A previous article attributed widespread airline service failures not to individual carriers but to government interventions sold as consumer protections. Through a web of intricate regulations and controls, the state restricts entry, grants shared monopoly privileges to approved carriers, and creates what Rothbard calls a state-enforced cartel. The result is an illusion of competition that allows poor service to persist without attracting better alternatives. This article examines how the same pattern protects incumbents and suppresses competition across other industries.

Loïc Wacquant and Murray Rothbard come from completely different worlds. Wacquant, in Punishing the Poor (2009), analyzes how modern states manage marginalized populations through policing and incarceration.

“Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported.” — Frederick Douglass, Composite Nation (1867)

[What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu. Dutton, 2026; x + 403 pp.)]

There is nothing new about the perils for peace and liberty which stem from the combination of monetary inflation and technological revolution. Indeed, we can find a prime illustration at the dawn of the modern age during the Northern Renaissance in Europe.

But first, towards better describing the peril, I urgently propose a new entry into the economics dictionary: techno-asset inflation. The definition is this: techno-asset inflation is found where monetary inflation and technological revolution interact to produce virulent asset inflation.

My wife and I recently took a four day road trip to the Hudson, New York area to see some gardens and a couple preserved homes. We stayed the first night in quaint Hudson, which lost to Albany by one vote to become New York’s capital. At one time it was a bustling whaling center, if you can believe it. We actually stayed in the Whaler Hotel and many shops and restaurants have the word “whaler” in their title. Nevertheless, today the town has lost most of its industry. There are a few decent restaurants and, for some reason, lots and lots of boutique furniture stores.

A previous article introduced and addressed the role of patents, monopoly, and cronyism in the beginnings of the telephone industry. This article will seek to explore the brief and imperfect era of freer market competition that followed the end of key Bell patents in 1893 and 1894 (1894–1906).