Efficiency vs. Equality

They tell us that only a “managed economy” for intellectual “property” will preserve jobs, and that more “freedom” will actually lead to slavery, that roving bands of pirates are living it up like drug barons on movie downloads. They explain how they need the senate to grant them special, temporary powers to download the contents of your phone or laptop when you cross the border, they explain why they need to send violent special forces police to arrest and extradite the owners of a file downloading business, they explain why they need to monitor the entire world’s tweets looking for jokes in poor taste.

We are, I think, at the beginning of Act III. Some of you will agree with me that surrender is a perfectly acceptable alternative in extreme circumstances. But others will climb into their trusty ships and continue the fight, harassing and wounding the entrenched interests until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own corruption. The future of our economy really does depend on the rebels succeeding. At every point in the last forty years, wealth, health, and happiness in our economy has been built on the freedom to disrupt the entrenched powers, not the preservation of their rent-seeking monopolies.

More jobs and businesses have been created by VCRs than destroyed by them. More jobs and businesses have been created by the breakup of AT&T than destroyed by it. More jobs and businesses have been created by the decline of IBM than lost in Armonk. More jobs and businesses have been created by the stagnation of Microsoft than lost in Redmond. And it will be the same with the RIAA, the MPAA, Intellectual Ventures, and everyone else scheming to enthral the people with digital “rights” management and criminal prosecution of “file sharing.” In the destruction of the monopolization of ideas, lies the seeds of another revolution, one that will bring wealth, freedom, and jobs.

Rebels, may the force be with you. Always.

German rules that limit the offering of sports betting and lotteries to state-controlled monopolies aren’t justified as long as they’re applied in an inconsistent manner, the European Union’s highest court said.

“The German rules do not limit games of chance in a consistent and systematic manner,” the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said in three separate rulings today. “In such circumstances, the preventive objective of that monopoly can no longer be pursued, so that the monopoly ceases to be justifiable.”

The author of this posting makes no effort to differentiate between “public school choice” and actual free education markets, and in the process grossly misrepresents what is known and has been repeatedly shown: that the freest and most market-like education systems overwhelmingly outperform monopolisitic school systems such as we have in the United States.

To his credit, Stephen Levitt did make this distinction in the 2007 posting linked in the blockquote above. But even Levitt refered to the evidence on this subject as “hard to find.” Should anyone else be experiencing difficulty in finding this evidence, they are encouraged to click on the link immediately above, where they will find a peer-reviewed paper digesting the results of 65 studies on this subject.