Interesting People mailing list archives

Re: Krugman On the Connectivity Power Shift

From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 20:38:00 -0400



Begin forwarded message:

From: Russ Nelson <nelson () crynwr com>
Date: August 1, 2007 6:06:51 PM EDT
To: Jock Gill <jg45 () mac com>
Cc: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Krugman On the Connectivity Power Shift

Jock Gill writes:

Actually not.


Actually not not.

The private sector COULD pressure the FCC to adopt an Abundant
Spectrum model.  They do not.  Follow their money.


OF COURSE!  THAT IS WHAT I AM SAYING.  Nobody expects them to pressure
the FCC for Abundant Spectrum.  Nobody.  Not you, not me, not Dave,
not anybody.  I do NOT trust businesses; not one inch.  I don't trust
them to be regulated either, because regulations are easy to subvert.
You can probably think of more examples than I can ... and in this
particular field, e.g. unbundled components.

What I trust is competition in a free market.  I don't know enough
about telecommunications to be able to write regulations better than
the regulation that competitive free markets provide.  And ... you
don't either.  But the participants in the market know how to offer a
better deal than the next guy, make more money, and create a public
benefit at the same time.

A free market provides continuous analog control through negative
feedback.  Consider the making of plate glass.  Before they applied
negative feedback to it, there was no way to keep all the parameters
adjusted properly.  The pressure of the rollers, the temperature, and
the speed all interact with each other, and no human has the ability
to keep them all adjusted properly to produce plate glass.

Same thing for regulations.  Conditions changes continuously and
rapidly, faster than the information can flow to the regulators, be
considered, enacted into law, and go into effect.  Free markets just
work better by their very nature.

Now, this is not to say that free markets are "never wrong" and never
produce bad results.  It is simply to say that the bad results from
free markets are less bad than the bad results from regulation when
you consider everything.  Yes, there are cases where regulation
produces better specific results than markets ... but more cases where
regulation produces specific bad results, and you can't distinguish
them a priori.  Maxwell's Daemon and all that.

You REALLY ought to read _The Myth of the Rational Voter_.  Really but
REALLY.  The scales would fall from your eyes and you would stop being
a democracy fundamentalist.

My sense is that you subscribe to the false dichotomy that pits the
"never wrong" private against the "always wrong" public and thus
prevents cooperation and cooperative gain.


How do you maximize cooperation?  You give people choices and let
*them* decide.  Another word for that is a competitive free market.
That's all that competition is: multiple offers of cooperation.
Government is "Here's my offer of cooperation.  Take it or I will
force you to cooperate."

Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  |     Sheepdog          | Curious how that is!


-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com

Current thread:

Re: Krugman On the Connectivity Power Shift David Farber (Aug 01)