September 22, 2003

From Mises.org: Isabel Blew Fallacy Ashore. The Fallacy of the Broken Window is one of many great examples from Henry Hazlitt's awesome book Economics in One Lesson.
Also: check out the latest Cox and Forkum.

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August 29, 2003

Greenspan's "bubbles"

Economists at the BIS (The Bank for International Settlements is a central-bank for the world) have issued an inane ruling that shows just how clueless they are. They told a Fed conference that "Central banks should tackle emerging asset bubbles head-on rather than wait till they burst and then clean up afterward."
The only point in question with these statists seems to be how much state intervention is necessary to “soften the blow” of these mysterious and seemingly natural and unpreventable “bubbles.” Not much though is given anymore as to whether these bubbles actually exist, and what, if any, is their cause.

Any economist worth a damn would start by asking what traits of the market could cause such “bubbles” to occur. The answer is simple: none. The self-correcting nature of a free market prevents any such “bubbles” from occurring by setting interest rates that accurately reflect the public's ever-changing time preference for future growth versus current spending. It is only manipulation by the only entity that has the power of a gun – the government – that can create changes large and lasting enough to create the “artificial” changes that cause economic depressions. The government cannot even create the so-called “booms” in the economy – it can only create destabilizing shifts to or from investment and consumer spending that disrupt the normal flow of goods and investment capital. It can also destroy very real economic growth – such as that during the 1920’s and 1990’s -- by practicing monetary and regulatory interventionism. I don't want to launch into a polemic on economics, so if you want to learn more about actual economics rather than pure interventionist propaganda, I recommend Mises.org, or Capitalism.net

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August 25, 2003

The lesson that we should draw from the results of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is that efforts to partially privatize the industry are likely to retain those elements of regulations that benefit concentrated interests in business most.
If this point is not immediately evident to you, I highly recommend you read "The Question of the Cable Monopoly"
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June 12, 2003

Regarding Monopolies...

I had to cut short a letter to the editor I wrote about monopolies, but if you want to read some common misconceptions about monopolies, you can do so here.

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February 06, 2003

Yet another communist "utopia"

Check out these Satellite photos of North Korean prison camps.

Then read this: Death, terror in N. Korea gulag.

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Microsofts and standards compliance...

Here is a quote from an email I sent out on the Brazos Valley Web Design listserv regarding Microsoft's lack of compliance with the W3C standards:

I think that it's helpful to realize that Microsoft's browser is in effect a de-facto standard, which by overwhelming user preference is preferred over the W3C-compliant Mozilla. If you think of MS as the U.S. and W3C as the U.N., it's easy to see that the "consensus" of a bunch of undemocratic, oppressive regimes is not any more valid that the individual judgment of the freest, richest nation on earth. The analogy is better than you might imagine, since both the US and MS are being derided precisely because of their virtues (freedom and successful products) by nations/companies that are failures precisely because of their flaws (tyranny/bad products.)

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The Antitrust Racket

Check out this blog from initium:

In 1977, Congress passed the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, a law intended to make life easier for FTC and Antitrust Division officials in deciding which mergers to prosecute and stop. Under HSR, all mergers worth at least a certain value (approximately $50 million under the current law) must be reported to the government prior to consummation. This "pre-merger notification" grants the government a waiting period to decide whether they wish to act against the merger. In most cases, the waiting period is terminated early, and no official action is taken. In a handful of cases-less than 2%-the FTC or Antitrust Division will seek conditions to allow the merger or attempt to stop it outright. Such official action generally results in a "consent agreement," where the merging companies agree to surrender a portion of their assets to a third-party chosen by the government.

Every Hart-Scott-Rodino "notification" must be accompanied by a filing fee. For mergers valued at less than $100 million, the fee is $45,000; for mergers of more than $500 million, the price is $280,000. The fee is non-refundable, and the monies collected from said fees are what finance the $330-plus million of the FTC and Antitrust Division budgets not financed by direct appropriation.

In other words, the government is forcing businesses to pay for the very antitrust enforcement that is targeted directly against their interests. This is a classic racketeering scheme. A business is forced to pay protection money to a thug who could turn against them at any time.

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December 21, 2002

Marxism

Interesting article on Marxism at the Economist.

Here is the conclusion:

Anti-globalism has been aptly described as a secular religion. So is Marxism: a creed complete with prophet, sacred texts and the promise of a heaven shrouded in mystery. Marx was not a scientist, as he claimed. He founded a faith. The economic and political systems he inspired are dead or dying. But his religion is a broad church, and lives on.

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