
An interesting NYT Bits blog entry covers
Opera's mobile browser. Buried in the middle of the article is this quote: "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser." It also talks about Opera on the Wii and browsers in cars. A good read.
My Take: But back to the iPhone. As tempted as I am to just shrug it off, since Apple is free to run its App Store any way it pleases, as an enthusiastic iPhone user, I think Apple is shooting itself in the foot here, as it is with all the "competitive" apps being rejected. Apple does stand to lose some Google revenue by letting people use other browsers, but they have much more to gain by unleashing the creativity of the developer community and giving them the freedom to improve or replace core iPhone functionality. Hopefully competition from Android forces them to wake up.
Member since:
2006-12-28
The entirety of Book V covers the role of government, and limits its role to providing defense, justice, and public goods. It also covers tax collection and public debt. No where does it say the government should regulate industry and limit choice.
I agree with you on that and if you re-read my post you'll notice I never said that Adam Smith thought otherwise.
Again, I'm more than in agreement with you as far as the age of "Wealth of Nations" goes and that modern economics has moved on from their but that is as far as my agreement goes. Most modern economies realize that to leave a mark totally unregulated is to invite profiteering and corruption, something I think you'll find the current credit crunch does more to validate than any argument I could post here.
Your standard of living examples display an alarming amount of naivety. Hong Kong is governed by a totalitarian regime where kleptocratic oligarchs embezzle the working mans wages and the United States has bankrupted itself over the past 8 years by paying private concerns in an unregulated industry to fight a war it cannot win.
Now take for example Luxembourg, the country I'm currently living and working in. Luxembourg uses a combination of market and planned economics, mostly codified by the Cristian Socialist party (a conservative party) and whatever other party has currently enough of the house to form a coalition with. Luxembourg is weathering the credit crunch remarkably well manly due to it's heavy regulation of it most important sector, banking.
These examples are not bland statistics or theoretical situation extrapolated from obscure mathematical formulas. These are concrete, real situation that demonstrate the fallacy that none regulation is good for the economy.
American style capitalism, the replacement of the jungle with markets wrapped up in a strange form of neo-Darwinist metaphysics, has shown itself to be non sustainable and has lost so much credit over the past decade that I would venture to say it's time is over.