Freedom Line Blog

Posted without additional commentary, per the latest Labor Department data, here’s an illustration from economist Steve Moore of the immediate and ongoing pay cut that Americans have experienced since Joe Biden became president:

The Biden Pay Cut

It’s difficult to say they haven’t earned it:  When it comes to public trust in media, the U.S. stands lower than any other nation:

U.S. Claims Lowest Public Trust in Media

We recently referenced how Joe Biden seeks a 2024 job extension from American voters even while he has presided over a record 24 consecutive months of earnings declines (wages minus inflation), and our friend Stephen Moore offers an instructive illustration of the point:

Record Biden Earnings Bust

Today is World Intellectual Property (IP) Day, and CFIF is proud to join a broad coalition of conservative, libertarian and free-market organizations in celebrating a key element that not only drives worldwide innovation and prosperity, but also is the central component explaining American Exceptionalism in worldwide innovation, power and prosperity.

In that latter regard, nothing stands above our enduring legacy of protecting IP – patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets.  America throughout its history has protected IP like no other nation before or since.  Our Founding Fathers deliberately inserted text protecting IP rights into Article I of the Constitution, which reads, “Congress shall have the Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”  As James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers while advocating ratification of the Constitution, protecting IP respected the natural right of individuals to enjoy the fruits of their labors, while also serving the public good by encouraging innovation.

That assurance that one’s creations will enjoy legal protection in turn promotes creative activity, which is why patent holder Abraham Lincoln noted that America’s IP protections, “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”

Consequently, no nation spanning the entirety of human history even approaches America’s record of patented invention, from the telephone to the airplane, from lifesaving pharmaceuticals like the polio vaccine to the internet.   No society remotely rivals our copyrighted artistic influence, whether in the form of motion pictures, television programming or popular music.  No nation’s trademarks stand recognized in the way that the Coca-Cola or Apple logos are instantly identified across the world.  A direct relationship exists between our tradition of IP protection and our unrivaled success in innovation and prosperity.

That’s precisely why CFIF is so pleased to join other organizations here in the U.S. and across the globe in celebrating World IP Day, highlighting IP’s critical importance:

On World IP Day, we celebrate the role intellectual property plays in bolstering entrepreneurship, innovation, economic growth and quality job creation…

The U.S IP system drives economic growth, accounting for $7.8 trillion in GDP (41% of total GDP) and more than 47 million jobs.  Direct and indirect employment in IP industries accounts for 44% of U.S. jobs.

IP-intensive industries create high-paying jobs.  Average weekly-wage earnings are 60% higher than earnings in other sectors.  Accelerating the growth rate of women who participate in IP-intensive industries means increasing their earning power and financial well-being.

Unfortunately, some politicians here in America and abroad fail to respect the role of IP in boosting innovation and wellbeing, and actively seek to undermine it with such misguided efforts as surrendering patent rights to Covid vaccines developed in the U.S.

We cannot let that occur, lest Americans and billions across the world suffer.  Accordingly, on this World Intellectual Property Day, we urge national governments, policymakers and other organizations around the world to promote policies that strengthen intellectual property protections and ensure that a healthy innovation environment can thrive.

For years CFIF has highlighted how the IRS has not only targeted conservative and libertarian organizations for persecution, but also suffered security breaches allowing online extremists to release Americans’ sensitive data to the world.  Now, the equally abusive (and obviously misnamed) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has suffered a similar breach.  Specifically, the CFPB acknowledges that an employee breached and forwarded the data of over 250,000 Americans in what it labels a “major breach”:

The CFPB said an employee forwarded the personal information of more than a quarter-million consumers to a personal email account, an incident that the bureau described as a ‘major’ breach.  The employee, who was fired when the data breach came to light, sent spreadsheets with names and transaction-specific account numbers related to those 256,000 consumer accounts at a single institution, according to the bureau.”

