If there were no monopolies on ideas, lands, or natural resources, advances in technology that improve efficiency would automatically benefit everyone.

The article is somewhat misled by the overgeneralization symbolized by "intellectual property". It stands for various things that are not similar and should not be grouped together.

Patents and copyrights are artificial systems and could be abolished just by deciding to do so. Abolishing trade secrets is not so simple, though abolishing punishment for leaking one would reduce the prevalence of them. As for trademarks, they don't prevent people from making comparable goods without the same markup; only people in thrall

Putting the term in scare quotes is not enough to avoid the confusion it causes. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.

Meanwhile, natural resources including arable land and fresh water are in short supply. We can't make more of them by abolishing property rights on them.

We may need to compensate for this tendency of physical property rights rather than abolish them.

About NSA facilities in Germany that snoop on the communications of Europeans.

The NSA surely knows about all the financial conspiracies that have wreaked tremendous harm on the US. Strange that it doesn't try to stop them or punish them.

Dick Cheney joined with Dubya to destroy Iraq, but now has the gall to blame his disaster on Obama.

Blair should be lecturing on Iraq from the dock at the International Criminal Court.

The rebellion against the Common Core has made the Gates Foundation hesitate in pushing it.