutrition around the issue of school lunches. At the same time, we had one person who was an expert on science education because the federal funding was there for the nutrition experts, but we had to rely on state funding for the science curriculum expert.”

Your tax dollars at work. Remind me why the federal government is involved in school lunches. Shit, remind me why any government is involved in school lunches.

Of course.

A 13-year-old boy has walked free from court after admitting smashing up a shop with a stolen golf club as his mother said the riots are because the government does “f*** all” for children.

Gee, I thought it was parents who were supposed to do stuff for children, not the government. Guess that goes to show how far Britain has degenerated under Labour.

Read it.

And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Wonder what took him so long. The rest of America wrote off New York years (nay, decades) ago.

Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart in cities like New York is led by unions. Organized labor, fearing that the retailer’s low prices and modest wages will undercut unionized stores, have built anti-Wal-Mart alliances with Democratic members of city councils.

Low prices for consumers don’t matter — what matters is high wages for union members. The Democrat party at prayer.

“We don’t care if they’re never here,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “We don’t miss them. We have great supermarkets and great retail outlets in New York. We don’t need Wal-Mart.”

Says somebody who’s never had to shop for stuff in New York. If you’re Warren Buffett, and can afford Warren Buffett prices, you’re golden; for anybody else, it’s arm-and-a-leg time. Asshole probably lives in the suburbs on Long Island or Westchester.

But Wal-Mart, a cost-minded retailer known for its dowdy merchandise, and New York, a city of excesses known for cutting-edge style, have long had an uneasy relationship.

“Dowdy merchandise”? There’s your ‘objective reporting’ in the New York Times for you.

Wal-Mart, which has nearly 4,000 stores in the United States, has sought to open stores in Rego Park, Queens, and in Staten Island, but both plans fell through in the face of intense union, community and political opposition.

Note that the opposition is not on the part of consumers, but on the part of those who want to keep consumers enslaved to their political rent-seeking. If consumers, especially the poor people who Walmart helps stretch their paychecks, didn’t want Walmart, then they wouldn’t shop there, and the places would go broke; but that never happens. Democrats love democracy except where it counts, at the checkout line.

Despite setbacks in each of these cities, Wal-Mart has had success in urban areas. In Chicago, for example, Wal-Mart opened a store last year that attracted thousands of job applicants and has, Mr. Scott said, performed better than expected.

Gee, I wonder why.

“We don’t like how they do business,” Mr. Ott, the New York union official, said.

And, of course, you must impose that dislike on other people. No wonder people characterize unions as un-American.

Steve Sailer kicks over a rock.

Have you noticed how the smarter the offender against political correctness, the more the establishment denounces him for stupidity? A few nights ago, English historian David Starkey intellectually mopped the floor with the other three participants on a BBC talk show about the riots. Slowly the outraged losers in the debate are trying to gather their wits and respond.

We see this same effect in the U.S. all the time. Every Democrat candidate is the second coming of Einstein, while every Republican is a knuckle-dragger just down from the trees. This was especially silly with respect to George W Bush, who graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, credentials that any Democrat candidate would give his left nut (assuming one could find it) to achieve. When it was revealed that Bush got better grades than Kerry at Yale, the silence of the Crust was deafening, since there wasn’t any available response and all they could do was ignore it and hope it went away … which it did, because something that would have been trumpeted for years had the situation been reversed didn’t fit the Narrative so had to be buried.

This is especially amusing when it comes to AlGore, who talks like a ten-year-old and has the apparent IQ of a carrot. Yet when he was running for President, he was the Smart Guy and Bush was the Dumb Guy.

Read it.

South African reader RH sent us the article below, which describes the latest innovative proposal by Desmond Tutu, the retired (Anglican) Archbishop of Cape Town. The Most Rev. Tutu has proposed a new income-redistribution plan that could solve all South Africa’s financial problems: a tax on white people.

Al Sharpton is kicking himself for not having thought of this first. Jesse Jackson is kicking himself because he thought that’s what Obama was going to do — but, as it turned out, Obama screwed him along with all the rest of his supporters.