Separately, and confirming our reference to CFPB abusiveness above, our friend John Berlau along with Stone Washington of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) write in today’s Wall Street Journal how the CFPB is suing and attempting to censor the owner of nonbank mortgage firm Townstone Financial for discussing out-of-control crime in the Chicago area on a radio show to general audiences.  You can’t make this up:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal bureaucracy with a vast jurisdiction, is testing a novel approach to crime and punishment.  In a lawsuit against Townstone Financial, a small Chicago-area nonbank mortgage firm, the CFPB is signaling that it may attempt to punish anyone who complains about neighborhood crime.

The CFPB accuses Townstone owner Barry Sturner and others affiliated with the company of making ‘statements that would discourage African-American prospective applicants from applying for mortgage loans.’  The suit, filed in 2020, doesn’t provide any concrete examples of  consumers that Townstone has allegedly mistreated.  Rather, the CFPB points to a handful of statements Mr. Sturner and other company officials made over a four-year period on the Townstone Financial Show – a weekly radio program and podcast.”

And here’s the kicker:  Mr. Sturner was simply saying things similar to what soft-on-crime Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson has himself said about Chicago crime:

Among the statements highlighted in the lawsuit are Mr. Sturner’s descriptions of frequent weekend crime rampages on Chicago’s South Side as the work of ‘hoodlums’ and his claim that police are keeping the city from ‘turning into a real war zone.’  The CFPB also wags its finger at a host’s description of a Chicago suburb as an area in which ‘you drive very fast through’ and ‘you don’t look at anybody or lock on anybody’s eyes.’

The CFPB contends that these statements about majority-black communities would somehow ‘discourage prospective applicants from applying for mortgage loans.’  Yet the Townstone hosts’ candid comments about the crime epidemic in Chicago’s black neighborhoods are remarkably similar to recent statements of Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson.

Despite Mr. Johnson’s past association with the ‘defund the police’ movement, he spoke openly in his campaign about the effect of crime on Chicago’s neighborhoods.  In a March 16 debate with Paul Vallas, Mr. Johnson described Austin – his own West Side neighborhood – as ‘one of the most violent neighborhoods in the entire city.’  In his April 4 victory address Mr. Johnson said he’d shielded his children ‘from bullets that fly right outside our front door.'”

It all points to a bureaucratic abusiveness that we address this week regarding the vast federal administrative state, and shows the need for courts and elected officials to rein it in.  In the meantime, the CFPB should pay more attention to its own dangerous data breaches, and less what is said on radio shows.

In our contentious national healthcare debate, there’s one point on which we can all find a rare point of consensus:  the benefit of achieving greater transparency in medical billing and fees.  

Unfortunately, the manner by which the Biden Administration has implemented the “No Surprises Act” that took effect on January 1 so far has failed to protect consumers from obscure and needless insurance costs.  Although the No Surprises Act aimed to reform the out-of-network reimbursement process, some insurance companies continue to exploit what are known as “shared savings fees,” which in turn keeps costs higher than necessary for both employers and their employees alike.  

The Department of Labor, however, can help rectify the problem by requiring greater transparency going forward.  

By way of background, “shared savings fees” derive from out-of-network medical claims, and more specifically refer to out-of-network cost-management fees.  They’re sold to health insurance plan sponsors, typically employers, as a form of protection against surprise medical bills charged to employees.  In other words, shared savings fees ostensibly provide a mechanism for employers to save money by lowering out-of-network healthcare costs when they arise.  

The problem is that in practice, they often impose hidden fees that result in higher premiums and dubious benefits for plan sponsors and covered employees, as we explained alongside a dozen other free-market organizations in a recent coalition letter to the U.S. Secretary of Labor:    

In some cases, shared savings fees exceed total administrative fees for many plan sponsors, and some may not even be aware of the total amount they are paying in those fees.  That is partly a function of a significant lack of transparency, since insurance companies do not routinely report their revenues from shares savings programs.  Unfortunately, the No Surprises Act does not directly address those fees, and we believe that insurers should more responsibly disclose the fees that plan sponsors are charged every year to help reduce healthcare prices for millions of American families.   

