Posted by: Chris | Sep 18, 2008 9:51:26 AM"

*chuckles* Being looted is so patriotic … lets push for more looting.

You have to admit: Inventing the price gouging ghost is no easy feat.

Often, the roots of current "market" problems lie in past regulatory solutions.

Is something similar going on in Cafe Hayek?

It's going on everywhere.

Why do you suppose that is?

Because state Capitalism differs little from state Anything Else. It's the rent seeking, stupid.

I believe the topic tonight was how John McCain is out of touch with the common people."

— Jay Leno, The Tonight Show

http://www.fff.org/whatsNew/index.asp

Why do you suppose that is?

If ordinary people cannot choose or demand good phone-card services WHEN THE MARKET IS WIDE OPEN TO COMPETITION …

Do you have evidence to suggest that it gets easier to find Waldo as Martin Handford adds more characters to the picture? If it is difficult to find Waldo in a crowd, perhaps it is harder to find a nontoxic phonecard in a crowd, too.

Did the scholastics blog about angels on pins because they were reluctant to explore whether the Black Death might challenge their theology? Is something similar going on in Cafe Hayek?

If ordinary people cannot choose or demand good phone-card services WHEN THE MARKET IS WIDE OPEN TO COMPETITION, how can they choose good political representatives?

They can't, obviously, but major shit is going down in the Big Money financial markets, and folks are naturally interested and would like to see it addressed more in this forum. I'm not suggesting that you mimic the know-nothing principles of Big Media, but under the circumstances, you might tie you posts to the problems Big Media is reporting at the moment. Tens and hundreds of billions of Treasury bucks are circulating among organizations that can't even attract capital from dollar-rich central banks, like the People's Bank of China, much less truly private capital. We want to know how you account for it, and what might be done (or not done) about it.

Of course, the honest politicians will tell us that our political system is not wide open to competition, because two established parties with a practical lock on ballot access vet the candidates. They'll tell us that this system is preferable to wide open competition for much the same reason that we need Big Brother policing phone card contracts.

Phone cards are subject to the consumer dissatisfaction described above, because the cards basically involve the extension of credit. When I buy a phone card, I'm buying service to be rendered in the future. I'm essentially extending credit to the phone card seller, so the problem with cards described above (1c per minute with a $10 connection fee) involves non-standard terms of credit that few consumers imagine without reading the fine print.

Maybe it's not "fraud" exactly, if a consumer could have read the fine print, but it offends many people's sense of propriety anyway. Does it offend yours? Is "capitalism" a game in which the cleverest architect of contractual terms, contracting with the most gullible consumers, wins?

The problem with this game is that most people don't like the rules. If some nominally "libertarian" ideology forcibly prohibits only force and fraud (ignoring the obvious contradiction), what does "fraud" mean exactly? It's a fair question, and it bears on terms of credit under scrutiny now, like ballooning payments on ARMs with "low introductory rates" on houses with prices inflated by all the credit extended this way.

No — I blogged about the trustworthiness of politicians, the officials that so many folks are now looking to for 'answers' and 'solutions.'

If ordinary people cannot choose or demand good phone-card services WHEN THE MARKET IS WIDE OPEN TO COMPETITION, how can they choose good political reprsentatives?

Phone cards have become a means of laundering money. You buy a $100 card, call the number in to a casino, and get credit. That's it. The contract on those cards reads that all funds are forfeited on the first call — even though they give great rates, such as 1c a minute with a $10 connection fee — which is great if you want to stay on the phone for 150 hours. The fact that some idiot buys this card without understanding the agreement shouldn't reflect on the guy who never intended to have to honor the contract because no idiot would ever buy it. Clear?

Don has been in fine form lately.