Volume 1, Issue 1

Fifteen years ago, I found it easy to be in favor of international capital mobility — the free flow of investment financing from one country to another. Then it was easy to preach for an end to all systems of controls on capital that hindered this flow. Now it is harder.

Not long ago, Republicans were trying to pass a balanced budget amendment to the constitution. Democrats were skeptical, overwhelmingly Keynesian, and believed that deficit spending had ended the Great Depression. Under Rubinomics the positions began to switch: Democrats became the defenders of fiscal orthodoxy. Now Bush has cut taxes for the rich and caused huge deficits. Is the flip-flop just politics?

Larry Lessig flagellates himself about losing the Eldred case, which upheld the legality of copyright extensions. He shouldn’t: Eldred was unwinnable. (The Court’s 7-2 vote is one clue). Besides, the worst of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act’s effects can still be made to disappear, if courts deem it “fair use” to copy an old work whose copyright owner hasn’t taken reasonable steps to provide notice of his rights. This is what Bill Patry and I propose in a forthcoming article in the California Law Review. The present paper is based on that article and on a stint of guest blogging that I did for the Lessig Blog the week of August 22, 2004. See http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/posner.shtml.

At the Democratic Convention Clinton argued that he had put police on the street and took guns off, but that Bush has done the opposite. Was Clinton truly more anti-crime? I estimate that Clinton-era federal programs were responsible for a six to eight percent reduction in crime seen in the last decade. The Bush administration has failed to build on the Clinton administration's success in funding more police. For no good reason, a crime-control program that has a very favorable benefit/cost ratio is being cut back.