Come to think of it, isn’t that what was just imposed in England last week? Admittedly, that tax is indirect:

Step 1:		“Youths” of color pilfer the swag from businesses.
Step 2:		The insurance companies reimburse the merchants.
Step 3:		Under the Riot Damages Act of 1886, the Government reimburses the insurance companies.
Step 4:		Taxpayers reimburse the Government.

The vast majority of British taxpayers are, well, white. So there you go.

Steve Sailer reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun.

This speech, given shortly after the race riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King, effectively destroyed Enoch Powell’s political career. Unfortunately, he was right.

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.

Read it.

But of course he’s going to pull us out of there Real Soon Now.

Already, hundreds more American troops have been killed in Afghanistan during the less than three years of the Obama administration than during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. According to the iCasualties.org Web site, whose count more or less tracks that of other sites devoted to these statistics, 630 American soldiers died in the Afghanistan operation in the years 2001 through 2008, when Mr. Bush was president, while 1097 American soldiers have died in the years 2009, 2010, and 2011. Even if you allocate the 30 or so American soldiers killed in January 2009 entirely to Mr. Bush, who was president until the January 20 inauguration, it is quite a record.

No doubt he’ll get around to it as soon as he’s finished closing down Camp X-Ray at Gitmo.

Read it.

Power Line has the answer.

What would liberals do without gaps to close? I think they’d pretty much have to go out of business. You’ve your education gap. You’ve got your power gap. You’ve got your jail gap. You’ve got your income gap, perhaps the granddaddy of them all.

This week Senators Mary Landrieu and Patty Murray took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to introduce us to yet another gap: “The skills gap.” I know when I want to understand issues related to productive employment, Landrieu and Murray are among the first people who spring to mind, and they don’t disappoint.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Landrieu and Murray explain, we have approximately three million job openings, all waiting to be filled. With so many Americans out of work, what’s the problem? I know what you’re thinking. It’s not Obama or his policies! Of course not.

Needless to say, Senators Landrieu and Murray are Democrats who have worked for government all their lives.

Read it.

You see, I love it here in San Diego. The weather is amazing, the beaches are beautiful, and the people are friendly and generally entrepreneurial. It’s a refreshing change from the Bay Area, where everyone seemed like they were always “too busy” to hang out. Here, life is more laid-back, and I’ve grown to appreciate it.

But one thing I’ve struggled with about California for years is the government. (Yes, I’m going to break my own unspoken rule and wax political on my blog.) The government is notoriously business-unfriendly–with everything from high taxes on business earnings to badgering businesses into more work.)

This is what happens when Democrats are left in charge.

And California has beautiful weather. Just think of what must be happening in Michigan.

Brian and I are moving to Austin before the end of the year. At this point, I’m not sure exactly when we’ll move, but it will be in November at the latest. And to California, I say: Love your weather–but good riddance!

Good decision, kid. You’ll never regret it.

Read it.

I’m sure you’re all wondering that.

As the WSJ reports today, one 64-year-old male participant suffered a heart attack during the swim and was later pronounced dead at a hospital, while a 40-year-old female spotted floating face-down was taken to the hospital and died early Monday.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it. And watch the videos.

Today’s entry: This video from Rebuild the Dream, the new organization of former Obama green jobs czar and 9/11 truther Van Jones, in which cute kids mouth bizarrely sophisticated talking points, including words and phrases they almost certainly don’t understand, such as “infrastructure,” “living wage,” and “tax brackets.”

Read it.

Mark Duggan, the man whose death sparked the beginning of riots across Britain, was the nephew of a renowned gangland criminal with a history of violence.

I knew they’d get around to blaming the Irish eventually.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

“I’m going to keep at it until every single American who wants a job can find one,” he said.

Or until we’re all broke, whichever comes first.

Read it.

The members of Congress’s new Deficit Reduction Committee are charged with figuring out how to raise revenues and reduce spending in order to address the nation’s burgeoning debt.

Political supporters of  Rep. Xavier Becerra (D., Calif.), one of the appointees to deficit-reduction committee, have already figured out how to raise revenue—by touting his seat on the panel to raise money for his political campaign.

