worked and more money is needed, it is also popularly believed that massive government spending on jobs programs can turn things around. If only it could.

The only way to do jobs programs is through a truly massive spending program, and we don’t have the will to do that.  This means that at some point in time it will be clear that however well intentioned these policies are, they can not work.  And supporting failing businesses doesn’t work too well either.  Among the three American auto makers to receive bail out funds, only Ford does not need more massive cash aid.  The other two auto makers will be back.  And they will tell us that confidence is high and all they need is just a little more cash. And the congress will give it to them. And so we continue to lose jobs, faster and faster, and probably faster than we can create them, because in the end jobs can not be bought by government intervention.

The fact is only innovation can create jobs.  Only new industries and products provide the engine for job making.  For the last one hundred and fifty years the great secret of American economic power has been innovation and our unique patent system and the groups of individual inventors who changed the face of the planet.  One more thing, these new innovations did not come from corporations, but from individuals often working alone.  And so at the beginning of the 1990's the United States had more important innovation than ten times that of the entire world.

But then in the early 1990's large multi-national companies sought ways to take innovation away from individual inventors.  Through massive assaults on congress they were able to dumb down our patent system so that they could get the creation of others on the cheep. Legislation forced independent inventors to publish all of their research before a patent was issued allowing the large corporations to grab their technology.  Most independent inventors could not afford to go into legal battles with some corporate giant. And so the basic underpinning of American innovation and production has been eroded, and the public knows little about this assault on our economy.

It would cost so little to restore our patent system; so little to support independent inventors who can give so much to the growth of jobs for this country.  But to help them we must stop the multi-national corporations and that is a high mountain to climb. The keys to innovation and the future success of our economy are renewed patent and intellectual property systems.  But to restore what has been lost takes a courage not yet seen on the floors of Congress.