I recently posted on facebook about health care reform and trying to “have it all.” I’m no expert, but it seems to me that you can have two of the following three things:

1. Increased benefits

2. Reduced costs

3. More government involvement

The one you don’t pick will have to go way in the opposite direction.

So, if you want to get the government more involved and increase benefits, costs will necessarily skyrocket. Didn’t we learn this with Medicare Part D? Any arguments about providing more entitlements…

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I was initially going to post this as a comment to Greg Conko’s recent post arguing against the Court’s recent decision in Wyeth v. Levine, but the comment system didn’t work correctly for me.

I appreciate the force of Greg’s argument (and I certainly agree that this particular case should have been decided much earlier on different grounds), but I think there is room for reasonable disagreement within the libertarian community about whether FDA preempting state tort law is good or bad.…

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Marlo made three interesting arguments yesterday contending that cap-and-trade would generate protectionist outcomes. I want to add another, pervasive, yet oft-neglected reason.

Environmental regulation spurs the businesses who feel cheated to lobby for other forms of protectionism for their industries. This is a very different mechanism from Marlo’s identification of particular measures with protectionist policies. It doesn’t matter what the content of the regulation is; as long as businesses perceive it as hurting them, they will lobby for and get protectionist measures…

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Bureaucrash just posted a new round of libertarian lolcats to the networking site, Bureaucrash Social. Many are topical. Many are hilarious. Some (such as this one, I think) are both. Check them out and let us know what you think!

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It’s been a while since I posted here, but I thought OpenMarket readers may want to check out a piece I have up on TechLiberation that has generated a lot of heated discussion. I there argue that “2008 was the year of Schumpeter” and 2009 is looking like it will be the year of Bastiat/Hazlitt, because it is the year that we all give in to the broken window fallacy and come to believe that we can improve the economy by going…

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I promised, and I shall deliver. As it’s my last day as an intern at CEI, this is my last Philosopher’s Corner post, and it covers a very important question: What actions am I responsible for? If I cause someone else to act, am I responsible for what they do as a result? This question implicates not only whole swaths of tort law, but also such issues as safe harbor for websites from copyright infringement or other law-breaking by their users.

Luckily, Alan Gewirth (the…

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Who doesn't love a good half-litre?

Over at the self-proclaimed “irreverant blog for food outlaws” Crispy on the Outside (which our own Richard Morrison dubs “one of the finest libertarian food blogs I’ve ever seen”), Baylen Linnekin reports on pub owners being fined £2,000 for serving metric quantities of beer. The owners established a bar catering to the Polish community, who use the metric system. So, they served half-liters (roughly equivalent to a pint) and three-tenths-liters of beer to their customers, none of…

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The Federal Election Commission has held that bloggers are covered by the same rules as journalists, permitting them to write about candidates without their actions counting as campaign contributions. Today, the FEC extended that precedent, concluding that even if bloggers coordinate with campaigns, they are nonetheless exempted from campaign contribution requirements. A rare victory for free speech online!

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Time Warner Cable is getting slapped with an anti-tying lawsuit. The plaintiff claims that by renting him a cable box, the company engaged in unfair trade practices. He acknowledges that he could have instead rented a CableCARD and used his own cable box, but claims it was too difficult.

But tying arrangements are good for consumers. They allow cable companies to offer packages that customers want (after all, if I’m buying cable service, I probably want a box too) at lower prices than…

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The British government has not been known for its high level of respect for privacy. But this truly surprised me. Vnunet reports:

The Home office has issued a consultation paper for a new law that would force phone companies, ISPs and network operators to record and store every phone call, web page request and text message.

The information would have to be stored for 12 months by service providers and would be searchable by a wide variety of organisations, including local councils, health…

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On Tuesday, I reported on overblown concerns that the rate of increase in broadband subscribers is not the same as it used to be, when fewer people already had broadband. Today, there’s more broadband fear-mongering, this time about speed. A new report makes similar claims to ones already released by a DC law firm and the OECD.

The new report uses data from a speed testing website run by “the Communications Workers of America, a group that would see its membership benefit greatly…

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It’s Friday again, and also my last day as an intern at CEI. So, I’m posting another Toothpastefordinner comic. Any complaints? No? Good. This one, released yesterday, takes a look at the typical overzealous advocate of online privacy laws. It’s hardly a parody.

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Another update on Congress’s continuing investigation into online targeted advertising. Google responded by stating that the company does not engage in Deep Packet Inspection, unlike ISPs that use NebuAd or Phorm. Yahoo, however, soundly defended targeted ads with a laundry list of positives. The company concluded its exposition on the generally-ignored benefits of behavioral advertising with a wonderful summary:

Given the wide range of benefits to society to customers, bloggers, small businesses, and even advertisers who can more efficiently find the right audience for their…

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A lawsuit filed for defamation against Wikipedia has just been dismissed by a federal judge. The ruling holds that Wikipedia is not liable for the actions of its users - exactly what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was intended for.

Now, if only Italy would get the message.

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"If these trends continue" is a dangerous way to begin a sentence in the new economy

Ars reports that Google has expanded its domination of search, with it winning more market share against competitors over the last 18 months. But don’t go blaring the monopoly warning horns just yet. As PFF’s Adam Thierer has argued, no tech company can maintain dominance for too long. As I showed earlier, people used to worry that Yahoo was the dominant website and that it would…

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Ars reports on a strange move by British ISP Virgin Media. Facing pressure from the government to cut down on P2P downloading (I guess we can forget net neutrality), Virgin has apparently agreed to use Deep Packet Inspection to monitor its users’ downloading activity and to pay record labels for those downloads.

As I just reported, the UK (and the rest of Europe) does not have the same level of safe harbor protections as the US. But ISPs just provide the pipes. Turnpikes shouldn’t…

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My colleague Courtney Long and I have been posting about a series of contradictory decisions regarding whether eBay should be held liable for the fraudulent actions of its sellers. French courts held the online auction company liable for some of its users’ sales of fake Louis Vuitton purses, but a US court ruled that eBay was not liable for sales of fake Tiffany-branded items.

Apparently, the disagreement isn’t just between the US and Europe - the peril of facing multiple regulatory jurisdictions that all…

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Following on the heels of Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, the state of California is considering passing a law harshly punishing “cyberbullies” with expulsion, up to 90 days in jail, and a $500 fine. As Larry Magid of CBS News argues, California needs to be careful not to encroach on free speech protections. The right to speak anonymously is one important aspect of free speech. And even insensitive anonymous speech deserves protection. Instead of punishing students for what they say, perhaps parents and schools…

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CNET and the Consumer Electronics Association have just released a new index of consumer confidence in the technology sector. Consumer confidence in technology often differs greatly from confidence in the rest of the economy. (For evidence, look no further than the mad rush for iPhones.) Hopefully, the new index will do a better job of tracking the tech sector specifically.

Now, if only we could get the CPI to reflect massive improvements in technology…

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I just posted on several states’ new taxes on internet downloads. Over at TLF, tech liberator Braden Cox just published an interesting piece on the green benefits of downloading. Apparently, downloading uses less than half the resources of brick-and-mortar purchases. And states want to tax it into oblivion.

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