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even in cases of obvious market failure

There is simply no such thing, boys and girls...

So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money?

Since I was modded as a troll for my unforgiveable diss of Republicans, let me state it a different way.

A poster here stated that Bush hasn't been president for 6 years now, and we should forget whatever he did that might be wrong.

After which I stated that Republicans are still upset about Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

http://capitalismmagazine.com/... That's just one. Do your homework Plenty of cites, plenty of evidence.

So modify me as troll if you like, but you're just admitting that the truth infuriates you Conservatives still excoriate FDR, at the same time as telling us that what happened since 2000 to 2008 is old news, not to be entertained.

I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property. The author isn't for, say, a 20-year or a 10-year copyright, but is against copyright at all. Suggestions about how Napster would some how result in great if the law hadn't shut them down seems like a pretty odd argument to make. Sorry, but I can't get on board with that. I'm fine with much shorter copyrights, but why in the world does anyone think that eliminating copyright leads to innovation (other than the fact that they're judgment is being swayed by the desire for endless free stuff on the internet)? The fact of the matter is that people aren't that generous, which means creators will have to get by on 1/10th of what they currently earn. There are plenty of examples of the fact that people aren't that generous. The most recent example is the fact that in 1990, Encyclopedia Britannica reached $650 million in revenue in a single year*. Now, wikipedia in 2010 is struggling to get $12 million in donations. Sure, that might be fine if someone's bringing down a million dollars a year, and now they'll earn $100,000 a year, but most creators are earning a lot less than that and it ultimately results in gutting the industry of people.

If this ever happened to the consumer software industry, the only thing we could do in defense is put everything on servers behind a paywall. In other words: create a techical barrier to prevent people from getting our work for free when "free" means going bankrupt.

Further, the article is completely off base when it argues that somehow peer-to-peer offers all these increased opportunities for small creators who can't afford a webserver. There's plenty of places that will host your music for free (like MySpace, Rapidshare, Grooveshark, etc), and bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper. It seems like it would be a lot more effective to put your music on a website (with band pictures, videos, tour dates, etc) than to put it up on Napster or a torrent or something.

Many of the author's examples didn't seem that solid. For example: "Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The US’ Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony) Or: "Here's an example of what one successful company, Google, does about hackers -- it puts them to work and pays them to tell them what to fix" (Gee, you mean a company that gives away its software doesn't worry about hackers/pirates?)

"I'm trying to answer the question asked -- what is blocking innovation in the US -- and the answer is that all the energy has been going into locking everything down, with the law tilting away from users and innovation, and that's not creating a fertile field for innovation. " When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation. Things like DRM and paywalls are a defense against those pirates. Complaining about companies "locking things down" is a bit like complaining about the money society spends on locks and alarm systems for their houses and cars. Yes, in some sense, it's a waste of money, but the problem isn't with spending the money on locks and security it's with the people who won't treat you fairly - i.e. the thieves. In the context of intellectual property, those are the pirates. Throw the blame at them for their degrading effect on innovation.

* "By 1990, sales of Britannica's multivolume sets had reached an all-time peak of about $650 million." http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/books-non-fiction/807-how-encyclopedia-britannica-was-blown-to-bits.html

"Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

Alert to the dangers of majoritarian tyranny, the Constitution's framers inserted several anti-majority rules.
http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/politics/democracy/5496-Abhorrence-Democracy-and-Mob-Rule.html

So, let's hear the libertarian solution:

Same as with Mars: First company to land on it, owns it. If you manage to (pick some technology you think will be available in 150 years) capture it into geosynchronous orbit, you get a free space elevator to go with a big nickel mine. (Small moons can also be pretty harsh mistresses :)

Even if you can't do anything useful with it, it's in your best interest - whether you sit on the board of ABC or just have 100 shares of XYZ that your great-great-Grandpa passed down from the dot-com era - to buy a few shares in "Asteroid Removal, Inc.", when they go public. ARI is just as interested as you are in removing that hunk of rock, but they can't do it without funding.

You could always just pass them for even showing up.

Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about a much larger class of thieves. You see, corporate criminals haven't stolen nearly as much from me as government con artists.

Funnier still, because I couldn't understand WCOM's books (nor the books of any other telco), I didn't buy their shares. I'm breaking even so far this year, after being up the past two years.

Yeah yeah, enough bragging. You see, the reason I was able to do this is because nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to by WCOM.

What went down at WCOM and ENE (Enron) sucked major ass. $10B frauds resulted into hundred-billion-dollar quantities of market-cap-ass being sucked. But Which is worse - Social Security or WorldCom? Social Security is a $13 trillion dollar black hole of unfunded liabilities. (That's accountant-speak for "debt that we've managed to hide from the balance sheet to the tune of about $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the States".)

Unlike WCOM and ENE, if you don't pony up 6.5% of your salary every year into the scam (oh, and another 6.5% from your employer, for a total of 13% if you have the gall to work for yourself), people with guns will take it from you. Since when did Bernie Ebbers put a gun to your head and force you to buy his stock?

And unlike WCOM and ENE, who, when their frauds were exposed, were crushed - and their accomplices at Arthur Andersen in the process, SS is still in business.

Just like WCOM and ENE, Social Security is all about off-balance-sheet financing.

I'm not gonna pretend that a webzine like "capitalismmagazine" is unbiased (hell, they're a bunch of raving l00ny randroids, but some of their less-political articles, such as this one on Intel and this one on old-school investing are great) - but if you can dig through the rhetoric and politics, you might realize that if it's fraud and theft you wanna eliminate, we need to remove the two-by-four in Social Security's eye before we can see clearly enough to expose the grit in Worldcom's eye.

> And people don't seem very mad about this.

People are mad - and rightly so - about corporate fraud. And Congress is responding, because it's an election year.

I just wish people realized where the real fraud was being perpetrated, and force Congress to do something about that, too.

Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about a much larger class of thieves. You see, corporate criminals haven't stolen nearly as much from me as government con artists.

Funnier still, because I couldn't understand WCOM's books (nor the books of any other telco), I didn't buy their shares. I'm breaking even so far this year, after being up the past two years.

Yeah yeah, enough bragging. You see, the reason I was able to do this is because nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to by WCOM.

What went down at WCOM and ENE (Enron) sucked major ass. $10B frauds resulted into hundred-billion-dollar quantities of market-cap-ass being sucked. But Which is worse - Social Security or WorldCom? Social Security is a $13 trillion dollar black hole of unfunded liabilities. (That's accountant-speak for "debt that we've managed to hide from the balance sheet to the tune of about $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the States".)

Unlike WCOM and ENE, if you don't pony up 6.5% of your salary every year into the scam (oh, and another 6.5% from your employer, for a total of 13% if you have the gall to work for yourself), people with guns will take it from you. Since when did Bernie Ebbers put a gun to your head and force you to buy his stock?

And unlike WCOM and ENE, who, when their frauds were exposed, were crushed - and their accomplices at Arthur Andersen in the process, SS is still in business.

Just like WCOM and ENE, Social Security is all about off-balance-sheet financing.

I'm not gonna pretend that a webzine like "capitalismmagazine" is unbiased (hell, they're a bunch of raving l00ny randroids, but some of their less-political articles, such as this one on Intel and this one on old-school investing are great) - but if you can dig through the rhetoric and politics, you might realize that if it's fraud and theft you wanna eliminate, we need to remove the two-by-four in Social Security's eye before we can see clearly enough to expose the grit in Worldcom's eye.

> And people don't seem very mad about this.

People are mad - and rightly so - about corporate fraud. And Congress is responding, because it's an election year.

I just wish people realized where the real fraud was being perpetrated, and force Congress to do something about that, too.

Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about a much larger class of thieves. You see, corporate criminals haven't stolen nearly as much from me as government con artists.

Funnier still, because I couldn't understand WCOM's books (nor the books of any other telco), I didn't buy their shares. I'm breaking even so far this year, after being up the past two years.