The No Surprises Act should’ve made shared savings fees unnecessary.  As long as shared savings fees continue to exist as “administrative fees,” the problem of higher healthcare costs and fewer choices for consumers will fester.  The Labor Department must therefore require higher transparency and full disclosure to employers and other health plan sponsors regarding shared savings fees to help resolve this outstanding and wholly unnecessary problem.  

In our ongoing political debates, leftists can virtue signal all they want, but facts don’t lie.  In this case, the Census Bureau’s facts over the past decade relating to domestic migration illustrate whose policy model Americans prefer:

Facts Don’t Lie, Leftists Do

We recently highlighted the preposterousness of Joe Biden’s ceaseless talking point that wealthier Americans don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes, as well as the insanity of resting his tax and budgetary policy on that false claim.  In reality, wealthier Americans’ share of income taxes paid dwarfs their share of income earned, and the Tax Foundation offers a helpful comparison graph illustrating our point perfectly:

Paying Their “Fair Share?”

Here at CFIF, we’ve written at length about how unionization rates in the United States have reached record lows. Despite talk of Big Labor’s resurgence, spurred by a pro-union White House and a federal government that tips the scales in unions’ favor, American workers are just not sold by the self-enrichment of union leadership and hostile negotiating practices that ultimately harm workers more than help them.

America’s growing tech sector, which typically maintains non-unionized workforces, perfectly illustrates today’s workforce realities.

A company named findhelp in Austin, Texas, however, suddenly finds itself at the center of an unwanted drama that threatens the company’s future courtesy of Big Labor.

By way of background, findhelp is a social care network to connect people with community services. It’s a “public benefit company” backed by private equity that employs approximately 250 workers.

On January 25, the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) announced that findhelp workers formally sought a union representation election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Naturally, deep-pocketed Big Labor groups like the AFL-CIO leapt at the announcement to claim it as some sort of watershed moment for workers in the tech sector.

Instead of a watershed moment, however, the reality appears to be Big Labor doing what it is notorious for doing: instigating worker unrest. This case offers a particularly chosen opportunity to Big Labor, as it desperately seeks to gain a foothold in the tech sector, and in a right-to-work state whose growing population and business prosperity are due in large part to the fact that it remains a refuge from the destructive public policies pushed by Big Labor.

At the center of the effort to unionize findhelp’s employees is the “findhelp Solidarity Network,” a glossy, public relations effort claiming employees at the company are “missing a voice at the table.” Parroting commonplace Big Labor Union slogans, it expresses a desire to “ensure that findhelp becomes, and stays, a place where all team members have a living wage, competitive benefits, and a respectful work culture.”

Those are curious charges against a tech start-up like findhelp, but ones that are all too recognizable for anyone familiar with Big Labor’s antics.

Meanwhile, on the popular company-review website Glassdoor, findhelp maintains an average rating of 3.4 out of 5. Companies like findhelp in early stages of development naturally experience growing pains, and complaints on Glassdoor by current and past employees like issues with “transparency,” “trust,” and management allegedly refusing to respond to employee feedback are commonplace at start-ups. An NLRB complaint charges findhelp with coercive actions, coercive rules and coercive statements, among other typical boilerplate union charges. Which raises the question of whether such commonplace complaints justify a full-blown union representation campaign threatening to drive a fledgling company into the ground through union representation.

It also makes for an odd irony, because many tech sector companies maintain left-leaning employee cultures, often at the encouragement of left-leaning executives themselves. Accordingly, one might expect them to welcome unionization, since in the abstract those same left-leaning cultures would favor Big Labor and its partisan agenda.

Tech sector employers, however, operate in an environment demanding fluid development and the ability to pivot on a moment’s notice. Unions, by their very nature, inhibit that sort of fluidity and flexibility.

It’s an issue of obvious concern for management, investors and even customers who may question the ability of a company with Big Labor’s bullseye on its back to function as effectively and efficiently as needed.

Unfortunately, all of this threatens to further embolden Big Labor, which may in turn have a substantial impact on startup companies across our economy, particularly in the tech sector.

In the meantime, all eyes will be watching findhelp and how it navigates this sudden and unwanted disruption.

While Joe Biden simply repeats his claims to be building an economy “from the bottom up and the middle out,” and strangely brags about slight reductions in the rate of inflation that shot upward under him, our friend Stephen Moore provides yet another handy visual on how inflation has outpaced wage gains since Biden entered the White House:

Joe Biden the Wage Slayer

Gallup just released a new survey summary under the sobering headline “Americans Sour on U.S. Healthcare Quality,” but what’s perhaps most notable is when the distinctive downturn began — as ObamaCare took effect and government control over our healthcare increased significantly:

Generally speaking and on a wide array of pressing issues, Congressman Darrell Issa (R – California) has proven a reliable leader who maintains solid support among conservatives and libertarians.

The prospect of Rep. Issa leading the House Judiciary Committee’s Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet Subcommittee, however, has sparked significant opposition and pushback from intellectual property (IP) proponents.  And for sound reasons.

For example, in urging new House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R – Ohio) not to select Rep. Issa for the role, IPWatchdog’s Paul Morinville lists a litany of concerns based upon Issa’s record:

Issa is the wrong person for the job and has demonstrated that since he joined Congress.  He has sponsored and cosponsored numerous bills that harm small entities for the benefit of Big Tech and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled multinational corporations.  He was one of the key drivers of the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA), which created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), the entity that now invalidates 84% of the patents it fully adjudicates.  He has ignored other problems like eBay v. MercExchange, which highly restricted injunctive relief, and Alice V. CLS Bank, which unleashed a demon into the patent system called the ‘abstract idea.’  This trifecta of damage has radically reduced the funding of startups by devaluing the only asset capable of attracting investment: patents.

More broadly and equally troublingly, Rep. Issa conceptualizes IP and Congress’s role in protecting it in an agnostic and passive way, as reconfirmed recently by spokesman Jonathan Wilcox:

As long as there have been patents, there have been disputes about how to regulate them.  Congressman Issa believes from decades of experience the system has too many loopholes that allow litigation and lawsuit abuse to stifle innovation.  Every IP reform he has achieved is to make the system more fair to everyone.

The fact that Rep. Issa views his potential chairmanship as an opportunity to increase government regulation illustrates precisely why the prospect of him leading this important subcommittee has generated such considerable and unified pushback from the IP community.  Patents are a constitutional and natural right, not a platform for increasing government control.

Moreover, centuries of American experience and success tell a different story than he suggests.

Throughout our history, America’s system of strong IP protections has made us the most innovative, prosperous nation in human history, without any close competitor.  From Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright brothers, from the film industry to the music industry, from lifesaving pharmaceuticals to software, from the telephone to the television, no society parallels our astonishing record of innovation, influence and prosperity.

That occurred by design, not coincidence.

Namely, our Founding Fathers considered IP a natural right and specifically drafted the Constitution to protect IP in a robust manner.  Even before they drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights, they specifically included IP protection in the text of the Constitution.  Article I, Section 8 provides that, “Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

That obviously creates an active, affirmative Congressional duty, not some sort of passive or optional authority as suggested by advocates of weaker IP laws.

The Founders recognized that, as with every other type of property, protection of IP recognized individuals’ inherent right to the fruits of their own labor while also incentivizing productive activity.  As James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, emphasized, “The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals.”

Similarly, former patent attorney Abraham Lincoln observed that, “The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”

And as the Supreme Court confirmed a century after that, “encouragement of individual effort by personal gain is the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors,” while “sacrificial days devoted to such creative activities deserve rewards commensurate with the services rendered.”

