“Protection or Free Trade”

The copy of Henry George’s Protection or Free Trade I ordered from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation last month arrived the other day, and I’ve started reading it. This isn’t just any copy of a book I first read as a teenager, more than forty years ago, but the latest in a series of annotated, scholarly editions of the great thinker’s books. I’ve read the introduction by William Peirce, a retired professor of economics and a Georgist activist, and gone on to begin rereading the book itself.

Professor Peirce makes the point that George was a public choice economist avant la lettre, as Adam Smith also was to some degree. George understood that it is insufficient to look at the abstract merits and faults of a policy conducted ably and without corruption; one should also consider the incentives of politicians, lobbyists, and civil servants to modify and pervert it.

The Red Queen’s Race

This week, one Printer’s Rush showed up on my Expedited docket, because a form I had filled out correctly somehow did not get uploaded correctly, so I had to redo it, with assistance from an ITRP (information technology resource person, pronounced eye-turp). That having been taken care of I have the same two cases on my Amended docket that I had a week ago.

I have been working on my oldest Regular New case, and have made progress without finishing it. Also, I took a look at another application on my Regular New docket, and decided that it wasn’t in my area; it used to be that I would put in a Transfer Inquiry when a situation like that arose, but for the past year or so, we’ve had something called a C* Challenge instead, and I had never done one. With helpful instructions from a fellow examiner, I did my first C* Challenge, and the application showed up as paused, and then vanished off my docket altogether. So that’s one small accomplishment, anyhow.