While protectionism may temporarily prop up inefficient industries and businesses, ultimately market forces will prevail, hurting even the favored industry. An insider tells the story of the copper industry--and how it ultimately lost out to fiber optics.
Competition is as wholesome in education as it is in manufacture and commerce, writes Hans Sennholz. Every school is an economic check on its competitors. However, government funding for higher education has dramatically changed the economics of this sector, vastly increasing costs, reducing service, and skewing curricula toward political ends.
The Scana Corporation is a government-created monopoly that provides electricity to most of the state of South Carolina. Like all regulated corporations, it is pressured by regulators to promote politically correct causes and policies--or else. Thomas DiLorenzo highlights the absurd results.
The Enron story provides what academics call "teaching moments," that is, opportunities to explain how economic theory can explain the outcome of state involvement in market processes. Interventionism often results in failures such as Enron's, and lessons learned by studying it may help avoid similar problems in the future.
Ted Roberts asks why his president, my congressman, my governor, the Postmaster General, or the county tax assessor isn't as eager to hear his opinions as a manufacturer of sugared, cola-flavored water? Politicians seem oblivious to the charms of consumer prejudices, but giants like Pepsi, and even local mom-and-pop barbecue caterers, whirl like a weather vane in their currents.
Why is there so much religious passion in the tone of the Microsoft critics? Why is it so difficult to understand that the marketplace is a far better evaluator of Microsoft's product than a federal judge who tries to synthesize, express, and enforce the whims of 20 million consumers whom he's never talked to?
The City of New York monopolizes the distribution of water, and as such the supply is always in jeopardy. Rather than study the details of the city's recently adopted Drought Management Plan, New York residents would be wiser to pray for rain.
With the Microsoft antitrust suit near a final settlement, it is a good time to take an entirely new direction in antitrust. That new direction ought to be its complete elimination. Its underlying concepts in economics and political philosophy need to be thoroughly discredited, and the legislation on which antitrust rests in practice needs to be repealed.
While the politicians and their media allies prattle on about "winners" and "losers" in the Microsoft antitrust case, they miss the larger story, one that has become a typical American tale: the ongoing assault of the Leviathan State upon the once free and productive business sector.
Everyone complains about bad service. From the airlines to telecommunications, we hear of the increasing number of consumer complaints. Diane Brady, a writer for Business Week, believes that she has the answer to why some of us might believe service is bad. Last year, she informed BW's readers that, once again, capitalism is running amok and now needs the hand of government more than ever to force businesses to properly serve their customers. "Why Service Stinks" told of unfairness abounding as firms go overboard to keep "good" customers and do everything they can to get rid of "bad" ones.