About two hours after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi named Mr. Becerra to the committee on Thursday, a political supporter began notifying Wall Street lobbyists about a $1,500-per-person fund-raising event on Aug. 31.

For the playbook, watch The Distinguished Gentleman with Eddie Murphy.

Read it.

British troops who face being axed from the military under plans to reduce the country’s defence budget are being offered courses in massage and aromatherapy.

Solidiers who have spent their careers training and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan can also prepare for civilian life by qualifying in pottery.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer just loves to talk about modern life. Be sure to watch the video.

The back story before the video starts is that the mother shown getting off the bus had spanked her child, which led to a verbal protest from the fellow with a shaved head and a beard in a reddish brown t-shirt. The mother then got on her cell phone and called for some backup to meet her at the bus stop to help her, as Dave Chapelle would say, in keeping it real.

Evidently, the insulted mother called the brother of the father of her baby, who then recruited a bunch of relatives and friends to help him defend the honor of his brother’s baby mama’s childrearing techniques. Students of altruistic and nepotistic urges might want to diagram out the most distant linkage between the insulted woman and the least connected man involved. I don’t know what they are exactly, but they might be something like “My half-cousin’s uncle’s brother’s baby mama got dissed, so do you wanna help us kill the guy?” Sounds like a plan!

Needless to say, none of these are white people.

Read it.

A remote Amazonian tribe, which made global headlines after being photographed for the first time, may have been massacred by drugs traffickers in recent weeks, authorities fear.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

Harvard, which as a non-profit doesn’t pay taxes at the corporate level and in fact is a huge beneficiary of government spending via research grants and contracts, subsidized student loans, and Pell Grants, is emerging as a hotbed of anti-Tea Party, pro-tax-increase sentiment.

Read it.

Hundreds of Londoners took to the streets this morning to clean up damage caused during last night’s riots – but the Twitter-organised community action was partially hampered by health and safety rules.

Notice that the people cleaning up are all white people, unlike the rioters.

That’s modern government for you: it can’t impede the rioters, but it sure can get in the way of the people trying to clean up afterward.

Read it.

Burgess is an idiot. Being a socialist fool isn’t an impeachable offense, unfortunately, and nothing Obama has done to date fits the Constitutional criteria. (Not sayin’ he won’t get there eventually — he is, after all, a socialist fool — but he’s not there yet.) Impeachment isn’t just a tool to get rid of a guy you don’t like. That a Congressman can mistake so fundamental a principle of the law merely illustrates that our government is run by ignorant blowhards.

There ought to be a test for prospective legislators, like the one they give prospective citizens. I doubt that very many of the current incumbents would pass.

Read it.

IT’S a long way from the marble halls of Congress to the ailing mining towns of eastern Congo, but the residents of Nyabibwe and Nzibira know exactly what’s to blame for their economic woes.

The “Loi Obama” or Obama Law — as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act of 2010 has become known in the region — includes an obscure provision that requires public companies to indicate what measures they are taking to ensure that minerals in their supply chain don’t benefit warlords in conflict-ravaged Congo. The provision came about in no small part because of the work of high-profile advocacy groups like the Enough Project and Global Witness, which have been working for an end to what they call “conflict minerals.”

Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law has had unintended and devastating consequences, as I saw firsthand on a trip to eastern Congo this summer. The law has brought about a de facto embargo on the minerals mined in the region, including tin, tungsten and the tantalum that is essential for making cellphones.

The smelting companies that used to buy from eastern Congo have stopped. No one wants to be tarred with financing African warlords — especially the glamorous high-tech firms like Apple and Intel that are often the ultimate buyers of these minerals. It’s easier to sidestep Congo than to sort out the complexities of Congolese politics — especially when minerals are readily available from other, safer countries.

For locals, however, the law has been a catastrophe. In South Kivu Province, I heard from scores of artisanal miners and small-scale purchasers, who used to make a few dollars a day digging ore out of mountainsides with hand tools. Paltry as it may seem, this income was a lifeline for people in a region that was devastated by 32 years of misrule under the kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko (when the country was known as Zaire) and that is now just beginning to emerge from over a decade of brutal war and internal strife.

