Bingo!
Customer Rating: 
I treasure Dr. Pat Choates new title (book). It is an easy read and a total epiphany. I thought I totally knew the negative side of so-called free trade and after perusing HOT PROPERTY I realized I knew little. Dr. Choate not only pinned down the significance of intellectual property (new ideas product-wise and the intangible, such as music, books, trademarks, software, methods, processes, and so forth) that stimulates our economy, but also makes clear how Japan in particular has bought off disloyal former D.C. government agents of all descriptions(Congressional staff, legislators, etc.)who have helped Japanese cartels steal the ideas as their own possession.
A recent e-mailed question from me to Dr. Choate regarding China's emerging roll as an economic power vis-a-vis Japan's theft of our (US) intellectual property produced the following reply from Professor Choate:
"The Japanese hold on the US economy by stealing our intellectual property is tighter now than ever. They now hold almost $1 trillion in federal securities, have a massive trade surplus with us -- far more than the $70 billion or so reported, because much of the China, Thailand, Mexico, etc., trade surpluses are from Japanese companies in those countries. Plus, the Japanese continue to hire our ex-officials on a wholesale basis. The Japanese are so involved with us it is as though they were co-directors of our government."
Read HOT PROPERTY and discover for yourself the wholesale theft of America's intellectual property that is all but destroying America's economic prowess and motivation to create new ideas that lead to innovation and economic stimulation.
Hot Topic, Lukewarm Treatment
Customer Rating: 
This book is in large part a polemic against intellectual piracy and in favor of intellectual property protection. Author Pat Choate was third-party candidate Ross Perot's running mate in the 1996 U.S. presidential election. It is no surprise, then, that the book features charged rhetoric and less than scrupulously dispassionate analysis. Nevertheless, it provides an amusing, easy-to-read introduction to the history of intellectual property protection and its role in U.S. industrial development. That history takes some surprising turns. Eli Whitney, famed as the inventor of the cotton gin, went broke trying unsuccessfully to defend his patents. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison also experienced patent and piracy headaches. Choate recounts these stories with verve and style. He also attempts to be even-handed as when, for example, he draws a parallel between intellectual property violations and the use of traditional knowledge (such as folk medicine) without compensation to the peoples who preserved the traditions. Ultimately, though, Choate focuses more on identifying problems than at proposing solutions. We recommend this book to managers in businesses such as pharmaceuticals and media, which are struggling to preserve their intellectual property rights internationally, as well as to policy-makers and others who are interested in legal and business history.
The Emperor's Clothes
Customer Rating: Pat Choate is a straight shooter, and one of America's preeminent entrepreneurs of ideas. He is also a hell of storyteller, and a man of practical policy for profitable democracy. His focus has long been on the capacity of the American society to innovate, to build a nation of enduring foundation and continuing vitality. Choate's latest work,
, shows his passionate vision and displays his superb gifts for telling the tale, and for laying things out in ways in which we know they were meant to be.
But the empire of Global Totalism that would control the world today is naked in its desire to take all resources, all capital, all which humanity would bequeath its posterity (and perhaps that posterity, too) into its ravenous maw. And that empire sees Choate and his kind as, um, problems. So when those who dare point out the nakedness of the current imperium, and speak with clarity, and passion, and literary (is this non-efficient?) force about the need to be clothed with true innovation for the advancement of mankind, the minions of the imperium slither forth. These minions try to make sounds of reasonableness, but their true intent is heard in the sibilance of their forkéd tongues.
Choate was punished mightily before in telling the simple truth about Japanese manipulation of USA Congressional action in the now classic . And while the voices have been somewhat more muted in discussion of , the new Global Totalists would have any tome by Choate rendered to the ash heap of history. He knows too much.
Eyeing the current giveaway of America's intellectual patrimony, tells some great stories about how a young America stole great European ideas to further its economy, and how the Germans, the Japanese and now the Chinese - each using different character-marking means -- have systematically done the same to further their own national ends.
Frederick Jackson Turner noted the importance of the American Frontier in the shaping of its peoples' character at the closing of the 19th Century. And so the frontier days of American innovation and invention reached new boundaries with the end of the American Century and the Millenial turn. Hot Property gigs the galloping globalists' giveaway of America's manufacturing capacity, it's patrimony of ideas, and the very frontiers of American innovation. Choate is a range rider - looking at the borders of this nation, protecting the frontiers of innovation from the poachers and the rustlers riding the contemporary range of ideas, practical discovery, and innovation.
USA intellectual property borders need protection, and protection is not a closing with an encircling wall. Times have changed. The USA's ability to maintain the integrity of those blessings bestowed upon us by "Nature and Nature's God" and by a living Constitution needs reinforcement. GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA - whatever alphabet mantle the Global Totalists of the Davos Cabal wish to clothe their avarice and greed, we must point out that these are transparent garments. These garments do not cover the Global Totalists rapacity.
If other observers are right, the Market States are on the rise. But a truly free global trade can only be achieved among a world of equal trader platforms, unfettered by imposed handicaps or cheated by favors. The importance of Hot Property is that it offers policy initiatives that might actually make America more competitive in a wordly, wise, eyes-wide-open market place. The globalist nightmare, with its totalist control of ideas and even consumer behavior, could end.
Choate's book alone cannot make the difference. That will take concerted action of a kind which the forces of global capital efficiency will oppose, whether that opposition comes from Nanjing, Osaka, Davos, or a yacht cruising off the coast of Connecticut. If there are choices left to make, Americans together must make them. Choate's work gives us tools to make those choices. is not yet widely read. But the fault for that is not with the book or its author. It is in us.
Buy this book. Read it. Use it.