Yeah yeah, enough bragging. You see, the reason I was able to do this is because nobody put a gun to my head and forced me to by WCOM.

What went down at WCOM and ENE (Enron) sucked major ass. $10B frauds resulted into hundred-billion-dollar quantities of market-cap-ass being sucked. But Which is worse - Social Security or WorldCom? Social Security is a $13 trillion dollar black hole of unfunded liabilities. (That's accountant-speak for "debt that we've managed to hide from the balance sheet to the tune of about $45,000 for every man, woman, and child in the States".)

Unlike WCOM and ENE, if you don't pony up 6.5% of your salary every year into the scam (oh, and another 6.5% from your employer, for a total of 13% if you have the gall to work for yourself), people with guns will take it from you. Since when did Bernie Ebbers put a gun to your head and force you to buy his stock?

And unlike WCOM and ENE, who, when their frauds were exposed, were crushed - and their accomplices at Arthur Andersen in the process, SS is still in business.

Just like WCOM and ENE, Social Security is all about off-balance-sheet financing.

I'm not gonna pretend that a webzine like "capitalismmagazine" is unbiased (hell, they're a bunch of raving l00ny randroids, but some of their less-political articles, such as this one on Intel and this one on old-school investing are great) - but if you can dig through the rhetoric and politics, you might realize that if it's fraud and theft you wanna eliminate, we need to remove the two-by-four in Social Security's eye before we can see clearly enough to expose the grit in Worldcom's eye.

> And people don't seem very mad about this.

People are mad - and rightly so - about corporate fraud. And Congress is responding, because it's an election year.

I just wish people realized where the real fraud was being perpetrated, and force Congress to do something about that, too.

On a related note, perhaps the broadcast spectrum should be put under new management.

Greenspan is not just an acolyte of Ayn Rand metaphorically, he actually hung out with her. It's not an accusation, it's the simple truth.

The Fed, Alan Greenspan, and Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Cultist?

The Motley Fool: Who is Alan Greenspan?

quote:
In the 1950s, Greenspan, who had been steeped in the free-market skepticism of John Maynard Keynes along with most economists of his generation, became an acolyte of Ayn Rand. Rand's philosophy of what she termed "enlightened selfishness" bears considerable similarity to today's libertarianism. Greenspan met Rand through his first wife, painter Joan Mitchell. Although Greenspan's friends and colleagues suggest that his relationship with Rand's Objectivism was more of a flirtation than a real commitment, Greenspan remained part of the philosopher's circle until at least the late 1960s. In addition to writing for The Objectivist, a rather surprising essay he wrote in defense of the gold standard -- surprising in light of his later work, that is -- appeared in the Rand-edited 1967 collection of essays Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Still, something about Greenspan's obvious pragmatism and political instincts fits poorly with the uncompromising sense of purity that characterizes Rand's heroes. If Greenspan ever was an Objectivist, his years in Washington have probably made him reconsider.

Businessweek: The Chairman as Political Animal

quote:
RAND FAN. By his mid-20s, Greenspan turned from music to economics--and the virulently antigovernment views of philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand. Greenspan became a regular in her salon in the 1950s and remained in touch until her death in 1982.

Randies may think of Greenspan as an apostate today, but the Chairman still thinks of himself as a Randite, if his reading preferences are any indication. And it's not hard to get become an apostate of Objectivism -- dissent ain't tolerated much in that salon.

Mayhap Greenspan deviated from Rand because he's actually working in the real world.

The Fed may be anti-democratic in nature, but thank god for that, or we would have collapsed into something resembling the Weimar Republic in the 80's.

"I believe that most of the problems that people associate with globalism," writes Soros, "including the penetration of market values into areas where they do not traditionally belong, can be attributed to these phenomena."

Just to let those who aren't aware of it, Soros is not an actual capitalist. Don't take his views as those of a repentant capitalist and free marketeer.

What crimes?

This is, as others below me have pointed out, another example of Microsoft's competitors taking the easy way out and ligitgating their way into success, rather than earning it and convincing a larger share of the public to buy their products. No matter how you frame it, the consumer has the ultimate choice in the matter...to buy or not to buy. If the majority of consumers cared about this, they'd change their buying habits.