No surprises here.

Every time politicians pee in a process because they think that doing so will make it taste better, it winds up tasting … about what you would expect.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as my granny used to say.

Read it.

But we NEED People of Color to add DIVERSITY! Otherwise the country will SUCK!

Read it.

The 1986 illegal alien amnesty was supposed to be one prong of a two part compromise strategy: amnesty illegal aliens already here, but enforce workplace hiring to prevent more from coming. The amnesty went off on a massive scale, but enforcement seldom happened: big employers tended to have politician friends who warned off federal enforcement agencies. It’s the kind of corruption that the press hasn’t shown much interest in, because That’s Racist!

Read it.

The White House and much of the chattering class cooed on Friday when unemployment dropped to 9.1 percent and 117,000 jobs were reportedly created in July. But these numbers, upon closer inspection, show no progress on the jobs front.

Buried in the job stats was a number — 193,000 — that dwarfed all the rest. That is the number of workers who left the job market. If 193,000 left and only 117,000 jobs were added, we lost 76,000 jobs. Moreover, this is not an aberration.

When President Obama took office in January of 2009, the labor participation rate was 65.7 percent. Now, “The labor force participation rate is currently 63.9 percent. That is the lowest level since 1984,” says Matt McDonald, a communications and business strategist who previously worked in the Bush administration. “If the labor force participation rate today were 65.7 percent, there would be an additional 4.2 million people in the workforce.” In that case, the unemployment rate would be 11.5 percent not 9.1 percent.

Welcome to the Obamanation.

Read it.

A story in Friday’s New York Times describes another horrifying local twist on China’s population control policy: Officials in Longhui County, a rural area of Hunan Province, have a history of kidnapping unauthorized babies and selling them on the black market when the parents are unable to pay exorbitant fines that may amount to five times their annual income. “I can’t even describe my hatred of those family planning officials,” says Yang Libing, the father of a nine-month-old girl who was snatched from his parents’ home in 2005 while he was working in another town. “I hate them to my bones. I wonder if they are parents too. Why don’t they treat us as humans?”

I suspect Tom Friedman won’t be writing about this one.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Ronald Bailey points to some inconvenient truth.

Read it.

New rule: If you find yourself using the phrase “mid-century vernacular” in the commission of telling a homeowner that she can’t tear down her chain-link fence, it’s time step far, far away from a government salary and any power to tell people what to do.

And here’s your requisite Stockholm Syndrome quote:

Charles Hall has been helping his sister with the red tape. He said he understands the need for zoning rules. “You cannot have everybody in the city doing what they want,” he said. “You’d have chaos.”

Read it.

Zimbabweans are lucky they are no longer suffering under the boot of the racist white former regime Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what kind of hell they would be living in now.

Read it.

These extravagances are part of the Essential Air Service initiative, which is part of the reason for the recent congressional impasse over a bill to keep the Federal Aviation Administration operating.

But the program survives because most states get some aid and every state has two senators, who usually hang on to every federal dollar as if it were a Super Bowl ticket.

Every time the Federal government spends money, it creates a group who wants that spending to continue. Ultimately, that constituency includes Federal lawmakers, who want the votes that supporting that spending will garner. This is an inherent defect in our present political system that can only be cured by reducing the number of things on which the Federal government is allowed to spend money..

Read it.

Last month, only 58.1% of Americans age 16 and over were employed, a significant drop from before the recession and the lowest since 1983.

The Obama Recession just keeps plugging away.

Read it.

And, needless to say, not an ethnic Briton.

Read it.

Needless to say, none of these gangs is composed of ethnic Britons. Thus does Britain reap the fruits of multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration.

Read it.

Read it.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has found a novel way of raising badly needed cash, according to the South Korean authorities: unleashing young hackers on South Korea’s immensely popular online gaming sites to find ways to rack up points convertible to cash. Despite its decrepit economy, North Korea is believed to train an army of computer programmers and hackers. The police in Seoul said Thursday that four South Koreans and a Korean-Chinese had been arrested on charges of drawing on that army to organize a hacking squad of 30 young video gaming experts.

