This article by Henry Ergas in the Business Age states my argument on Telstra better than I ever could: Irrational to invest in expansion.

He makes a strong case arguing that the backward regulatory regime will probably, years down the track, mean that the company has to be stealthily renationalised in order to invest in new networks, and even maintain the old ones.

A really unsexy version of 88 lines about 44 women: James Gattuso looks at the telecommunications reform legislation proposed in the US House, and finds 82 regulations in 77 pages. Many individual ones may sound trivial - for instance,

68) VoIP providers required to provide information to telephone directory publishers,

but, the cumulative effect shows just how large a regulatory burden the sector faces. This is modern ‘deregulation’, in a country that has a political culture of business-government seperation.

Now can’t you wait to see what Australia’s definition of ‘privatisation’ is?

Pirates, a sadly underutilised subject for drawing:

I haven’t done a huge amount of drawing or painting recently, but previous images are available here. (Or just click ‘art’ on the sidebar.) The plan is to have an exhibition sometime late next year in the city, considering that I now have well over 100 digital illustrations (in various stages of completion) and about a dozen new canvasses. But, as some of you may know, my last exhibition basically bankrupted me. And the financial punishment of the next exhibition is likely to put the last to shame - the cost of professionally printing the digital art - in series’ of 10,20+, no less - will be awe inspiring to behold.

More we pay for this:

The Government’s 2004 election commitments provided more than $20 million funding for tourism projects in regional Australia. Projects funded over the budget period will include: Kimberley Cultural Tourism Promotion, Cairns Esplanade – Stage 3, The Great Green Way, Trail of the Tin Dragon, Restoration of Willow Court Barracks, the Woodend Bike Trail and the Caravan Safari Trail Project.

If ‘Trail of the Tin Dragon’ is half as dramatic as it sounds, then I’m willing to concede that it probably is a good investment. (From Tourism Budget Facts PDF)

This piece “There’s No Free Market At America’s Airports” (thanks Drink Tank) argues, amongst other things:

The only time the airline industry had a degree of stability and profitability was during the years it was run by the Civil Aeronautics Board, the government agency that set ticket prices and assigned routes to airlines. The C.A.B. was stodgy—it failed to run the industry so that people of moderate means could afford to fly, and it generally lacked imagination, flexibility and even a hint of daring—so it was pulled down in the late 1970’s by people screaming that the free market could do it better.

In some ways, they were right: The market did do it better than the C.A.B., but you can’t really, really, really have a free market in an industry dependent on the government. And so, in the end, unrestricted free-marketism will kill the industry for lack of investors, chaos, customer cruelty and skies dyed crimson from the red ink.

Dropping subsidies out of an industry that is so heavily subsidised would certainly decimate it, as their business models would be based on the current combination of regulations and subsidies that the government offers/enforces. In these situations the benefits are clear - if done properly, whatever replaced the old order would be more efficient, competitive, etc. etc.

So should we advocate and encourage reforms with such enormous transaction costs? My argument about Telstra raises the same issue - if enacted, the industry would be devasted, but what erose out of that devastation would be immeasurably better.

Policy perscriptions like these are probably not that useful for a government which would be too afraid of the numbers of temporarily unemployed workers who could point to the radical reform and cry ‘the government threw away my job!’. But that doesn’t mean they are useless. By illustrating the benefits of pro-market reforms in one sector, these arguments help bolster the argument that market processes are viable in all sectors of the economy.

And you can only hope that a government comes along occasionally who is prepared to do the big, thankless reforms.

I’m not really a ‘damn the man’ sort of guy - as it is probably possible to surmise from this blog - but Mike Doughty’s “Busting up a Starbucks” (from the album Haughty Melodic) sure makes it sound fun.

Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution by Ronald Bailey

I make a great deal of fuss in my work and on this blog on the value of technological progress and innovation, but, as inventions go, things like VoIP are rather mundane compared to the developments Ron Bailey details in Liberation Biology.

Bailey approaches the biggest questions in biology and medicine from an enthusiastic, innovation-embracing, libertarian perspective - stem-cell research, anti-aging, gene therapy, designer babies, and mind-enhancing therapies. He details the latest research, and then the critiques of the ‘bioconservatives’ - a coalition of traditional left and right intellectuals which oppose almost all of the benedfits that biotech developments can provide.

Most of the book is about medical biotech, but the chapter on GM food is extremely strong.

Books I have recently obtained:

The Latham Diaries. No, I’m not going to review it - anybody who can read has probably read too much already. But, being a guy who works in the political arena, I’m going to read it for the gossip, naturally. I have some throughts on what it all means for political governance, but that’ll have to wait until I at least read past the first page, in a naive attempt to do some ‘research’. Check out Ari for some underreported diary entries.

From Hipsters to Gonzo: How New Journalism rewrote the world. Another one published here in Melbourne. I will probably review this for the December issue of the IPA Review.

I’m looking forward to this being published: The Mitrokhin Archive Vol II: The KGB and the world. As an avid reader of volume 1, this is a real score, although my knowledge of Cold War history in the ‘rest of the world’ is much more vague. But we read to learn, don’t we?

I also recently ordered a massive truckload of books from Amazon, largely because I was struck the other evening by a lack of desire to read anything I already had on my bookshelf. Naturally, I overcompensated.

The more I read about Google Print (link goes to PDF analysis of copyright issues), the more I fear it.

1. I’m going to spend so much more money on books, particularily old scholarly ones.
2. I won’t be able to get the really good ones - they will be too far out of print, and I will expend a lot of energy trying to find them.

All in all, this is going to cost me dearly.

Also - will this drive quotation books out of the market? I’m sure that there are fewer quotation books sold now that the best most popular quotes are available on Google already, but when you upload all of them…