Category: Economics

  • Private Roads

    I often hear arguments from skeptics of capitalism about roads being a “natural” monopoly, so I decided to write up a fictional account of how a private road system might function. Needless to say, this is just one potential scenario that markets might create. It is impossible to say what arrangement entrepreneurs would actually organize.

  • The lesson that we should draw from the results of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is that efforts to partially privatize the industry are likely to retain those elements of regulations that benefit concentrated interests in business most. If this point is not immediately evident to you, I highly recommend you read “The Question of…

  • Yet another communist "utopia"

    Check out these Satellite photos of North Korean prison camps. Then read this: Death, terror in N. Korea gulag.

  • Microsofts and standards compliance…

    Here is a quote from an email I sent out on the Brazos Valley Web Design listserv regarding Microsoft’s lack of compliance with the W3C standards: I think that it’s helpful to realize that Microsoft’s browser is in effect a de-facto standard, which by overwhelming user preference is preferred over the W3C-compliant Mozilla. If you…

  • The Antitrust Racket

    Check out this blog from initium: In 1977, Congress passed the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, a law intended to make life easier for FTC and Antitrust Division officials in deciding which mergers to prosecute and stop. Under HSR, all mergers worth at least a certain value (approximately $50 million under the current law) must be reported to…

  • Marxism

    Interesting article on Marxism at the Economist. Here is the conclusion: Anti-globalism has been aptly described as a secular religion. So is Marxism: a creed complete with prophet, sacred texts and the promise of a heaven shrouded in mystery. Marx was not a scientist, as he claimed. He founded a faith. The economic and political…

  • Economic Freedom and Prosperity

    For my econometrics class, I am comparing the relationship between economic freedom and prosperity, and I just got my first regression results for 2001 for 155 nations. The results are very preliminary, but the evidence is clear: there is an extremely high correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, explaining over 73% of the variation in…