Why monopolies are bad

The reason monopoly is bad in the eyes of libertarians, is because it is inherently coercive -- we as consumers don't have other options, so even if the monopolist is a "good" one, he's still holding all the cards, and we have no choice but to either buy his stuff at his price, or go pound sand.

Competition empowers consumers by giving us choices and thus power, pitting the businesses against each other to our benefit.

Businesses hate that, so they constantly look for ways to "control" competition -- usually using government mandated cartel practices, subverting government oversight agencies, or by illegal price fixing, illegal anti-competitive agreements, etc.

A free market works when it channels greed into socially positive outcomes. Greed doesn't like being channeled and will happily corrupt the government in order to free itself from the hard boundaries of the free market.

Thomas Frank under-performs yet again

Thomas Frank continues to underserve his readers. This time it's a disjointed rant based loosely on a deliberate mis-reading of a 28-year-old quote.

Wirthlin's point, that people act on their perceptions, is pedestrian, and the same sentiment can be found in the mouths of political operatives (and marketers and newspaper editors) of all political stripes.

If you view Frank's writings with sufficiently jaded eyes, it's amusing to see him waxing indignant about the Republican disconnect with Frank's version of reality -- which of course is really real.

A useful exercise might have been for Frank to engage in some, oh, let's call it reportage, wherein he could prove rather than assert that his reality is more real than the straw-man GOP version he offers.

Frank might have addressed the consistent thread of anti-Americanism that continues to dominate the far left and even the near left, such as the amazing circumstance by which the Democratic Party two years ago was in a conflict of interest -- that the worse America did in Iraq, the better for themselves -- and prominent Democrats still apparently desire American defeat in Iraq.

If you seek to read a fact-free essay that consists of a leftist agreeing with himself, Frank once again delivers. If you seek someone to challenge your thinking, or expose you to new ideas, new facts, what one might call "news" -- seek elsewhere.

Memo to the Wall Street Journal's editors: please raise your expectations of Thomas Frank to the same level you hold other writers on your page. His track record is sub-par.

A dialogue on global warmism

A slightly redacted email exchange with a leftist friend, after I forwarded this link and pointed out that the "consensus" on global warming isn't a consensus:

These are good questions. Thank you. Part of the joy of knowing you -- aside from looking at you -- is being challenged by your perspective. It's delightful.

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 my friend wrote:

The consequences of your side of the debate being wrong are far more catastrophic than those if mine are. Be prudent, darling. What's to lose?

A decent standard of living, especially for poorer people. Ask the Mexicans (among many others) who had their cost of food skyrocket because of ethanol mandates. Ask them "what's to lose?" and they'll tell you about their kids going hungry.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6255781.stm

)

The cost of global warmism is not zero -- it's quite high, especially if the "answer" is to shut down the economies of the world, or divert food to fuel. Ethanol mandates alone have accelerated the loss of rain forest as the demand for corn and other ethanol feed stocks has gone up, resulting in vast new plantings of marginal and ecologically sensitive lands.
(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=biofuels-bad-for-people-and-climate

)

Ask the extinct species "what's to lose?" when it turns out -- Oops! -- it was all a mistake, no warming, but those species are gone forever.
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

)

I can certainly understand the appeal to continue to live exactly as one wants to and imagine that there aren't any costs to pay whatsoever. Who wouldn't want to buy into that fairy tale?

This is an excellent point -- the same reason people ignore the looming disasters of Social Security and Medicare -- denial is so much easier than action, if action truly is needed.

What I don't understand is what "your" side imagines the appeal is to those of us who believe that behaviors must change for the planet to survive. What precisely do you think we "get" out of this? An orgasmic satisfaction for being busy-bodies?

Well, for the Watermelons -- the socialists and communists who became politically homeless after the fall of the Soviet Union -- they're just green on the outside, and still red on the inside. For them it's a perfect reason to do what Bush Jr tried to do with the war: stifle dissent, exaggerate dangers, and concentrate power. Global warmism has been the excuse for massive state intrusions into both the private sector and into people's private lives. It's the perfect excuse for totalitarianism.

And for you personally, the payoff is different, as you reveal below.

Between the high resource input demands of over-indulgent self-entitled Hummer owners and families with 7 children, and the slightly less high inputs of smug self-righteous Prius drivers with compost piles and two cats, lie people like me -- who think it's wrong to blindly deplete fisheries, dump phosphates in the water supply, pretend that oil supplies will never run out (never being a pretty ridiculous concept), that super mega-ton carbon emissions come at no cost whatsoever, or that the World will be just fine, in fact better, without all those pesky bears, condors, elephants, forests and other annoying and inconvenient flora and fauna that just get in the way of commerce.

We just don't happen to like this obsessively human-centric point of view, because we believe it's destructive, sense that the planet is telling us that, and think that (really) minor lifestyle adjustments could reverse a dangerous and perhaps life-extinguishing trajectory. If we're wrong what has actually been lost or forgone that has any real significance? If we're right, you and your offspring get to be here. Seems a fair gamble.