Accordingly, America’s strong historical protection of IP rights reflects both the importance of economic incentives – the utilitarian angle – as well as the recognition that free people possess a natural right to the fruits of their labor and investment.

Today, the total estimated value of American IP measures approximately $6.6 trillion, which standing alone exceeds the economies of every other nation in the world.  Our IP industries also account for 52% of all U.S. exports, and employ nearly 50 million workers whose average annual earnings exceed non-IP workers’ wages by nearly 30%.

Both at home and abroad, however, our unparalleled system of strong IP rights remains under deliberate assault.

Overseas, nations with weaker IP laws seek to pressure the U.S. to surrender IP protections, such as with our world-leading Covid vaccines and treatments.

And here in the U.S., skeptics and special interests who seek to weaken IP rights claim that the Constitution’s IP protections are utilitarian in nature, as opposed to natural rights.

The obvious flaw in that claim is that utilitarianism obtained more widespread popular currency decades after the Founding Fathers drafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.  They were steeped not in cold utilitarianism, but rather the natural rights theories of John Locke, who observed that, “a person rightly claims ownership in her works to the extent that her labor resulted in their existence.”

Even accepting for the sake of argument, however, that America’s IP protections arose from solely utilitarian rather than natural rights ideals among the Founders, the simple fact is that one cannot identify an alternative IP system in the world today, or throughout human history, that has resulted in greater utility than our own.

That’s why IP matters, and why we must maintain and strengthen America’s system of IP protection, not undermine it.

It’s therefore important that new House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan take this to heart in determining who will lead the critical House subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet.

This week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D – Massachusetts) and a group of fellow liberals submitted a letter to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) demanding that the federal government employ so-called “march-in” rights under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 to disregard private patent rights on the critical cancer drug Xtandi.

Here’s why that’s a terrible and potentially deadly idea that the HHS, other lawmakers and the American public must oppose.

Simply put, disregarding patent protections for pharmaceutical innovators will bring innovation to a halt and deprive Americans of lifesaving drugs.  America currently produces two-thirds of all new drugs worldwide, and that’s because our nation honors and protects patent rights, it doesn’t violate them.

It’s especially outrageous that Senator Warren and her cohorts seek to leverage the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 to facilitate their scheme.  The Bayh-Dole Act was passed in order to extend patent rights to universities and nonprofit research entities whose research was assisted by federal funds, not weaken them.  Prior to Bayh-Dole, very few innovations partially funded by federal dollars were ever commercially pursued – only 390 in the year prior to its passage.  Four decades later, however, that number approaches 7,500, with over 420,000 inventions and 13,000 new startup enterprises formed.

That explains why The Economist magazine labeled Bayh-Dole the most important bill of the past half-century:

Possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.  Together with amendments in 1984 and augmentation in 1986, this unlocked all the inventions and discoveries that had been made in laboratories throughout the United States with taxpayers’ money.”

Alarmingly, however, this groups seeks to undermine patent rights for Xtandi by exploiting a “march-in” provision within Bayh-Dole to empower the federal government to commandeer new drugs and license the patents on inventions partially funded by federal dollars to third parties.   According to their flawed logic, the market prices of some drugs render them insufficiently available to the general public, and on that basis they encourage federal bureaucracies to forcibly license those drugs’ patent rights to other third parties for manufacture and sale.  That would constitute a frontal assault against private pharmaceutical innovators, disregarding their patent rights and the enormous investments they’ve made over years and decades to conceive, perfect, produce and distribute those drugs.  It would also contravene the statutory terms of Bayh-Dole itself.

Indeed, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole themselves confirmed that the law bearing their names did not intend or allow cost to become a mechanism for imposition of de facto drug price controls:

Bayh-Dole did not intend that government set prices on resulting products.  The law makes no reference to a reasonable price that should be dictated by the government.  This omission was intentional;  the primary purpose of the act was to entice the private sector to seek public-private research collaboration rather than focusing on its own proprietary research.”

