Complete privatization will not lead to ideal results, but it will unravel most of the anticompetitive practices that exist in the cable industry. 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.
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.
It has finally come down to this: Martha Stewart must go to prison, or at the very least be forced to step down from her position as CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
Abercrombie & Fitch, a constant winner in the voluntary "dollar-vote" elections of the market, is accused of being an intensely racist company in both its employment practices and its product marketing. In fact, it is doing nothing but what should be permitted in a free society: finding a market niche and making a profit.
If you are preparing to fire someone on grounds that he or she is dangerous, you had better have darn good legal counsel! Chances are you will be sued. Chances are that you will have to settle either with a large cash payment or go to court. In either case, you will have expended massive resources just to do what the free enterprise system should guarantee in the first place: the right to hire and free.
Closely linked to the issue of gay marriage is the issue of gay adoption. The subject raises the stakes in the current national controversy, and, as usual, state intervention complicates the picture enormously.
In Portland, the restaurant chain Pizza Schmizza offered to pay homeless people a slice of pizza, soda and a few dollars in exchange for holding a sign for 40 minutes on downtown sidewalks that read: "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money." Ralph Nader didn't like it one bit.
The guild system possesses a superficial plausibility, which gives it what attractiveness it may have among market critics left and right. But consider how a guild system must work in practice. The logic of the guild is such that certain people who wish to enter a particular trade are denied entry.
Whether we look at the very sketchy circumstantial evidence, the fiduciary duty argument, or the proprietary information doctrine argument, none of these arguments can justify the prosecution of Martha Stewart. The prosecution of Martha Stewart and others before her is nothing more than the reflection of the growing anti-capitalistic mentality in our society that Mises warned us about.
One cannot discount the role of politics here. In the end, we could have a well-known person owning a felony record and being sentenced to prison and a once-prosperous company in tatters. We will see some federal prosecutors being feted as though they had just solved the Case of the Century. These are dark times, indeed, for the pursuit of justice in the United States of America.
