John VanSickle wrote:

> Distribution of IP now involves considerably less work than before.  A 
> few mouse clicks and key presses, and it's done.  The record companies 
> are less necessary than before, in a free market they must find another 
> service to provide in order to survive.

Web hosting?

You *can* host a website from a laptop in your house, connected to the 
Internet via ADSL. I've done it. But it works *really* badly...

> A continuing theme throughout the lecture is how vested interests, when 
> faced with a situation in which their current contribution was no longer 
> wanted by the free market, sought to make the market less free.  Where 
> they did not petition the legislatures to outlaw the new technology 
> outright, they lobbied to require that a new service be packaged with 
> the new technology, with the lobbyist's patron being granted a legal 
> monopoly on providing that service.
> 
> He didn't make the point as directly as I would have liked, but it is 
> pretty clear throughout that a free market, in spite of all the flaws 
> that some claim to see in it, is the best means to reduce the costs and 
> increase the availability and quality of consumer goods and services for 
> the people in general.  Every economic system has, in comparison to 
> others, winners and losers; but the free market, in the full scope of 
> thing has the most winners and the fewest losers.

Yeah, pretty much.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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