See? Patents do help foster innovation!

can you give an example of any country that did not have patent laws producing anywhere near the number of new things that are produced by the US?

unfortunantly there is no example to go by to counter this.

all that can be done is to look at history and note the number of things that we done by one person or group, and then lost over time to be rediscovered by another group many years later. the patent system is supposed to prevent this by getting these people to disclose 'enough details so that a person ordinarily skilled in the field can duplicate the invention'

In my opinion, the big problem is that the bar for getting patents is just too low. it used to be that you had to provide a working model of the invention to be inspected and see if it matched up with the patent. that's not done anymore, and many patents are for things that just don't work. the patent is also only supposed to be granted for things that are 'not obvious to a person skilled in the field', that is not being done (especially in the computer field) and this leads to far too many patents.

then you get into the problem that