“The scientists get the patents,” US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick tells Axios.  “The universities get the patents. And the funder of $50 billion [in research leading to the patents], the US government, you know what we get? Zero. … The United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit.”

Put that way, it doesn’t sound so wrong, does it? But in reality, it’s piling a third bad idea on top of two others.

Explaining why “intellectual property” in general and patents in particular — the bottom layer of the poisonous three-layer policy cake — are bad ideas is a book-length, not op-ed length, endeavor. Suffice it to say that “intellectual property” ISN’T property, but rather a pernicious system of government-granted monopolies on ideas. If you want to dig into that claim, I recommend N. Stephan Kinsella’s book Against Intellectual Property (available free online from though, oddly, copyrighted by, the Ludwig von Mises Institute).

The middle layer is using taxpayer money to fund university research, then allowing the researchers and universities to patent, and realize revenue from, the results of that research.

It’s here that Lutnick is absolutely correct: If the government funds research, the taxpayers who funded the research should be the beneficiaries. The proper way to accomplish that is to put all results of government-funded research in the public domain. Goods produced using the research would be price-competitive because no single manufacturer would enjoy a monopoly on their production.

Lutnick’s proposal for a new top layer is bad all around.

The choice for universities would be to spend less on innovative research (incentivizing innovation is the go-to excuse for defenders of patent), charge more for the licenses on their patents, or (most likely) some combination.

Taxpayers still wouldn’t enjoy any choice in the matter. The combination they’d get out of the deal would be fewer new, worthwhile products AND higher prices for those products.

As for the federal government, the revenues would likely be a wash at best.  University patent revenues come to low single-digit billions of dollars per year. 50% of that would come to a fraction of what the federal government spends per DAY … and would likely be more than offset by the economic disincentives to innovation and production.

If the feds won’t eliminate patents and government research funding, they should at least eliminate any and all combinations of the two, rather than demanding their own taste of the racket’s revenues.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The Producers at the Muny in 2008. Photo by Meetmeatthemuny. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here we go again. It’s time for another performance of American politicians’ favorite off-Broadway play, “Shutdown Panic.”

“Congress only has a few weeks to avoid a government shutdown,” Mitchell Hill reports at WTOP, “but leaders of both parties are still a long way from agreeing on a stopgap spending bill to keep federal workers on the job.”

The cast changes but slowly. The plot gets tweaked but little.

Act One: “There’s a government shutdown coming if we don’t pass a spending bill!”

Act Two: “Let’s fight about it!”

(The most common plot tweak comes in here with the occasional insertion of a short supposed “shutdown”)

Act Three: “SURPRISE! We made a deal!”

Act Three always closes with a set change: A road, and cast members kicking a can down it.

Curtain call — the cast takes its bows. They’ve once again saved the day by borrowing and spending more money than ever before. Please clap.

At this point, I pause to check two numbers. The “National Debt Clock” tells me that the play’s producers owe nearly $37.5 trillion to their backers and that 2025’s expenses stand at nearly $2 trillion more than box office receipts.

It’s Max Bialystock’s and Leo Bloom’s wildest dream: “Springtime for Hitler” isn’t just a money-making (for them, but nobody else) flop, it’s history’s longest-running such flop!

The last time US politicians actually (and very temporarily) paid off their ever-growing debt was 190 years ago in 1835. The last time they even managed to theoretically balance one year’s budget was 24 years ago in 2001.

And, let me emphasize: It’s THEIR debt, not YOUR debt.

The organization they run (“the US government”), not you, borrowed the money.

They love to talk about a “national” debt and shake their heads in amazement at how much each American “owes” (about $110,000), but your signature isn’t on any of those loan documents. In fact, if you hold the US government’s bonds, you’re actually among their unlucky creditors.

Let’s throw in two more numbers: 123.8% and 70.

The former is the ratio of the politicians’ debt to the country’s Gross Domestic Product; the latter is the IQ cut-off point separating those who believe the debt will ever be paid off from those who know it won’t.

In May, Moody’s lowered the US government’s “sovereign credit rating” from Aaa (“highest rating, representing minimum credit risk”) to Aa1 (“high-grade”).  In reality, that rating should be Ca (“highly speculative, or near default”) or C (“little prospect for recovery of principal or interest”).

At some point, the producers of a commercially unsuccessful play default and the play’s run comes to an end.

That’s going to happen with the US government. And the longer it takes to happen the uglier things will get.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“When [David] Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world” asserts Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (“David Graeber: the Left’s lost hero,” UnHerd, September 2).  An unlikely position for the author of tomes covering “some of the most mind-numbing subjects,” from the originations of finance to managerial administration, whose defiant anti-authoritarianism apparently mapped “a kind of ‘road not taken’ for the political Left” which has since veered ever more sharply into pinning all their hopes and fears on the next election.

Yet Lambert can count Graeber’s bestsellers “among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time,” offering “the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists” — who have taken up such themes as emphasizing “‘values’ as distinct from ‘value'” (no longer the domain of such leftists as The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy author Raj Patel),  “paeans to untrammeled human creativity” Graeber made in the face of the sort of tech billionaire via which such techno-utopianism is now judged guilty by association, and exploring “the horrors of modern bureaucracy” while “the ‘b’ word is hardly ever uttered by progressives” (at least those who, unlike Argentine comic-strip character Mafalda, don’t need to holler the name of an eponymous pet turtle) more comfortable with “the language of enlightened paternalism.”

Even being “deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation,” which Lambert points to as the dividing line between Graeber and the right, could easily sound closer to the “Birkenstocked Burkeans” of National Review‘s Rod Dreher than a Biden-era brat summer. The Economist, the newspaper in which Lambert locates the “orthodox line of rebuttal” to Graeber that seemingly wasteful jobs “ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production,” had once employed the laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer who had argued that in self-managed worker cooperatives where “each obtains exactly the remuneration due for his work, minus only the cost of administration, the productive power of the concern is greatly increased.”

Graeber would at least not quarrel with Lambert that avowed anarchism was “far rarer in academic life” than Marxism.”  In 2004, Graeber himself had asserted (with coauthor Andrej Grubacic) that “there are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists,” with the professoriate preferring “the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D.” Even then, the ranks of respected academic anarchist anthropologists included Harold Barclay and James C. Scott together with Graeber. And for decades before and since 2004, one of the all-time most cited living academics has been anti-Marxist anarchist Noam Chomsky.

Auburn’s academic anarchist Roderick Long summed up: “Graeber’s liberatory vision” has much of value as “a useful corrective for those” — including Graeber himself, who had previously dismissed “terms like free enterprise” as cover for “the sordid economic reality, one where productive wealth was controlled by the few for their own benefit” — “who are too quick to take the case for free enterprise as a validation of the perversities of the existing … market.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, September 8, 2025
2. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], September 8, 2025