Freedom Line Blog

As we at CFIF often highlight, strong intellectual property (IP) rights – including patent rights – constitute a core element of “American Exceptionalism” and explain how we became the most inventive, prosperous, technologically advanced nation in human history.  Our Founding Fathers considered IP so important that they explicitly protected it in the text of Article I of the United States Constitution.

Strong patent rights also explain how the U.S. accounts for an incredible two-thirds of all new lifesaving drugs introduced worldwide.

Elected officials must therefore work to protect strong IP and patent rights, not undermine them.   Unfortunately, several anti-patent bills currently before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week threaten to do exactly that.  Those bills include S. 1040, which rests on the myth of a “product-hopping” problem under U.S. law.

As CFIF has explained, however, bills like S. 1040 and acceptance of the “product-hopping” falsity would dangerously threaten U.S. innovation in an increasingly competitive world economy:

Myth:  Anti-patent activists employ this deceptive term when a manufacturer introduces a new, different drug that may compete with or replace  older version and provide expanded patient choice and access.  They claim that by introducing a new product covered by new patents, biopharmaceutical manufacturers are somehow engaging in anticompetitive activity, fending off entry of generic or biosimilar competitors.

Fact:  U.S. patent law rightfully grants patent rights for new and useful improvements to existing drugs.  That incentivizes research and development and the multiple years of risk-taking and experimentation needed to make existing products even better.  Such improvements open the door for reduced side effects, lower dosage requirements, improved potency, extended effectiveness or alternative uses.  Additionally, as the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated, it’s important to upgrade existing drugs to address potentially mutating viruses and diseases. Depriving pharmaceutical innovators of patent protections for those critical improvements or otherwise disincentivizing those innovations would mean they’re far less likely to be developed, resulting in fewer options for patients.

We cannot jeopardize America’s status as the world’s leader in innovation, including pharmaceutical innovation and availability on the basis of anti-patent myths.  Hopefully wiser minds on the Senate Judiciary Committee prevail.

In this week’s Liberty Update, we highlight how the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is finally confronting the bloated federal workforce, which includes malfeasant officials like former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent Lois Lerner.  In that vein, our friends at Unleash Prosperity offer a visual today on just how vast and bloated that federal workforce has become:

What DOGE Confronts

From our friends at Unleash Prosperity, another fantastic visual aid to rebut the predictable default rationalization that climate change, rather than incompetent leadership, underlies wildfires in California or elsewhere:

Climate Change? No.

As 2025 approaches, a critical debate over extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that finally ended America’s inglorious status as the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate looms.  Important in that debate is something that many people may find surprising:  America’s corporate tax rate remains too high.  As our friends at the Tax Foundation highlight, at 25.8%, it stands above the worldwide average of 23.51%.  Something to keep in mind when opponents of tax reform and greater global competitiveness attempt to mischaracterize our current rate as somehow too low.

U.S. 25.8% Corporate Tax Rate Remains Too High

On a recent episode of the Federal Newswire Lunch Hour podcast, CFIF’s Timothy Lee joined host Andrew Langer and Daniel Ikenson, Founder of Ikensonomics Consulting and former Director of Trade and Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, to discuss Federal Trade Commission overreach, so-called “junk fees,” and more.

The conversation focuses on “the FTC’s increasingly aggressive regulatory posture under Chair Lina Khan, highlighting concerns about overreach, economic consequences, and implications for constitutional governance.”

Watch below.

From our friends at Unleash Prosperity, a handy illustration of how the Biden/Harris administration facilitated Iranian restrengthening, which in turn allowed them to fund terrorist proxies like Hamas prior to their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, by scaling back Trump administration sanctions on Iran.   The Biden/Harris administration’s conduct throughout its tenure in signaling international weakness has been both inexplicable and shameful:

Biden/Harris Facilitated Iran

Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

If you happen to be someone who ever purchases gasoline, the answer is no on that front, as our friends at the Unleash Prosperity Hotline highlight.  The Biden/Harris administration and its cheerleaders frequently trumpet that inflation and prices for items like gasoline are down significantly from their recent highs, what they rarely bother to tell you is that they’re still up significantly from when Biden and Harris took over:

The Biden/Harris Effect

Despite attempts to portray the Biden/Harris administration as friendly toward domestic U.S. energy producers, American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher highlights how that’s simply not the case.  Zycher cogently distinguishes the deceptive metric of oil and natural gas production on federal lands – which is a trailing indicator from permits and exploration years old – from new permits granted, which better reflects current friendliness toward U.S. energy producers.  It’s not a pretty picture for Biden/Harris apologists or the Harris campaign team:

Biden/Harris Unfriendly Toward U.S. Energy Production

After the United States Supreme Court ruling this past June finally and rightfully overturning “Chevron Deference,” one might hope that federal agencies and the bureaucrats who populate them in Washington, D.C. would recognize and respect the new limitations on their previous excesses.

