Re: An Experiment: A Literal Political Thread
You may be surprised, but I kind of agree with you as well.
The ills that regulation is trying to ameliorate are classic Pareto problems. I would be interested in the practicality of a two-tiered regulatory state, where large companies have to check every box but small companies and M&Ps get a waiver for all but lethal issues.
Another surprising area where we probably agree is in anti-trust enforcement. Free-market capitalism may be a great economic engine, but it needs to be embedded in a broader social context. The people who operate within free-market capitalism still need to behave in ethical and socially responsible ways.
It is the nature of free market capitalism for the more efficient companies to drive less-efficient competitors out of business, and for companies within industries to consolidate to fewer and fewer, larger and larger ones. But this results in monopoly power and a certain form of "laziness" that undercuts the very same competitive power that brought it about in the first place.
It is d*mnably difficult to describe how and when anti-trust action should be applicable, though in many cases it is fairly apparent "just by looking at the situation" when it is called for (i.e., on an ad hoc basis, hard to codify though). The breakups of Standard Oil and of AT&T created standalone competitive firms which then led to substantial innovation and price reductions afterward, which is the desired result in the first place. Ironically, several of the companies that resulted from the initial breakups subsequently merged again.
Today, it seems to me that a company like Comcast should be forced to divest into two companies, one that provides content and one that delivers content. It seems inherently anti-competitive to me for the same company both to provide and to deliver content as they would be sorely tempted to restrict competitors' ability to deliver alternative content.
The practical problem with anti-trust enforcement, of course, is regulatory capture, and rent-seeking behavior, as companies in one industry try to use it to restrict competition from another. That happened with cable vs DSL: cable was successful in getting DSL to be regulated under one regime while cable is regulated under a different regime. With a different regulatory structure, DSL could be just as effective if not even more so than cable in content delivery; as it stands now, cable has a significant competitive advantage, not because of technology, but solely because of the difference in regulation.
If I am not mistaken, South Korea has unfettered DSL that provides better internet service there than cable provides here.
