Thursday, July 29, 2010 12:31 pm | By Anthony Lizan
Whoever said, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me,” never met Congressman James Oberstar (D-Minn). His bill, “America’s Commitment to Clean Water Act (H.R. 5088),” would remove the word “navigable” from the Clean Water Act’s definition. By removing this one word, the federal government’s regulatory authority over private property would increase exponentially.
The implications of this bill on individual property rights are frightening. By removing the word “navigable,” the government could regulate every body of water in the U.S. from small ponds to irrigation canals. Bureaucrats could impose onerous new restrictions and permit requirements that would hamper economic growth, especially for small businesses.
Owners of desert property would be the only ones truly safe from this bill, except for the fact that the government already owns most of the deserts in America.
Rep. Oberstar claims that his bill "would restore, not expand, the geographic scope of Clean Water Act." He even has Lisa Jackson, the EPA Administrator, bolster his point. As Americans for Tax Reform has noted, the EPA has no credibility when it comes to regulatory restraint. They have continually overstepped their bounds and have attempted to subvert individual property many times. The EPA would administer the law if H.R. 5088 gets passed.
While the government may not necessarily regulate every body of water if H.R. 5088 makes it out of committee, the fact is, it leaves the door wide open for future regulatory abuses. Why give the government more power than it already has?
To see PRA’s letter condemning H.R. 5088, click here.
Not so Shocking Study Finds 97 Percent of BitTorrent Files Illegal
Monday, July 26, 2010 5:33 pm | By Kelsey Zahourek
The Australian based University of Ballarat came out with a study finding that 97 percent of files shared over BitTorrent networks contain infringing content. This really isn’t a huge revelation but does confirm what many have been saying for sometime now.
The study concluded:
Overally, 89.3% of torrents were given a definitive legality. Of those 89.3% of torrents, 99.66% are infringing. If we assume that all of the 16 cases of ambiguous legality are not infringing, we arrive at an overall figure of 97.9% infringing content shared over BitTorrent networks.
The three most shared categories were movies, music, and TV shows and of those files ZERO were found to be shared legally.
I have often written about the harm imposed by illegal downloading on the economy as a whole, but often left out of the equation is the effect on consumers. Networks are being overrun with infringing works delivered via P2P. When I go online and stream a movie or TV show, legally mind you, my user experience is almost exclusively determined by the amount of activity on my ISP. (the series of tubes is not limitless, after all) When someone else on my network is clogging up the system by pirating countless movies or the latest in software, I lose out. Moreover, as is the case with any form of theft, when a company sees a loss in profit due to shoplifting or pirating, they incur those expenses by raising prices on honest consumers.
Want to Promote Conservation? Protect Property Rights!
Friday, July 23, 2010 12:00 pm | By Anthony Lizan
President Obama recently launched the America's Great Outdoors Initiative, asking for comments on what the administration can do to promote outdoor conservation. From what we’ve seen in the past, whenever the Democrats talk about “conservation,” they’re really asking, “how can we take more land for the federal government?”
If President Obama really wants to promote outdoor conservation, he should create more opportunities for private ownership and respect individual property rights. People who have a vested interest in something, whether it’s land or an iPod, are more likely to take care of it. Land ownership naturally creates incentives to protect the property.
We see examples of this all over the world. Niger for instance, is much greener now because the government allowed citizens to own trees. According to the New York Times,
"From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them…But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them."
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