Dismiss my opinions as you will, but please give this article some thought. Antitrust laws are unobjective and arbitrary, punishing successful companies for the "crime" of being better than their competitors.

Sorry, the problem *is* the guns. Take away the guns, and nobody would be dead.

This seems so logical, and yet I encourage you to present any real world example proving what you claim. The truth is that only law abiding citizens obey laws in the first place. If someone is willing to commit murder, they are certainly going to be willing to break any gun law.


Some things to consider:

New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46 percent and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.

In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures and its murder rate, then a low 2.4 per 100,000 per year, tripled to 7.2 by 1977.

In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 percent.


Now these will surprise you:

In Kennesaw, Ga., the city passed a law requiring all households to possess a gun. Within seven months, the burglary rate dropped by 89 percent.

In Orlando, Fla., the police department set up a program teaching 600,000 women how to handle firearms. Subsequently, the rape rate dropped by 88 percent.

Among the six million Swiss, there are an estimated two million guns -- including 600,000 fully automatic assault rifles, and their murder rate is 15 percent of ours.



I challenge you, go ahead and give us an example of what you claim. You won't find too many. It would seem to make sense that if you take away the guns you stop the killing, but take a look sometime at a country like England that has stringent gun laws and look at the rate of murder and rape, in almost every case it increase with gun control. When you outlaw guns all you do is remove the right of law abiding citizens to protect themselves and the criminals have free reign. If, however, a person was going to break into a house in a neighborhood notorious for its gun advocacy, they might think twice as there is a higher risk of them losing their life.

Some sources and good references:
Article by the National Center for Policy Analysis
Article at the Independence Institute
Capitolism Magazine Article
Article on Heartland.org
An Article on Australia's Gun Control mistake, cut with some humor.

Now I wouldn't post a problem without a solution, so here is an article detailing an alternative to making all guns illegal.

I would start with The Antitrust Terrible 10: Why the Most Reviled "Anti-competitive" Business Practices Can Benefit Consumers in the New Economy and The Government's War on Mergers: The Fatal Conceit of Antitrust Policy, because it is a common misconception that antitrust is even needed. More analysis is found here, here, and these two links. In short, antitrust and monopoly-busting tactics do more damage than good.

If you are a pro-capitalist out there check out the opinion pieces on www.capitalismmagazine.com. They are starting a notification email list as well as a discussion list and will be creating a petition.

I'm sorry, but I must correct one major blunder in your post: "(like our actions regarding the recent U.N. conference on racism)", I'm afraid you have that a bit wrong ? Maybe UN conference OF racists ? Here have a good link: The United Nations Conference of Racists

I definitely agree, Jon Katz isn't presenting the full story and his logic is fuzzy.

Katz says the U.S. is becoming one of the most resented countries in the world. Hello Katz! The U.S. has ALWAYS been one of the most resented countries because of its prosperity. The rest of the world loves to belittle the U.S. for any reason it can come up with because of its prosperity.

Next Katz talks about surveys:

67% of Americans surveyed believed that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to global warming and increasing average temperatures.

Since when does the general public have the scientific knowhow to analyze factors and trends in the Earth's chemical content? They think that because its what they are TOLD by the liberal media not because they have made a scientific analysis of the situation.

Katz goes on to say that this issue is going to capture large amounts of attention and that our nation's president is definitely on the unpopular side. Katz, the environmentalist left has been preaching this for decades. The truth is that global warming is NOT based on fact it is based on scare tactics. If the rest of the world jumped off a bridge would the U.S jump too? I'm proud that our president has stood up for his belief that environmentalism, when carried to the extreme, is very unhealthy for everybody. If you believe that global warming is truly a threat, do your homework and research the topic instead of blindly trusting liberal rhetoric. You'll find that global warming is actually at odds with science and is just another political tool.

The Tick : Spooooooooooooooooooooon!.

here's a link
'In December 1996 he said the market's rise was due to "irrational exuberance." '