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Complicated. >> wipe out the software patents. and there's a controversial -- i are remember reading something about this, the business method patents. which is more bizarre. because coming up with a business method is the way capitalism work. you come up with a good business idea, that's what rewards you. i remember reading a case about a place that was selling cereal to college students and got a cease and desist order which had patented the business method of selling people bowls of cereal and milk. >> 40,000 lawyers a year and a lot is driven by litigation. >> can i strongly endorse karl's...

Of economic update and susan crawford, author of the book, "captive audience." great to have you here. >> great to be here. thanks so much. >> so since this is your area of expertise, lee start with you. is our i.p. regime a total disaster. >> this was a great idea at the outset, giving people a limited time in which they own it and exploit it. >> when you step through that logic a little more, why should the government grant -- i come up with an idea and the government grants me an exclusive monopoly over a small period of time. why should the government do that? >> there is deep concern abou...

>> caller: an economy, can capitalism grow infin nightly? more immediately we have this subset of that question which is can we keep burning fossil fuels and the answer is no. >> and there's a nonenvironmental aspect to this. >> yeah. there are a lot of things that are wrong with gross domestic product. bobby kennedy talked about it in 1968 in which i keep going back and finding these kennedy quotes. it says, if we judge the united states of america by that, it counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear away our highways of carnage yet the gross national product doe...

Problem worse and that lowers the return to investing in a heavy industry, that lowers the average real interest rate and the problem that they face is that the real interest rate is negative and that makes it difficult for us to achieve full employment. so you're making that problem harder by taxing carbon. >> so we don't have to have one -- >> i think that's totally wrong. >> when you have a low real interest rate, typically you get a lot of growth and a lot of employment. >> he's talking about a negative interest rate. >> yeah, but a real interest rate. what a carbon tax will do is drive ac...

This is not stock, not money given to owners. >> firms sitting on cash waiting to invest. they are waiting for cues. tacking them, taxing carbon would help give cues to drive investment into clean energy. another way -- >> they are very skeptical about clean energy. you also have to realize it's a terrible investment for the past decade. this is not an easy problem. >> one of the problems is lack of markets. the government could do a lot to fix that by consuming clean energy and vehicles. the federal government is in the u.s. is the single largest consumer of clean energy. if you add state and...