market

People respond to incentives. This is the case regardless of how the politico-economic system in which we live and work is structured.

Episode #79 of the In The Tank Podcast is a best-of edition. Today’s podcast features work from the Mackinac Center, the Tax Foundation, and the Cato Institute.

Congratulations to Google on Pokemon Go. Google’s parent company Alphabet incubated and spun out this latest highly successful data-collection-device – for sale to advertisers everywhere.

As more evidence comes to light exposing Google’s much increased search and Android dominance in the U.S. since the FTC closed its search and Android antitrust probes in January 2013, it only becomes clearer that the FCC’s AllVid proposed rulemaking to “Unlock the [set-top] Box” is obviously anticompetitive overall, not pro-competitive as the FCC naively claims.

The United States has lapsed into aristocracy, the New Class — the politically connected “enemies of promise” — standing in the way of the free market reforms that could make America the home of social mobility once again. This is among the central theses of a thought-provoking and inspiring new book from George Mason University law professor F.H. Buckley, whose The Way Back challenges us, perhaps audaciously, to pursue socialist ends through capitalist means.

How affordable is the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare? One just needs to look at the state of Minnesota. The state’s health insurance marketplace illustrates some of the many pitfalls of the Affordable Care Act, which has been especially hard on millennials.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Charles Steele, the Herman and Suzanne Dettwiler Chair in Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan, joins Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News H. Sterling Burnett. Steele joins Burnett to talk about research he conducted showing the benefits of increased natural gas supplies to the farm economy.

And that, in a nutshell, is the lion’s share of Google’s business model. And business – is booming. Google is worth a net $350 billion. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Denmark – is $342 billion.

Supporters of education reform who advocate for government-funded choice mechanisms, such as vouchers, tend to argue the problems in K–12 schools in the United States are primarily economic matters, not pedagogical. This view is validated by much data, but the concept ought to be extended further to say the economic marketplace in which K–12 education operates needs more than vouchers to become as efficient as it needs to be to deliver a quality education to each and every child.

In the next several weeks, expect the EC’s Competition Directorate to decide that Google is in fact dominant with >90% share of Internet search in Europe and that Google has abused its search dominance by biasing its own Shopping service over competitors. It also could formally charge Google for abuse of its search dominance in contractually tying Google Search and other search-driven apps like Maps, YouTube, etc. to Android to extend its search dominance to mobile search and to the operating system market where Android now owns >80% share.

Environmentalists like a good crisis. Spreading fear is a proven fundraising technique—with manmade climate change as the fear du jour. But, back in 2005, the “looming crisis,” according to the Kansas Sierra Club, was the end of cheap oil. The post concludes: “The end of cheap oil, followed by the end of cheap natural gas, threatens to cripple strong economies and devastate weak ones.” The author posits: “The world burns oil faster than new oil is discovered.”

If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government.

Personal choice and freedom of association are two fundamental and essential principles of any truly free society, and this includes a free market workplace. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is spending taxpayer dollars to undermine those principles in other countries around the world.