From a great op-ed by Bruce Bartlett:

The fact is that a lot of people who get into politics don’t really have any ideology. They could just as easily be Democrats or Republicans, because they don’t have anything in particular they want to accomplish in terms of policy. They just like the spotlight, or the thrill of running for office or want a nice line on their resume.

When such people first decide what party to join, they are not concerned about where they would feel most at home philosophically. Rather, their only concern is which party will give them the best chance of winning. Secondarily, they are concerned about which party offers them the best opportunities for advancement once elected.

I have a piece in The Age today: “Market the massage, not media moguls“:

Radical change over the past 30 years has inundated media companies with competition. The high capital costs that encouraged the media to package objectivity are being replaced by the extraordinarily low costs of cheap printing and the internet.

As any first-year marketing student will predict, media companies, big and small, are attempting to respond to this highly competitive environment by differentiating their product from competitors.

One effective way is the careful, studied introduction of political viewpoints.

Any assessment or assertion of bias in a media organisation has to take into account this fact — more often than not, bias is an intentional technique to attract and retain an audience.

(I’m not sure what the title means, either. Presumably its a typo.)

My friend Ari Sharp has a well-argued piece on OnlineOpinion, “ABC mission creep“, which identifies a major problem for advocates of the public broadcaster:

So how did we get to the point where the ABC, the national public broadcaster, has decided that it should publish celebrity gossip as a regular feature on its website? It seems to me that we need to re_examine the reason for the existence of the ABC in order to see how the current incarnation is a long way from where it should be. In short, the ABC has undergone what military planners might call “mission creep”.

Ari argues that the ABC’s main purpose is to remedy a market failure in broadcaster: the market underprovides certain types of content, particularly news, current affairs and educational programs - content which is, coincidentally, necessary for democractic engagement.

(The contrarian in me would like to ask this: does higher quality news, current affairs and educational programs lead to higher quality democratic engagement? It strikes me that unless one spends a great deal of time independently studying specific, contentious issues they are far from what should be considered an informed voter. High quality news could, unfortunately, give people the impression that they are informed, rather than actually informing them… which is better for our ‘democracy’? A pessimistic attitude, I know, but one which I don’t think is often adequately explored. Perhaps I shall think about this more another day.)

Ari’s piece raises a few issues:

What should a public broadcaster do online? Its entirely nuts for our taxes to pay for someone to replicate Defamer. If we accept the argument that there is a market failure in broadcasting, surely we cannot extend that market failure to the internet. There is ample high quality, and low quality news, current affairs and educational material online. It seems to me that the role of the ABC on the internet is minimal.

However, there are good things that the ABC can do on the internet, and I think it is relatively succesful at doing them. For very little cost they can, for instance, migrate its content online (podcasts of radio shows). While we still have a public broadcaster we should demand that we get the best service for our money. For the small amount of effort they require, these sort of measures are desirable. Similarly, it takes little effort to utilise their news services to provide it onlin. Even though there is great competition in the online news market - the ABC competes with commerical news services which I certainly do not consider sub-par - it is a legitimate function of a publicly funded broadcaster, with its existant reporters and editors, to provide such services.

Is there a market failure in broadcasting? Where I disagree with Ari is this characterisation.

It is hard to consider television broadcasting an example of the free market in action. By the most conservative estimate, there is room for at least 2 new analog television channels across the country. If we factored in the huge swarthes of spectrum that the digital television disaster has locked up, there would be many more.

Australian governments have routinely restricted the number of broadcasters, to such an extent that Hotelling’s Law seems to govern the programming decisions of broadcasters. With only three commerical stations, niche programming is nowhere to be seen in free-to-air television in Australia. (I’m intentionally downplaying the differences between Seven, Nine and Ten - they do focus on different audiences, but, as someone whose tastes seem to be well outside those audiences, I do not think satisfactorily so.)

But markets can, and do, produce niche products. I do not think ‘market failure’ in this case is a fair characterisation of broadcasting in Australia. The government has artifically made television programming a scarcer resource than it might otherwise have been had broadcasting spectrum been subject to a standard property rights regime.

It seems to me therefore that the market failure justification of public broadcasting is not sufficient. Whether there is a market failure for desirable content as Ari argues, is a proposition that could be better tested in a liberal broadcasting environment, not merely asserted in a protectionist one. We may discover that such market failures exist. But, and I suspect this is the case, we may not. (Australian subscription television is a good - but not perfect, for reasons i won’t go into here - example of how markets can provide a variety of content.)

There is a lack of variety in broadcasting, but it is brought about by government policy, not market failure. Policy makers would be better to treat the cause of the problem, rather than treat the symptoms.

Sometimes I get fantastic things in the mail for free. The other day, for instance, I got a review copy of James Buchanan’s Why I, too, am not a conservative.

But then, on the flip side, sometimes I get things like this:

Thanks, government!

A classic ‘government to the rescue’:

Immediately upon returning from the July 4 recess, Tip O’Neill called an emergency meeting of the crime-related committee chairmen. Write me some goddamn legislation, he thundered.

Hat-tip Radley Balko

(Following from the previous post) Innovations like these would be under threat from network neutrality legislation - Application-aware networks (or XML-aware networks), which, as I understand them, would embed awareness of the nature of the data transmitted through them in order to increase speed and efficiency. While similar networks are used by industrial entities (think postal services or transportation), once a company develops something similar for consumer use, regulations which insist on an open, end-to-end network would restrict its use.

I had a short little piece in the Crikey daily email today discussing one of their correspondent’s uncritical support of network neutrality legislation, reproduced here:

Margaret Simons’ continued advocacy of network neutrality regulation for the internet is way off the mark (yesterday, item 20). This debate isn’t about internet freedom, it’s about who should control innovation – regulators, or the marketplace.

The network neutrality legislation proposed in the US would introduce a regulatory regime to prevent some content providers paying for privileged speeds or bandwidth. Such legislation is not dissimilar to banning a practice common within supermarkets – producers paying for prominent displays within stores.

The Save the Internet Coalition worry that ISPs would degrade, or even block access to the small independent blogs – none of which could likely pay for priority bandwidth. The potential for such discrimination has already alarmed consumers and legislators. Negative consumer reaction would greet any ISP that tried such an action. The fear is ISPs could grab an editorial role for the whole internet. Few ISPs would relish such an opportunity, indeed it would leave them vulnerable to being responsible for content, a matter which postal services the world over have resisted.

However, if we want higher broadband speeds and more bandwidth to provide services such as online movies and television, ISPs must be allowed the chance to charge for these services. Again this is analogous to postal services’ different mail classes.

We can’t predict how the internet will look in ten years, just as we couldn’t predict ten years ago how it looks now. Network neutrality would be the largest regulatory intervention yet into the architecture of the internet, and an attempt to fix the current pricing model in perpetuity, despite changing technology and consumer demand.

If consumers don’t want ISPs to change their pricing models, that’s fine, and ISPs that do so will be punished in the marketplace. But if consumers want innovation to freeze at 2006 levels, they should hand these decisions over to regulators, governments and populist Senators from Queensland.

Via Jason Soon, the Libertarian Purity Test. I scored 83: “You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.”

I’ll say.

Swedish Tax Authorities Outsourcing Work to Lower-Tax Countries. You have to give them credit - at least they’re trying to save money.