The ruling struck a major blow against administrative state overreach.  And while the Court’s decision specifically dealt with agencies’ rulemaking process and the ability to interpret statutes however they like, hopefully it and similar previous rulings will start imposing desperately needed guardrails to prevent rouge agency action.

The Unites States Department of Education (DOE) offers a textbook example of that sort of rogue behavior.   Many cogently contend that the DOE shouldn’t even exist, and that federal education dollars should instead go directly to the states, letting them handle education policy at the more effective local level.

Of course, if we accomplished that, bureaucrats in the DOE ranks wouldn’t be able to use their lofty titles to attack universities of their choosing at whim.

More specifically, we at CFIF told you a few months ago about an attempted money grab by DOE at the University of Arizona.  in that instance, the DOE moved to shift tens of millions of dollars in student debt from thousands of students instead onto the U of A following its acquisition of a for-profit online university.  That offers just the latest example of the ongoing efforts by federal regulators to target more market-driven education models.

To date, DOE has failed to provide any clarity or guidance in their scheme to U of A, despite that fact that it could cost Arizona taxpayers millions at a time when Vice President Kamala Harris desperately wants to avoid stirring up opposition among voters in this critical swing state.

Unfortunately, the DOE’s malfeasance shouldn’t be surprising.  It stems from DOE’s stubborn and unfounded aversion toward any market-oriented education outside of bureaucratic control.  How dare U of A experiment with an innovative form of education delivery, they believe.    That’s shameful of them, and ultimately damages student populations that the DOE exists to help.

In that vein, our friends at the Heritage Foundation released a report earlier this year detailing DOE’s two-decade war with for-profit higher education, even in cases where those schools were partners with nonprofit institutions.  “Rather than singling out the for-profit sector, which is meeting the needs of non-traditional students in particular, the department should hold all sectors to the same standards instead of expressing the anti-market biases,” the Heritage report found.

Sadly, U of A appears to be just the latest victim of DOE’s perverse witch hunt.  That triggers the looming question: Who’s next?  If the DOE can do this to the largest university in such a politically and economically important state like Arizona, what other state universities in less-pivotal swing states might they target next to try to recoup their student loan “forgiveness?”

Hopefully, pressure from the courts, elected officials and the public results in some restoration of sanity at the end of the day, and that DOE decides to put the interests of Arizona students and taxpayers first.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Michael Ramirez on Vice President Kamala Harris’ price controls:

In this week’s Liberty Update, we highlight how Kamala Harris isn’t even bothering to conceal her goal of abolishing private health insurance in America.  Whereas Barack Obama earned PolitiFact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” for assuring America that, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it,” Harris just openly advocates ending private healthcare plans completely.  Some pro-socialized medicine extremists claim that the 80% of Americans who prefer private insurance are somehow oblivious to its cost.  In a letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, however, a wise reader notes that government plans cost even more:

[T]he average annual cost of Medicare per beneficiary in 2022 (the latest data) was $15,727.  For a retired couple, that’s $31,454 a year, or 30% more than private coverage for a whole family.”

A second reader further notes that while someone with employer-provided private insurance can at least see how much is taken out of his or her paycheck, we have no idea how tax dollars that subsidize government plans are inefficiently used within the murky interiors of the federal bureaucracy.

In response to broad public discontent over economic conditions, the Biden/Harris administration habitually points to the nation’s unemployment rate.  What remains underreported is that the unemployment rate is actually on a disturbingly upward trend over the past year, from 3.4% in April 2023 to 4.1% now, just as voters consider whether to continue the economic policies of the past four years:

Unemployment Rate’s Disturbing Upward Rise

Today, the House Oversight Committee is holding an important hearing entitled “The Role of Pharmacy Benefit Managers in Prescription Drug Markets Part III:  Transparency and Accountability.”

For those unfamiliar, Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) amount to middlemen that control prescription drugs for millions of Americans.  A majority of Americans receive health insurance through employer plans or government programs such as Medicare, which in turn cover prescription drugs through PBMs.  Those PBMs negotiate with drug companies and pay pharmacies, but throughout the process determine the drugs that insured patients may obtain and at what cost.

The problem is that PBMs operate in such an opaque and complex manner that they’re able to inflate drug costs while claiming to be working to reduce them.  It has reached a point where even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now investigating PBMs’ role in driving up costs for Americans.

Today’s House Oversight Committee hearing accordingly offers invaluable assistance in alerting Americans to PBMs’ ongoing role in unnecessarily increasing drug prices for consumers, and hopefully helps propel reform in this critical realm.

In their increasingly desperate effort to resuscitate Joe Biden’s sagging campaign, his defenders claim that stock markets vindicate “Bidenomics” (not that they call it that anymore, of course) vis-a-vis former President Donald Trump.  Well, our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity show what happens when you adjust stock performance to account for out-of-control inflation under Biden:

“Biden Boom?” Not So Much.

