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FTC Staff Discuss a Tax on Electronics To Support the News Business
dptalia links to this piece describing a staff discussion draft from the Federal Trade Commission, writing "The FTC is concerned about the death of the 'news.' Specifically newspapers. Rather than look to how old media models can be adapted to the Internet, they instead suggest taxing consumer electronics to support a huge newspaper bailout. Additionally, they suggest making facts 'proprietary' and allowing news organizations to copyright them."
Note, though, "The good news in all this is that the FTC's bureaucrats try hard to recommend little. They just discuss. And much of what the agency staff ponders are political impossibilities."
This would essentially put the government in charge of choosing which press agencies to sponser... Dangerous precedent...
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is all out of proportion because of the state of the economy and the number of unemployed people already out there. In better times, much of this would be ignored.
Remember to maintain your supply of
We didn't try to artificially keep wagon wheel business alive when cars were invented.
Yes you did.
It's frightening just how much modern American government has become like the nightmare Statist government in Ayn Rand's novels, constantly meddling with and attempting to control market forces that it and it's members are incapable of understanding or wanting to understand.
Regardless of what you may think of her personally, she was prescient.
Far too many people are willing to ignore good advice when they don't like the messenger, or the people associated with the advice. There is also another reason people ignore good advice that scares me even more. It's when the advice is ignored because they cannot accept the implications of what that would mean.
I guess the latter reason also scares me because I often find myself making the same mistake. It's easy and comforting.
As with Ayn Rand, it's like any other book, it takes an effort to distill the insightful portions from the author's other opinions.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Why are we always so concerned with keeping companies in business. We didn't try to artificially keep wagon wheel business alive when cars were invented. This is absurd, if a company can no longer sell something, sell something else, or die off.
While normally I agree with the idea of making businesses survive and fail on their own I'm a bit more hesitant to agree to letting the news industry fail. I wouldn't want to get all my information from blogs, word of mouth or press releases from the government. Remember most of the stories posted here are from a news source of some sort or another. If the news agencies failed It would leave a huge information vacuum that the government could fill as it wished. And lets not even think about the quality of the news when it is all done by people without editors or others to put the breaks on unsupported stories. At least right now we can get a view of the truth by reading the extremes and taking the average. The US (and other civilized countries) are better of with the news agencies then without them. As for newspapers, if you can read you have access to them which gives them an advantage over electronic media.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
Newspapers aren't, for the most part, loosing money. They're becoming less profitable. Historically, newspapers have enjoyed fantastically high profit margins. Due to a falloff in revenue from shrinking circulation and less interest in print classifieds, those margins have shrunk to being merely moderate.
Back in the days when newspapers were run by private companies or wealthy families most papers probably could have weathered these leaner times, these days most major papers are held by big public media companies. These companies can't tolerate a drop in profits, so they are firing reporters and closing beuros in order to maintain those margins.
Wrong.
GM deserved to die because it was mismanaged for decades. Their products have been crap for a long time, they haven't made a decent car in decades, and it shows in the sales figures. The only reason they were profitable before was because of the SUV craze. However, GM pissed away this opportunity, and instead of using the temporary windfall from the sale of highly profitable SUVs to build a "rainy day" fund or otherwise make the company strong for the next recession, they were completely caught with their pants down when gas prices rose and then again when the recession hit, killing the SUV craze suddenly. With no more cash cow to abuse, GM had no more money left.
Ford, OTOH, managed to manage their company well enough that they avoided this fate, even though they were profiting off the SUVs alongside GM, and had all the same issues with union work and costs.
So, in the end, instead of Ford being rewarded for their superior business acumen, they got to watch stupid, mismanaged GM get an unearned bailout.
GM should have been allowed to die. It could have been split up and sold off to Ford, Honda, Toyota, and the other automakers. That "vast system of suppliers" should have been able to hang on until then, as they would have been needed to supply these other companies who would now be selling more cars. Any company that can't handle a temporary disruption to their sales has no business staying in business.