I’ve previously criticized George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok’s views on patents.1 For example, as noted in Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin, Tabarrok makes a Laffer-curve style argument that patent rights are currently “too strong.” Of course, he is correct that patent rights are too strong. However, he assumes that we should reduce patent strength, since it’s “too strong” now, but not abolish it, since zero protection is too weak. Instead, there is an optimal amount of patent strength, somewhere between zero and infinity, and we should try to adjust the patent system to optimize the...