I have a piece in the AFR today on the media legislation, available on the IPA website: ‘Only the market can properly reshape the media‘

Also, a short, smart-arsey letter in The Australian:

YOUR editorial “Poor digital vision” (14/9), which states that protections granted to free-to-air television networks are unrivalled elsewhere in the economy, is inaccurate.

Pharmacies, wheat exporters and international airline carriers, to name the most obvious, all benefit from unjustifiable legislative protections which punish Australian consumers and taxpayers. If we were to defend the Government’s protectionism in digital television, at least we could say that they were being consistent.

Link via BoingBoing.

Back from Amsterdam, and, having been allowed to bring my own books on the plane, I’ve managed to chew through a few of them.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson is a fascinating read, and does a fantastic job at outlining the cultural and legal impediments to the introduction of the shipping container - not a strictly new invention, as Levinson notes, and neither one made possible by any technological development, but instead an innovation utilising existing technology.

The benefits of the container are obvious now, but during its introduciton it was surrounded by folly from all established players in the transport industry - US regulators, dockworkers unions, existing shippers, port operators, and traditional port cities - the list is extensive.

Two by Richard Dawkins - His recent essay collection A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love and his classic The Selfish Gene. Evolutionary biology is certainly not within my comfort zone, so The Selfish Gene was an enlightening read. In A Devil’s Chaplain, he expands outside the narrow confines of a single thesis to deal with ethics, humanism and religion.

This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983 by K.S. Inglis, re-released to accompany his new history of the ABC from 1983 to today. A rigorous institutional history, Inglis’s research is high quality, but his non-judgemental style does slow down the pace of this extremely comprehensive book. The tone is set early on, where he dispassionately describes the early Australian regulatory experiments with broadcast radio, an embarrasingly bad example of government failure, without passing any judgments.

While more authors would be better off with less editorialising, a certain degree of opinion should be allowed to penetrate even the most objective history. In stark contrast, I’m now reading Murray Rothbard’s Economic thought before Adam Smith, which, while also extremely comprehensive, maintains a fast pace due to Rothbard’s continous commentary on methodology and historigraphy, and clear purpose. Inglis’ book seems content merely to list events in a sequential order - and, perhaps appropriately for its status as a semi-official history, is more usefully viewed as a primary rather than secondary source. Interpretation of the history of the ABC has to come later. (The book was written in 1983, and that interpretation certainly came.)

Anyway, it makes for good research material, poor entertainment.

The final book I read was the short The Wars of the Roses by A. J. Pollard, which provides a good overview of this complicated era. Pollard’s thesis is clear - there were two clear periods in the Wars of the Roses, and he forges a midway between the older view that the Wars were the most bloody period in English history, and the 20th century revisionist view that they cannot usefully be called ‘wars’ at all.