Tea with FT: Tax income from protected intellectual property rights at a higher rate than income from when competing naked in the market

February 12, 2014

Tax income from protected intellectual property rights at a higher rate than income from when competing naked in the market

Sir, Martin Wolf writes “Property rights are a social creation. The idea that a small minority should overwhelming benefit from new technologies should be reconsidered. It would be possible, for example, for the state to obtain an automatic share in the income from the intellectual property it protects”, “Enslave the robots and free the poor”, February 12.

And that as you know, is a theme close to my heart. On it I have written to you, to Martin Wolf and to other of your journalists many letter over the years. In fact only last week I wrote you a letter referring to Martin Wolf's article titled just like this one. I did not copy Wolf, and you might have not either.

Though it might very well have been thought of earlier by someone else I started to formally promote such a tax scheme in 2008, by means of an Op-Ed in El Universal, Caracas, titled “We need a tax intellectual property rights’ income”.

Wolf also writes “We must reconsider leisure… let people enjoy themselves busily”.

And that is another theme that I have often written about, as I feel it is of utmost importance for any society to know what to do well with its structural unemployed. As a example you can read “We need worthy and decent unemployments”

PS. Sir, I leave it in your hand to copy or not copy Martin Wolf with this letter, since I do not wish to receive a letter from him telling me again I write too much, or that he already knows what there is to be known, on issues such as the risk-weighted capital requirements for banks.

Thank you, Martin Wolf

On October 1 2009, the Economist Forum gave me some FT voice again publishing "Free us from imprudent risk-aversion"

And I very much appreciate it.

And on July 12 2012 Wolf also wrote that when "setting bank equity requirements, it is essential to recognise that so-called “risk-weighted” assets can and will be gamed by both banks and regulators. As Per Kurowski, a former executive director of the World Bank, reminds me regularly, crises occur when what was thought to be low risk turns out to be very high risk."

And that is something that I of course also appreciate, but that yet makes me curious on why Wolf does not follow up on it.

Yet one wonders

Between January 2003 and September 2006, out of 138 letters to the editor that I sent to the Financial Times before I placed them on this blog they published these 15. Not bad! Thank you FT!

Unfortunately, since then and until the very last day of the decade, out of some 1.000 letters that you can find here, FT published none, zero, zilch. Of course FT is under no obligation whatsoever to publish any of my letters and of course one should not exclude the possibilities that my letters might have quite dramatically gone from bad to worse… yet one wonders.

My usual suspects are:

1. Someone in FT with a delicate ego feels his or her importance diminished by giving voice to a lowly non PhD from a developing country daring to opine on many issues of developed countries.

2. That FT has some sort of conflict of interest with the credit rating agencies that makes it hard for them to give too much relevance to someone who considers they have been given too much powers.

3. The FT establishment had perhaps decided there were only macro economic problems and not any financial regulation problems, and wanted to hear no monothematic contradictions on that.

4. That FT feels slightly embarrassed when someone repeatedly asks the emperor-is-naked type question of what is the purpose of the banks and realizing this was something FT should have itself asked a long time ago.

5. It is way too much oversight for FT to handle.

6. Or am I just supposed to be a living example of one half of the Financial Times motto, namely that of "without favour"Which one do you believe is closest to the truth?

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A Blog is born

I like reading The Financial Times, or FT as it is known, and I frequently write letters to the editor and some of them that have indeed been kindly published, for which I feel thankful. But then I realized that all those letters to the editor that for reasons impossible for me to comprehend were never published, were condemned to an eternal silence not of their own fault, and so I decided to, at a marginal cost of zero, to resurrect them and keep them alive, right here.

English is not my mother language so bear with me and you’ll probably note when my letter has been published in FT by its correctness. Swedish is my mother language but I have not written anything serious in it for about 40 years and last time I tried, they just laughed their hearts out because of my démodés. Polish is my father language but, unfortunately, I do not speak a word of Polish, much less write it. Yes Spanish is my language, as I am from Venezuela and although I trust I write in it with great flair, I would still never dream of publishing an article in Spanish without having it edited by my wife.

And so friends here is my Tea with FT blog with my old and new letters to the editor. I hope you will share them with me now and again, and then again and again.

Welcome, and cheers, as I believe they say over there.

Per

PS. Just so that FT does not get too cocky and believe it is my only window to the world, I will now and again publish a letter sent to the editor of another publication.