Kill the Gatekeepers
Tomorrow Digg.com releases version 3.0. Why is this significant? Take a look at this comparison to the New York Times website. Digg.com has about 800,000 unique visitors every day and is doubling in traffic every two months.
Ice Cream and Patents
It’s another hot summer day and nothing cools the heat like a large cone of ice cream. Due to our relatively free economy, I have the choice between many different sellers, brands, and types of the frozen treat. A relatively new concept is one where ice cream shops mix your choice of ice cream and toppings on a super-cooled stone slab before placing the mix in a cone. Someone, somewhere, conceived of this recipe and sought investors to bring it to market.
The New York Times: It Just Can’t Stop Hating Success and the American Way of Life
To combat climate change, we need to break our addiction to consuming oil, while developing countries need to break their addiction to selling it. We need a different lifestyle model . . . . —Thomas L. Friedman
The biggest problem with our bounty of coal is not what it does to our mountains or the atmosphere, but what it does to our minds. It preserves the illusion that we don’t have to change our lives.
GNP, PPR, and the Standard of Living
[This article was originally published in Review of Austrian Economics 1 (1987): 181–86.]
Mutualism’s Support for the Exploitation of Labor and State Coercion
Mutualism claims to oppose the exploitation of labor, i.e., the theft of any part of its product. But when it comes to labor that has been mixed with land, it turns a blind eye and comes out foursquare on the side of the exploiter.
Patent and Penicillin
Apparently the discovery of penicillin is often trotted out as a classic case showing the importance of having the innovation-incentives of a patent system in place. The following post from Greg Aharonian’s PatNews is a letter from a medical specialist debunking some urban legends about this, including one repeated by then-US Patent Office Director Q. Todd Dickinson:
Artifacts of Financial Engineering
Inflation, writes Sean Corrigan, is properly defined as monetary creation, but this very act has seemed to reduce the kind of “inflation” that is routinely misdefined as a rise in the consumer price level.
Price Controls on Labor
Hans Sennholz writes that few employers, if any, knowingly buy labor that costs more than it produces. Yet, economists who dare to point to the failure of price controls on labor are vilified.
Patent Trolls and Empirical Thinking
Patent trolls are under increasing attack of late—patent owners who don’t actually develop or manufacture the product covered by their patents, but just sue other companies who do make it.
Because drug price competition is bad, mmmkay???
Sez Senator Charles Schumer. The pharmaceutical company Merck is facing generic competition for its cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor. In response, Merck is cutting deals with insurance companies to offer lower copays on name-brand Zocor than the generic equivalent (it’s true that a copay is not the actual price of the drug, but it is the price signal that people with insurance are concerned with. I’m not sure how this affects the price of the drug without insurance).
