How to Fix the World (in 3 Easy Steps)

By Joshua W. Hunking

The solution to the world's greatest problems already exists. Inventors and artists have been using it for years through intellectual property (IP) laws that allow control of an idea on the back end, which justifies investment in that idea in the first place. Imagine the p

• Language: English
• Publisher: Houndstooth Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781544545042

Joshua W. Hunking

Joshua W. Hunking, JD, is the founder of Hunking Law, LLC. A trial attorney who thinks deeply about social justice, Hunking previously worked as a law clerk for the Oregon Army National Guard Office of the Staff Judge Advocate. He is a soldier in the Oregon Army National Guard, currently serving with the 141 BSB based in Portland. He loves his wife Heatherlee and enjoys spending time with her and their dogs. More than anything else, he wants to see good done in the world and works every day to make that happen. He lives and works in Oregon.

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Copyright © 2023 Joshua W. Hunking

All rights reserved.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-5445-4504-2

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I dedicate this book to all those people who helped me over the course of my life. Without you I could never be me; I hope that my effort spent in this endeavor has the ability to help someone else be better than they otherwise would. Oh yeah…and to my darling wife, Heatherlee.

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Contents

Introduction

1. How We Currently Solve Public Policy Problems (and Why It Is Potentially Less Effective than Other Ways to Solve Public Policy Problems. Stated Another Way, What Is the Problem We Are Attempting to Evaluate and Solve?)

2. The Intellectual Property System Is the Best Way We Are Currently Aware of to Effectively Generate, Sort, Store, Organize, and Convey Human Knowledge

Step 1: Understand Property Law (and Capitalism as a Function of Property Law)

3. Property Laws Produce a System of Human Organization Designed to Move Property to Its Highest and Best Use

Step 2: Understand Intellectual Property Law

4. Putting an Idea to Its Highest and Best Use (i.e., Getting Solutions to Where They Need to Go)

5. Protecting and Incentivizing Ideas Is How We Generate the Best Solutions

Step 3: Apply Intellectual Property Law to Any Problem That Needs an Idea as a Solution (Notably in the Public Policy Realm)

6. The Application of Intellectual Property Principles to Real-Life Problems

7. Implementing This Approach on a Global Level

8. Working Together to Create a Better World

Appendix: Analysis and Identification of the Problems within the Homeless Community

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Introduction

TL;DR: If we incentivize the generation of better ideas by creating a system to control the economic value of the idea thereby generated, we can justify the investment into the generation of the better idea and thus create the incentive to generate the better idea in the first place.

This book intends to help explain to you the best known method by which we can solve problems that need an idea as the solution. I will do my best to take complex ideas framed in the form of processes and make them as clear as I possibly can to any reader who is trying to understand this subject. My main goal is to persuade you that your world will get better if you use better tools to generate ideas to make it better.

I am a lawyer from the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Specifically, I am a trial lawyer who understands the rules surrounding the driving of vehicles in Oregon better than almost anyone else in the world. I am also a human, and more specifically a human with a brain that operates in a particular way. If you asked me to generate abstract art you would be disappointed with the results. But if you asked me to generate a process by which you can effectuate an outcome, you would be pleasantly surprised with the result you got. Because my brain happens to understand processes better than most other people I have met, I tend to use processes as a way to understand the world.

By way of anecdote, in law school I vividly remember having discussions in constitutional law class about what happens when one constitutional principle comes into conflict with another constitutional principle. The other students seemed to intrinsically understand something that I, to this day, do not understand. From my perspective, arguments about which right is superior and why just don’t seem to resonate—or frankly, even be a conversation worth having. Don’t worry, I still got a B+ (I think) in constitutional law because I can understand and apply the rules, but I did substantially better compared to my peers in Civil Procedure, Property Law, and Intellectual Property Law because those subjects are really just about the rules of process. They are black and white and flow chronologically to effectuate an outcome.

In my job, I am regularly standing next to a person who is accused of drunk driving and arguing to the Judge whether they should go to jail for three days, seven days, thirty days, or not at all. What I know to be true through experience over time is that it is irrelevant how many days you put a person in jail for drinking and driving if your goal is to get them to not do it again. Which then caused me to wonder why I can continue to tell people the same thing over the course of several years and still always achieve the same result—that no one seems to understand that the actions we are taking in the criminal justice system, specifically relating to drunk driving (but also to other areas), do nothing to impact the likelihood that someone will not drink and drive in the future. Facing this problem and feeling like I am beating my head into a wall trying to get people to understand the obvious truth led me down a path to attempt to understand why these problems seem very solvable to me, but we collectively fail to solve these problems or even make progress on them in any reasonable period of time. It clicked in my head about two years ago, and I have been refining ever since. With this book I hope to explain to everyone what I now know to be provably and inexorably true.

If you stick around and really grapple with these concepts you will see the passive benefit to your life and the life of your progeny that will necessarily occur as a result of your acceptance of (and nonresistance to) the very basic principles I am about to get into.

The ultimate goal is to show you that by leveraging intellectual property law as the primary tool to generate better ideas, we can create better ideas. I will explain the underlying systems that create the interactions that force the result. By which I mean that whether you like it or not, rules work collectively to create systems, those systems result in a response from people, those responses create an outcome. I intend to show you how those rules create our current systems, which will show you why we have the results we have. In knowing that, you will be able to see, as I do, why some minor changes to the rules will result in substantially better outcomes much faster than we would otherwise achieve those outcomes. I will discuss the basic purpose, design, and effect of property law (at least in the American system), specifically what intellectual property law is and why it exists and what effect it has. Once all of this is understood, you’ll see why the invariable and obvious truth is that in order to make a better world, we need to apply intellectual property law rules to every type of problem that we want to solve.

Of course, I am not able to see all potential unintended consequences because this hasn’t been studied yet. But anecdotally, I believe it will work because (1) when I turn on the radio I hear amazing songs for free, (2) when I go to the store I see very useful kitchen gadgets that I would never have thought of at bargain basement prices, and (3) I compare the improvements in medicine to the improvements in the justice system over the last 150 years. The rules of intellectual property are already working, and they are helping us solve problems faster than any other system known to humans.

The purpose of this book is to reorient the way you see problem-solving. If we need a better idea in order to solve a problem, how can we generate that better idea? Let me show you.

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Chapter 1

1. How We Currently Solve Public Policy Problems (and Why It Is Potentially Less Effective than Other Ways to Solve Public Policy Problems. Stated Another Way, What Is the Problem We Are Attempting to Evaluate and Solve?)

The problem with our current system of solving public policy