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Well, it looks like I haven’t written for almost 4 months. Where have I been? I got sidetracked. Also, I took a few trips (one to California, where I visited Martin at Stanford and attended a conference in San Jose, and another trip to Boston, where I visited Mayank and attended a conference with Mark about the GPL at MIT). Most recently, I’ve been focusing on applying to law school.

Writing a personal statement is an excruciating affair. It’s 2 to 3 pages about yourself, and it has to be pretty close to perfect. I had trouble figuring out what to write about, and then once I did I spent another couple weeks of nonstop editing to get it to flow well. Anyway, about $600 later, I’ve sent almost everything in. Now I just have to wait. I’ll hear back in April.

What else have I been up to? Well, a couple of weeks ago, I went to the Emerging Issues Forum. This is a conference run by a group out of NCSU that is chaired by Former Governor Jim Hunt. The Forum is a place to discuss issues of special importance to North Carolina.

This year’s topic was “Financing the Future”, essentially, tax and revenue planning for the future. I decided to go because I thought the list of speakers was amazing: people like Paul Krugman, Bill Richardson, Mark Warner, Steve Forbes, and so on. What I didn’t think about was what the attendees would be like. It was definitely a who’s-who of NC politics and business interests. The talks were very interesting. I took copious notes. I tend to think about these issues on a more national scale, and it was enlightening to hear what people at the local level had to say.

I’ve waited so long to write about it that I don’t have anything really interesting to say, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Whenever I have discussions with conservatives about social programs and safety nets, our difference in philosophy tends to come down to one major argument: conservatives feel that, given the opportunity, people will exploit welfare so that they don’t have to work as hard; whereas liberals think that the majority of people will who need welfare benefit from it rightly and many of them will use it to better themselves. This, I think, is a key difference.

Granted, I agree that there are people that abuse welfare. I also agree that our social programs could do better to help the working poor, who are sometimes worse off than people who qualify for the programs. I don’t think the solution is to make welfare and other benefits harder to get, and thereby hurt more people.

That aside, what I really don’t understand is why people who assume the worst in people who take welfare don’t assume the same thing about those in leadership positions. Conservatives commonly argue for more powerful government policing capabilities, saying that we’re not at risk for the government to use those provisions excessively. There are two problems with this. First, it ignores years of history that shows that people will abuse power if too much is given to them. Second, it sets a double standard: assuming poor people will do worse than rich people. Whatever happened to “the meek shall inherit the earth”?

This double standard amazes me. If anything, we should be more scared of rich people. If a poor person lives off welfare, abuses the system, and becomes a slob who doesn’t try to better him or herself, we haven’t lost all that much. If a rich and/or powerful person abuses their position, there’s a lot more money to be lost and a lot more potential for damage.

Conservatives argue eloquently for limited government power. Yet they’re always ready to give the policing elements of our government more of that power. In a free society, however, greater police power is the greatest danger to freedom. Welfare and other social programs aren’t going to limit our freedom, except to take some of our money. Hell, they might even help some people. A police state, however, is by definition contrary to a free society. I think we should accept the fact that we live in a free society and because of that, we’re not always going to be 100% secure. We can change the attitude in which we live to make that more likely. I also think that as a free society, we should take the moral high ground and help those in need and assume they will use it wisely, and accept as the cost of living in that society that some people will abuse government services. After all, I’m sure Halliburton has cost me more in taxes than welfare abusers.

Did you know you could patent discovered genes? Not engineered genes, but discovered ones. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the situation, but this just seems crazy.

According to a study published in Science, 20% of all human genes are patented. Granted, according to the article in National Geographic, the patent doesn’t exactly cover the gene, but instead covers anything you do using the gene, such as creating a drug. However, what this amounts to in my mind is that if someone finds out what gene causes Alzheimer’s, they can patent it and be the only ones to create a genetic cure.

Now, I understand the idea behind patents. By allowing one to patent an invention, we promote the publishing of the information (as a patent) while still guaranteeing that the inventor can reap some profit from his or her work. This is especially important in fields where the R&D costs are astronomical, as is the case in the health industry. These patents promote expensive research with the understanding that people will earn back the money they spent.

However, genes are not inventions, they are discoveries. While I can understand the ‘high cost v. reward’ question, it seems to me that the patenting of a gene creates a chilling effect. It’s not like another company can just invent another gene that does the same thing differently — genes do very specific things. The patent essentially prevents anyone else from curing that genetic disease. As the article mentions, it even raises the cost of research. Why can you patent the whole gene (and thus a whole class of inventions) instead of just that specific drug or process that results? The article discusses many of these questions.

The bleeding heart liberal in me thinks that since there’s a lot of federal money already going into this research, the public shouldn’t so easily give up the knowledge that money reaps. Hell, why not just move the realm of the research completely into the public arena–say at universities and federal research institutions. Conservatives would go crazy, but there are some benefits. First, the pharmaceutical industries won’t have to take the kinds of R&D risks they are now. They probably won’t rake in the crazy profits, but risk would go down, and drug costs would shoot through the floor. The public wins because of drug costs and the fact that the knowledge is then in the public domain. Pharma companies can then focus on creating the new Viagra.

I doubt the drug companies would be ready to give up their status, because such a plan would turn them from high-powered research conglomerates into simple manufacturers, in some senses. But why should they get federal money and then keep all the profit? That’s really the big issue for me: they try to go both ways on this one.

Well, that was just rambling and pie-in-the-sky. I agree that the situation is a lot more complicated than I let on. But hey, I’m interested in hearing what other people have to say about these issues.