If you weren’t careful in drafting that patent royalty or licensing agreement, the Supreme Court just confirmed the intrinsic value of your cash flow stream is a lot smaller than you thought following its refusal to overturn an older decision from the 1960s.
You may never look at raisins the same way again. The highest court in the United States just handed individual citizens a major win in terms of personal property rights, striking down one of FDR’s New Deal programs by depriving the Federal Government of a power it has illegitimately exercised for decades. The case was called Horne et al., v. Department of Agriculture. It stemmed from The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, which gave the Secretary of Agriculture authority to issue “marketing orders” for the purpose of maintaining stable markets in specific commodities.
Words and phrases are interesting things. Each represents a package of ideas and associations, instantly unwrapped the moment we encounter them. If I say, “She stood in a cold, dark, damp basement on a winter day, with only a bit of gray, overcast sky visible through small windows around the perimeter; the rhythm of ice rain hitting…
President Obama’s administration has announced that he wants to impose a one-time tax levy of up to 14% on the $2 trillion in foreign profits American companies have built up and not repatriated in exchange for making repatriation on future foreign profits that were subject to at least a 19% tax rate tax-free, encouraging domestic…
A friend of mine, a nuclear engineer, once explained that he doesn’t bother to contribute to forums or message boards when the topic of nuclear energy is brought up anymore because people are irrational about it, interested in their own confirmation bias rather than learning or having an honest discussion. Almost everyone I know working in…
Mail Bag: Do You Think Polygamy Will Be Legalized in the United States? Over the past few years, I’ve received a lot of questions about the role of polygamy in American society and, in some cases, whether I think it will ever return and whether I think it should be legalized following its restriction in the…
I mentioned the infamous Bob Jones University student handbook in an earlier post after explaining it was the school from which one of the extremist authors I was reading as part of a self-imposed cultural studies program graduated back in 1950. It was the university that famously insisted God didn’t want blacks intermingling with whites and refused…
I don’t talk about it very often, but one of the charitable organizations close to my heart are community food banks and soup kitchens. These non-profits collect groceries for those who can’t afford to feed themselves or their children, allowing them to avoid hunger. They resonate with something very deep in my core, maybe because I…
A few of you know I’m in the middle of my 1970-1990 counter-evidence study, in which I dive into books on both extremes of the so-called culture wars, reading everything from radical feminists to conservative preachers to understand some of the things that were happening in the United States at the time from the perspective…
The Hobby Lobby decision has been all over the news and it seems like everyone has an opinion on it (few people bothering to read the actual opinion from the Supreme Court). Despite many messages from you asking my thoughts, I haven’t written about it for several reasons. [mainbodyad]I believe this is a case that never should have been…