That’s precisely why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has rejected every one of the “march-in” petitions that it has received during the Bayh-Dole Act’s existence.  It has consistently and correctly ruled that attempts to leverage price allegations to justify march-in would undermine the very goal of the act and ultimately harm American consumers.

People like Sen. Warren and her cohorts nevertheless claim that federal funding toward pharmaceutical research justify government march-in intrusion, falsely asserting that pharmaceutical innovators somehow enjoy a free ride at taxpayer expense.   That’s false.

Private funding for research and development actually dwarfs public funding.  According to the NIH itself, private sector R&D far exceeds NIH funding throughout recent years and decades.  In 2018, as another example, the NIH spent $3 billion on clinical trials involving new or existing drugs, compared to $102 billion in R&D by the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry.  Indeed, the pharmaceutical industry stands as the single largest source of business R&D funding in the U.S., accounting for 17.6% of all U.S. business R&D.  The next-closest counterpart is the software sector at 9.1%, with the automobile industry at 5.9% and the aerospace industry at 4.1%.

Senator Warren and her cosigners also allege that inflation somehow justifies their demand, but the fact is that drug prices significantly trail overall inflation.

Accordingly, the facts show that strong U.S. patent protections and the Bayh-Dole law promote pharmaceutical R&D investment, and there’s simply no legal or logical basis for advocating march-in regarding Xtandi.  Pharmaceutical innovation demands billions of dollars in sunk costs of investment, not to mention potential product liability lawsuits for any errors.  Strong patent protections, which Bayh-Dole codifies, help ensure that those costs and risks will be fairly and sufficiently rewarded.  They provide innovators and investors the incentives to create pharmaceuticals that save millions and even billions of lives worldwide.

The demand by Senators Warren and her cosigners would dangerously jeopardize that.

As the global economy slows, inflation remains elevated and wages fail to keep pace, we continue to emphasize how government regulators targeting short-term lenders only end up hurting the people they claim to be helping.

Now, a stark new study just released by Gregory Elliehausen of the Federal Reserve among other authors hammers home that point.  Namely, new laws artificially capping interest rates resulted in surveyed borrowers themselves saying that borrowing money when they needed it only became more difficult.  “Disapprobation of high interest rates,” the study begins, “reflects a longstanding and widely held belief that lenders take advantage of needy individuals by charging high interest and imposing harsh terms.”  Their work clearly found, however, that government mandates manifesting that disapprobation inflicted even greater pain:

[W]e find that the interest-rate cap decreased the number of loans to subprime borrowers by 44 percent and increased the average loan size to subprime borrowers by 40 percent.  We examine the welfare effects of the loss of credit access using an online survey of short-term, small-dollar-credit borrowers in Illinois.  Most borrowers answer that they have been unable to borrow money when they needed it following the imposition of the interest rate cap.  Further, only 11 percent of the respondents answered that their financial well-being increased following the interest-rate cap, and 79 percent answered that they wanted the option to return to their previous lender.  Thus, the Illinois interest-rate cap of 36 percent significantly decreased the ability of small-dollar credit, particularly to subprime borrowers, and worsened the financial well-being of many consumers.”  (Emphasis added.)

Rather than harming the very working Americans they claim to be helping, government officials at the federal, state and local levels need to increase access to small-dollar credit by first doing no harm.

One can’t accuse the U.S. Census Bureau of right-wing bias, and their visual regarding population shifts signals important things that a lot of leftists would prefer remain unsaid:

Americans Abandon Blue States for Red States

In the wake of the outrageous and still-unfolding Twittergate revelations, one can’t intelligently contend that they haven’t earned their unpopularity, but according to a new I&I/TIPP survey that’s worth reading in its entirety, public trust in media has plummeted to a new record low:

Trust in Media Hits New Low