A new Maryland law makes it illegal for manufacturers to set a minimum retail price for their products in sales contracts. The law is meant to increase competition. Unfortunately, it will have the opposite effect.

As Wayne Crews and I explain in the The American Spectator, it could prevent retailers from competing with each other on non-price grounds, such as customer service, product demonstrations, and advertising.

Some products, such as televisions or cars, have high information costs. Customers want to know a lot…

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O’Reilly writer Andy Oram makes the case that the assertion President-elect Barack Obama’s victory is in large part due to his campaign’s effective use of the internet is an overstatement, to say the least.  Oram counters that when all is said and done, the mainstream media is what had the most significant impact on the elections.

I feel I have to temper the hype over how the Internet has changed elections. There’s no doubt that the Internet provides enormous potential, and that people have been…

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A new RAND Corporation study that purports to show a link between teen pregnancy and viewing TV shows with strong sexual content seems just like the kind of publicity-engendering publication that researchers love as a way to help attract research dollars. Indeed, a look at the study’s abstract reveals language so tentative as to bring the whole exercise into question. Under “Conclusions,” it reads:

This is the first study to demonstrate a prospective link between exposure to sexual content on television and the…

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At long last, David Simon’s grossly overrated, overwrought, overwritten, television series “The Wire” is getting the bad reviews it deserves. [Full disclosure: I’ve had my personal differences with Simon and, at one point, he took to writing be hugely nasty emails to me for daring to suggest that maybe his own reporting on inner-city life sometimes ran contrary to his own nihilistic left-wing ideology. He even once called me a profane name in a print interview. Why he, a big time…

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