Free Market 17, no. 3 (March 1999) Duality is the Visa and MasterCard management policy that allows banks doing business with one to issue both credit cards. It is a is questioned in court, the Justice Department has announced that duality is “anti-competitive.” It has staked the success of a huge lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard the company was changing its bylaws to prohibit duality. “AmeriCard submits that competition between the two competing bank-card systems must not be lessened and that
The chairman was to “de-velop and recommend to the President national economic policies to foster and promote free competitive enterprise, to avoid economic fluctuations or to diminish the effects economic post in the White House. The presentation of the data and the policy recommendations have always been tainted by politics. There is a built-in bias
of various states to decide where to locate. If true, this would generate tax competition between states. Firms will locate in one state over another to take not based on market conditions but on distorted prices due to state incentive policies. One should recall the famous “Lesson” of Henry Hazlitt: what economic
to government-sponsored cartels, all aimed at keeping steel prices far above competitive levels. Few industries have received such benefits, all of which have firms failed to modernize their plants, depending instead on a new government policy, the “trigger price mechanism.” This legislative device “triggers” steel that have been most protected will be least able to withstand new waves of competition. Steel, as experience has demonstrated, is no exception. William L.
to go to the pharmacy, where we pay prices outrageously inflated by the lack of competition made possible by the government grant of privilege called the patent. In we have here is the usual combination of graft and political payoffs called public policy. Of course prices will rise, which is what happens when something is
And it’s on its way out because of another problem with government environmental policy: an exaggerated, over- broad response to a possibly nonexistent risk, aimed at the reason we want to get rid of it show us the very real hazards of government policies that try to do too much with heavy-handed commands and bans rather than Brian Doherty is the Warren Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Doherty, Brian. “Regulation Begets Regulation.”
of Auto Fuel Economy Standards, Current and Proposed,” by Julie DeFalco, in Competitive Enterprise Institute ‘s Policy Publication, June 1997, and “Death by Regulation,” by Sam Kazman, in
low, and there are no physical barriers to entry--the textbook ideal of “perfect competition.” And yet we don’t see hundreds and thousands of firms of equal size. in no position to “exploit” their size. If they let up in their service or pricing policies, their stock price falls and consumers go elsewhere. The consumer is
an endorsement of environmental regulations, labor controls, Keynesian fiscal policy, and buzz words that imply nothing but government-controlled trade. It was a regime, will the special interest moths disappear. James Sheehan works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Sheehan, James. “This Isn’t Free Trade.” The Free
questions are triggered by these recent events: Is Lindsey’s hiring an insurance policy for Bear Stearns? A classic measure in which the regulators and a big player Commission. The big boys welcomed the ICC as a way of keeping out new “cutthroat” competition. Historian Gabriel Kolko called this kind of bogus regulatory structure
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.