Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Property, and the Next Captured Economy Time and technology await no one. AI is developmentally an infant. An intelligence must acquire information before it can do anything useful with it. Humans learn by observing, reading, imitating, experimenting, being corrected, and synthesizing what they’ve encountered. Artificial intelligence does essentially the same thing through radically different machinery and at radically different scale

Tax policy is often debated in terms of fairness. Should the wealthy pay more? Should income be taxed more heavily than consumption? Should corporations shoulder a greater share of the burden? These are important questions, but they are not the first questions that should be asked. The more fundamental question is this: What incentives does a tax system create? Every tax system influences behavior. Taxes do not simply collect revenue. They encourage some activities, di

Every institution develops incentives. Businesses seek stability because stability makes planning easier. Universities seek larger endowments to expand their programs and ensure their future. Charitable organizations seek continued donations to fulfill their missions. Bureaucracies naturally seek larger budgets and broader responsibilities because additional resources increase their ability to accomplish their objectives. None of these tendencies necessarily arise from il

Not every regulation protects the public. Some protect the regulated. That distinction is easy to overlook because regulations are almost always introduced with good intentions. They are presented as measures to improve safety, protect consumers, preserve the environment, promote financial stability, or ensure fairness. Many genuinely accomplish those goals. Society benefits from laws that reduce fraud, protect property rights, and hold individuals and businesses accounta

Few words in politics are used as casually as regulation. It is often treated as though it were morally neutral—a simple matter of good governance. Politicians promise more of it. Critics call for less of it. Entire debates are framed around whether someone is "pro-regulation" or "anti-regulation," as though the word itself settles the question. It does not. Regulation is not simply a policy preference or an administrative tool. Every regulation represents an exercise of

One of the most frustrating features of modern public discourse is that many arguments never actually reach the point of disagreement. They collapse long before facts are presented, evidence is examined, or principles are debated. The failure occurs at a much more fundamental level. The participants never agreed on what the words meant in the first place. This problem is so common that it often goes unnoticed. People spend hours arguing about freedom, justice, equality, r

One of the quieter forms of discrimination is not open hostility. It is diminished expectation. The phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" became widely known because it describes something subtle: believing that certain groups cannot reasonably be expected to meet the same standards as everyone else. Instead of demanding excellence, responsibility, or accountability, society quietly lowers the bar. At first glance, this appears compassionate. In practice, it can be

One of the most misunderstood phrases in the Constitution is "the general welfare." Today, it is often treated as if it were a blank check—a constitutional permission slip allowing Congress to spend money on anything that might improve someone's life. If a proposal sounds beneficial, it is said to promote the general welfare, and the discussion moves immediately to how much it will cost. But that interpretation asks remarkably little of the Constitution. It effectively tr

We often hear that governments should make ethical decisions. It sounds straightforward enough. Most people would agree that public policy ought to be fair, compassionate, and just. But what does that actually mean? Suppose a policy helps one million people while unintentionally harming ten thousand others. Is it ethical because more people benefited than suffered? Or is it unethical because those ten thousand paid the price for everyone else? Now suppose the people makin

Imagine two people watching the same political debate. Both are intelligent. Both care deeply about their country. Both believe they are defending what is right. By the end of the debate, they reach completely opposite conclusions. How is that possible? It is tempting to assume that one of them must be uninformed, irrational, or acting in bad faith. Sometimes that may be true. More often, however, the disagreement begins much earlier. It begins with the moral framework t

Political ideologies are often treated like teams. We identify ourselves with a label, defend that label, and criticize the opposing label. Elections become contests between competing tribes, and political discussions often become little more than arguments over which side deserves to win. Yet beneath every ideology lies something far more important than the label itself. A question. Every political philosophy attempts to answer the same fundamental questions about human so

There is an old saying that nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program. Whether that saying is entirely fair is open to debate, but history provides enough examples to explain why it continues to endure. The federal income tax offers one of the clearest illustrations. When the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, the income tax was not presented as a burden that would fall upon most Americans. It was largely described as a tax aimed at higher incomes