However else one opines on the merits or perils of artificial intelligence (AI), everyone of good faith can agree that it mustn’t become a tool for brazen copyright infringement.  Artists who pour their (sometimes literal) blood, sweat and tears into their creative works shouldn’t have those works stolen and exploited by AI bots.

That is particularly true as it relates to AI music generators specifically created for that exploitative purpose.

For that reason, we should all welcome and applaud major record labels for their decisive lawsuit against AI generators Suno and Udio, whom they accuse in their complaints of copyright violation on an “unimaginable scale.”

The complaints make for gripping reading unlike most legal filings, but we’re not talking here about sampling various songs or “fair use” or ambiguous similarities between songs.  We’re talking about wholesale theft, scraping songs for exploitation, which not only punishes artists but America’s entire world-leading music industry.

The complaints can be – and should be – read in their entirety here and here, and we should welcome this effort to enforce creators’ IP rights, regardless of how the broader AI landscape continues to expand.

In our latest Liberty Update, we call Joe Biden out on his deficit fibbing, which he continued in last week’s debate meltdown against Donald Trump.  Excepting the unanticipated Covid spending that Biden and his party supported, official government data shows in sharp relief how Biden’s baseline deficits exceed Trump’s, as we pointed out:

Biden Baseline Deficits Exceed Trump’s

In recent weeks we at CFIF have criticized the Biden administration’s indefensible legal crusade against entertainment enterprise Live Nation, which promises nothing but a waste of judicial resources and litigation costs in its attempt to reverse a merger that the very same Department of Justice (DOJ) blessed just a few short years ago.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar and tech expert Mark Jamison adds his own intellectual heft to the issue in his new commentary “The Government Is Gunning for Live Nation.  It’s Making a Historic Mistake”:

The recent case filed by Department of Justice (DOJ) exemplifies the administration’s tendency to view company breakups as a panacea for perceived market ills.  The DOJ argues that Live Nation’s integration of concerts, event venue ownership, talent agencies and ticketing creates barriers to competition and enables the company to engage in unfair practices.  The DOJ believes that spinning off Ticketmaster, which Live Nation acquired nearly 15 years ago, and Live Nation’s concert venues will foster a more competitive market.

History suggests otherwise.”

Mr. Jamison’s piece merits a full read, but he highlights how American consumers will be the ones to pay the price of this latest misguided activism from the Biden administration:

Live Nation has become the world’s leading provider of live concerts, ticket sales and related services.  Its success stems from innovative integration across multiple business lines, a structure that its competitors want to replicate, according to the DOJ.  The agency contends that this integration is hard to duplicate, so it stifles competition and innovation.  Yet this very structure has driven substantial value for consumers and investors.  The only beneficiaries of breaking up Live Nation would be those less effective competitors who struggle to match its innovations.”  (Emphasis added.)

Well said.

In our latest Liberty Update, we highlight how Americans have soured on “Bidenomics” despite Biden supporters’ ongoing insistence that voters trust them rather than over three years of actual, real-life experience and hardship.  Well, our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have highlighted another point that merits emphasis as minorities turn against Biden in his reelection effort.  Namely, they prospered far more under President Trump than President Biden:

Minorities Prospered Far More Under Trump Than Biden

At CFIF, the issue of improving taxpayer privacy and protection against persistent abuse by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) remains among our most important missions.  Among the abuses that we’ve chronicled is the case of convicted criminal Charles Littlejohn, who rejoined the IRS in 2017 with the specific purpose of illegally breaching and leaking the private tax returns of Donald Trump and other Americans to radical left-wing organizations like ProPublica.

In The Wall Street Journal this week, one of those victims speaks out on his own experience and the need for greater taxpayer protection against this recurring problem that should terrify all Americans of every political persuasion.  Ira Stoll, whose tax information was passed to ProPublica, even helpfully details how federal law allows victimized taxpayers to sue the government for at least $1,000 and attorneys’ fees.  His broader point, however, is that crimes like those perpetrated against him could be avoided if the IRS simply collected and retained less confidential information, much of which it doesn’t even need for legitimate operational purposes:

The problem transcends the Littlejohn leak.  A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office documented 462 unauthorized accesses or disclosures of tax information between 2012 and 2021, ‘of which 24 resulted in guilty outcomes’ after referrals to the Justice Department.  Much of this could be solved if the government simply collected and stored less confidential data.”

We agree wholeheartedly, and applaud Mr. Stoll for speaking out even though ProPublica retains his data and could vindictively release it at any time.

Joe Biden tells Americans that he’s helping them by building “from the bottom up and the middle out.”  But the numbers don’t lie, and the ugly reality is that he’s only dragging us all toward the bottom.  Throughout his presidency, wage gains (green) have been consistently exceeded by inflation (blue), meaning loss in real earnings (red):

Bidenomics Means Lost Earnings