"Furthermore, with the continued erosion of the US economy into a non-producing one,"
Really? The latest widely-published statistics I read said that the average American is still 30% more productive per work hour than the rest of the Western world.
[citation needed]
Perhaps... but I beleive it's the concentration of open-walleted investors and the whole VC concept that made Sillicon Valley what it is. There are smart people everywhere in the world. If concentration of uber-smart people was THE requirement it would have been, say, Mumbai, but Indians are skint and famously mingy so it's not. Those brilliant global PhDs wouldn't concentrate in SoCa if weren't for the money that was very willing to mobilize.
It's still so. It's still much easier to get funding if your start-up's addy is in the vincinity of SF bay area even tho you can do great things everywhere. Sadly, in many cases underfunded ventures don't go anywhere. There is a whole history technically superior products originating outside SV and failing mostly due to underfunding. The times are changing tho, internetization and production outsourcing to China democratized the market, and OTOH many policy makers in EU for example are understanding the need to angel fund tech startups, which is why there are now more successful tech companies coming from EU than ever.
I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.
The original intent of parents, i.e. not the one patent trolls and their lawyers advertise, was to protect knowledge from being lost/forgotten due to industrial secrecy. The intent was to convert private knowledge into public good in exchange for a limited-time legal protection. The idea was never really to ensure monopoly and especially not income of the inventor, but to prevent inventor from keeping his inventions secret by allowing him to be legally protected for a limited time in exchange for publicly disclosing his inventions.
Which is why software patents are retarded and esp. Apple-style trivial UI patents because the society as a whole doesn't benefit from obvious UI gimmicks being presented in a patent format since, even if they weren't non-trivial and derivative, they would be in plain sight and not a part of otherwise hidden internal functioning. So even if the reasoning behind math and business processes not being patentable are not analogous enough there is additional argument against sw patents.
So the entire system that enforces patents of the latter kind is either dishonest or ignorant about the purpose of patent system. I don't know which of the two is worse as a trait for a judge. At least Common law judges can hide behind precedents (but hide only, they are not as bound by precedents as they are by the intent and purpose of a legal institute), but in civil law jurisdictions it would be unforgivable. Which is methinks why Apple sued Samsung on industrial design rather than patents in Germany.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra