1) Congress Tells Patent Office To Consider Race Of Applicants
Yesterday we celebrated Martin Luther King Day, whose dream was a nation where people are “not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
No one told Congress or the Patent Office.
Congress just passed a law that directs the USPTO to determine whether opening more offices is "necessary" to grant more patents to "underrepresented groups."
If you think we are joking, then you’re not familiar with the “Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022,” which was stuffed, or should we say sneaked, into the 4,000-page Omnibusted spending bill back in December.
This act instructs the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office to help "underrepresented groups (e.g., women, people of color, veterans, individual inventors, members of any other demographic, geographic, rural populations, or other economic group underrepresented in patent filings) "increase participation in the patent system."
We’re all for encouraging innovation and invention, but we’re not clear how an applicants’ skin color, sexual preferences, or geographic location has anything to do with the soundness and uniqueness of their invention.
3) The Climate Change Industrial Complex Is Losing Public Support
We’ve noted before that the Climate industrial complex is a multi-hundred billion dollar enterprise. It’s a hustle to pick the pockets of taxpayers all over the world.
They’ve succeeded big time on the money front, but even with all this money, their scheme has been a failure in convincing voters that the world is coming to an end. On the one hand, polls do show most people want action on climate change, but when they’re asked how much they’d be willing to pay to achieve that, the answer is shockingly low. An Associated Press poll found 68% of Americans wouldn’t be willing to pay even $10 more a month in higher electric bills if the money were used to combat climate change.
That pattern holds worldwide.
Last year, representative samples of more than 1,000 people were questioned in the US, UK, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Singapore, and New Zealand. The results were a bust for the climate change fanatics.
Reducing people’s energy consumption was seen as a priority by only 32% while favoring public transport over cars (25%) and radically changing car models (24%) were all unpopular.
Only 23% felt that reducing plane travel and charging more for products that did not respect environmental norms were important while banning gas-powered vehicles (22%) and reducing meat consumption (18%) and international trade (17%) were seen as even lower priorities.
The study by the Kantar group at the behest of the United Nations dryly noted: “Rather than translating into a greater willingness to change their habits, citizens’ concerns are particularly focused on their negative assessment of governments’ efforts.”
From Historian and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, Paul Johnson who has died at the age of 94:
What is America? It is not a race but a cohesion of all the races of the world. It will soon be a nation of 300 million, 10 percent of whom were not even born there. Its creation from Europe, Africa and Asia is a continuing process, as countless immigrants arrive each year and are quietly absorbed and prosper. Moreover, these citizens, whose parents, grandparents or ancestors came from all over the world, are given the chance to participate in democracy at all levels, which exists nowhere else on earth. More than 600,000 offices in the US are elected. The entire public ethos of America is fashioned to finding out what the voters want and constructing policy on their wishes. America is successful precisely because it is a working multiracial democracy. To be anti-American, therefore, is to be anti-humanity. For no other country represents so clearly the current wishes and long-term aspirations of the human race.
Our friends at Marginal Revolution University – a project by several professors at Virginia’s George Mason University – have come up with a great new video series explaining inflation and how it redistributes wealth. (The worst hyperinflation in history came in socialist Venezuela in 2018, where the IMF reports prices rose 929,790%.)
This introductory four-minute video is part of a new free Money & Inflation series, which is a great way to teach basic economic principles to young people. It comes complete with lesson plans, has lots of excellent resources including lesson plans, interactive games, and group exercises.
Bring home a now valuable carton of eggs and use it to explain to your kids just how inflation explains why their eggs are both in short supply and much more expensive.