In other words, you get to do what Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell could only dream of -- the ability to use the power of the government to tell everybody how to live, what values to have, etc. (Beats having to persuade people, like they have to in free countries.)

Your straw man above is pretty grotesque, and typical of the hate projected by leftists onto my side -- the bizarre idea that we skeptics don't value the environment, or that we're all materialists, that we all worship commerce and cheer environmental depredations -- it's loony, yet you put it forward as only half tongue in cheek.

The reality is that the wealth generated by the free market has led to not dirtier but cleaner air, water, and soil, that rich countries protect species much better than poor ones, and that the only way to pay for even some of the interventions you want is to let my side run the economy long enough to generate the wealth to cover the tab.

Look at the ecological disaster areas of the 20th century -- they are the communist countries, not the capitalist ones. Look at the ecological disaster areas of the 21st century -- they are the poorest areas with the weakest property rights, yet global warmism deepens poverty and undermines property rights further.

I'm not the slightest religious and I don't know whether you are or not,

I'm the worst Christian I know -- and yes, somehow, still a Christian. And if you're a global warmist, then you're religious -- because it's a faith, it's not science.

but if 'god' created everything, how come most of what was created appears to be expendable, because humans seem to trump everything else? Are you more precious than a manatee in 'god's' eye?

Well, yes, actually, I think humans are more valuable than non-human animals. And I think humans have a God-given duty to protect the environment. (Hence my opposition to global warmism and its horrific costs to the poor and to the environment.)

And, as the Tappet Brothers say, I've just wasted the last hour. It's like sending an email to my brother-in-law about why he should abandon Ralph Nader -- the result will be the same.

(signed)

Wasted? Nonsense. If nothing else you've given me a wonderfully diverting 20 minutes responding to you, and deepened my affection for you. Now I have to go re-read everything I wrote to see if it makes sense from a perspective OTHER than behind my own eyes -- how could I not be grateful to you for that?

-Tom

Merkeley vs. Merkeley

Watching today's single-chair US Senate debate with Jeff Merkeley vs. the empty podium where Gordon Smith should have been, I have to call it a narrow Merkeley victory.

Victory because the world gets run by the people who show up, and Smith didn't. And narrow because Merkeley came across as a mildly clever man with a hat full of memorized sound bites.

Note to future debate prep staff: remind the candidate that a sound bite is like a spice -- use sparingly to accent the main course. Rely on them too much, and it burns the tongue and insults the palate. So too with Merkeley, who said "giveaways to the richest Americans" perhaps a dozen too many times.

Working the sound bite into one answer is good. Two can be better if they're far enough apart. Three or more answers in quick succession, all containing that same sound bite, and you sound like a performer repeating memorized lines. (Oh, and it sounds even lamer if you then stumble over it.)

Yes the room was filled with upper middle class liberals who might not have been terribly open to Smith anyway. Nevertheless Smith owed it to all the voters to show up and make his case. Had he handled himself well, Smith could have raised doubts about Merkeley's intellect (actually Merkeley managed to raise them himself, in my mind at least) and shown off the bipartisanship that has so distanced him from his own reluctant Jesus-loving base.

Grover Norquist and "StopACORN.org"

Grover Norquist enters the blogger room to give interviews to the assembled electron-stained wretches. His "Americans for Tax Reform" (www.atr.org) argues for pro-growth tax policies. See also their Tax Policy widget, here.

One concern he mentions (that many of us share) regarding the Congressional bailout of the financial markets is transparency.

Perhaps groups like ACORN should also be invited -- or forced -- to be made transparent. Right now donations and contracts are published on the web, however grants are another matter -- ACORN affiliates love to suck up taxpayer dollars to fund their efforts to move the country leftward, and doesn't want to have public scrutiny.

Transparency in government spending could help eliminate abuses.

There is a group in Maine that got government info on spending from friendly legislators and then published it on the web, exposing some irregularities. It was criticized for "inaccurate" data -- it turns out the government released bad data on its own spending. Oops.

Defending Free Markets, one rally at a time

I'm in Washington DC for a rally of free market defenders. Good energy, and a heartening mix of younger activists -- an especially positive sign.

I'd still like to hear a positive vision for government's role in protecting and defending free markets. It exists, and needs to be set out in detail.

For example, a transaction is a free market transaction only when it is a voluntary exchange, freely entered into by two parties who have roughly equal information, and each has other alternatives he could have chosen.

To quote one authority, with liberties taken in formatting:

...[T]he organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government [emphasis added throughout], for:

• the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another,
• the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into,
• the definition of the meaning of property rights,
• the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and
• the provision of a monetary framework.

(Source: Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, U of Chicago Press, 1962.)

The current market turmoil has, at its heart, the

As I wrote recently,