Read it.

There’s a shortage today of low-priced, life-saving drugs for cancer patients.  And the cause – surprise, surprise – is the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003.

Not every idiot in government is a Democrat. They just act like ’em.

Read it.

Graeme Zielinski, Communications Director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, is quite a guy.  He was a focus of a post here last month when he tweeted that people should celebrate the 45th anniversay of Medicare by “punching a Republican.”  He then claimed he was just joking.

Read it.

Jeez, you’d think it was Los Angeles or something.

On Friday, it emerged that Mr Duggan had been travelling in a minicab and was gunned down after an apparent exchange of fire.

A police officer’s radio was found to have a bullet lodged in it afterwards, suggesting they may have narrowly escaped being struck.

Officers had been attempting to carry out an arrest under the Trident operational command unit, which deals with gun crime in the black community, according to the IPCC.

So this was basically a race riot (which is plain if you can find an article with pictures, although the media won’t dare point that out) after some gangbanger got into a shootout with police. Maybe it is Los Angeles after all.

But you have to get down to the end of the report to find out the essentials of the story, which in the days of Real Journalism would have been in the first paragraph.

Steve Sailer is an optimist.

I must confess that when I read articles from the mainstream media in Europe denouncing immigration restrictionists with angry rhetoric but little substance, I sometimes wonder if my leg is being pulled. For example, is this April 29, 2011 article from Spiegel on Denmark’s decade-long success in implementing a more rational immigration policy a self-parody? Perhaps the reporter secretly wanted to laud the Danish government as thoughtfully reformist, but had to lather it in spiteful PC rhetoric to get it published  … I don’t know. (I particularly like the chosen photo, with the fat lout trying to look surly in the front and the youth with the “Soldier of Allah” sweatshirt.)

According to the figures, migrants from non-Western countries who did manage to come to Denmark have cost the state €2.3 billion, while those from the West have actually contributed €295 million to government coffers.

Read it.

This is a disaster of unparalleled gravity. SEALs are the best of the best; this is like having two dozen Rolls Royces destroyed.

Read it.

You know what’s going to happen….

So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics—but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”

God forbid that anything interfere with the batch-process age-group factory-style government school method.

It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. People get so caught up in “the way things are done” that they can’t possibly comprehend any other way of doing things. Therefore, when you show them a child learning faster than his or her peers, the focus is not on how fantastic it is, but on how we’ll be able to keep that child in the same class as other kids their age. Why is it necessary to group kids by age? Because it’s just what we do. When a child is bumped up a grade, why do we do it for all subjects at once, instead of each subject separately? Because it’s just what we do. The educational system was created to teach children; now it exists to perpetuate the current educational system.

Read it.

The events at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee are chilling. Not shocking, since this type of Black Behaving Badly (BBB) activity has transpired in Milwaukee and in cities throughout the nation, necessitating curfews, massive police presences at Black cultural events, and a further allocation of monetary resources in attempts to protect law-abiding citizens from Black thuggery.

But that, of course, would be politically incorrect.

Read it.

Unfortunately, the “deal” announced Thursday will restore the cuts to the EAS program, but without Congressional approval. Although the Senate passed the House’s version of the bill, Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood will strike out the EAS language. In effect, the Executive conspired with the Senate to carry out an end-run around the intent of the legislation, all to protect subsidized flights for politicians who don’t want to be bothered to use major airports. This is both a scandalous waste of taxpayer funds and a blatant abuse of executive power.

Sounds like Democrats to me….

Read it.

The whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a myth that is long past it’s use-by date. The essence of property is exclusion; you can’t use my property while I’ve got it; and if you steal it, it’s no longer available for my use. If you compose a bunch of songs or stories, and I copy those, even though I now have them, you still have them too; there has been no transfer of exclusive use. Anything that can be transmitted to another without depriving the originator of its full enjoyment does not come within the concept of property, period. ‘Intellectual property’ is a purely artificial legal construct that has no natural foundation; it’s principal effect in the modern world is to stifle innovation rather than to promote it.