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 about these products before they commit to a purchase. They want to know what they’re getting. Try before they buy.
By forcing retailers to compete against each other to give customers more and better information and service, minimum price agreements can help consumers get what they want and boost sales at the same time.
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 using it in burgeoning numbers over the past four years to search for information, share ideas with friends, and form online coalitions. But several key observations show that the tipping point hasn’t arrived.
He goes on to give three points that illustrate why he feels this is the case:
1. Fund-raising proves the primacy of the mainstream media
2. Viral videos also prove the primacy of the mainstream media
3. Elections themselves have no Internet component
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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 experience of a pregnancy before the age of 20. Limiting adolescent exposure to the sexual content on television and balancing portrayals of sex in the media with information about possible negative consequences might reduce the risk of teen pregnancy. Parents may be able to mitigate the influence of this sexual content by viewing with their children and discussing these depictions of sex. [Emphases added.]
So there is a “link” — so what? That doesn’t necessarily imply causation, which could just as easily run the other way: One could just as easily conclude that more libidinous individuals seek out sexual content. Yet such a banal statement would not get headlines. Still, I must give the authors credit with qualifying their language so much as to dilute the link’s significance.
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