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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (38022)8/15/1999 11:11:00 AM
From: T L Comiskey  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 152472
 
All.....QCOM has the banner ad on ABC NEWS .Com..technology section......this Sun. A.M........The ..." Go brain go" thing.....also ..interesting article about an inexpensive , asprin sized computing device intended for internet acess.......tim



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (38022)8/15/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: John Biddle  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 152472
 
Alan Green$pan and Mr Rubin don't have competition in the USA.

Hey Maurice, glad to see you over here where because of Ramsey I probably should have posted in the first place.

About Greenspan & Rubin I said nearly the same thing to Art in a PM, i.e., that even if one believed that they were doing a good job, how does one know, there were no alternatives. Maybe someone else would have done significantly better. The US economy might look pretty good, but look what we did to so many small economies by backing the philosophies of the World Bank.

I believe that Art's belief in regulation is in part colored by his inability (and of course everyone else's, mine included) to look at what happened in the past without the knowledge of what happened between then and now. You just can't forget. Saying that a regulator would have known that CDMA was the right thing and caused everyone to use it is preposterous, given where CDMA was compared to GSM at the time.

Where the kind of regulation Art wants fails compared to the marketplace is that no matter how good the regulator, they will make choices which will subsequently limit the market in ways few if any can see at the time. Once GSM is picked, CDMA becomes impossible. Or if CDMA is picked OFDM is dead and so is the pulse technology of Time Domain. These technologies may turn out to be duds, but sooner or later something will be invented that is an improvement over CDMA (I hope Q does it, but it's not likely).

I want everyone to have the right to invest their own money as they see fit, and to be able to reap the full rewards of their successes when they have them and bear the full consequences of their failures when they occur. In a free market system many ideas will be tried, some of which will die and continue to add fuel to the "capitalism is so inefficient" fire. However, in market economies the better choices tend to win and with far fewer limits on innovation the best sets of ideas will move all of us forward.

From a pragmatic perspective I believe this approach gives us all better advances than a regulated approach, but a more serious benefit is that the market approach is aligned with individual liberty, and the regulatory approach, irrespective of its quality or effectiveness, is not.



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (38022)8/15/1999 6:21:00 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 152472
 
Maurice, I don't want to overload the thread or get too far off the main subject, but briefly, regulators in the U.S. are SUPPOSED to be independent (by law). The fact that many times they aren't simply speaks to the dysfunctional side of regulation. If you regularly read journals such as The Economist, you will find that they recognize the value of independent regulators. They have often commented that the U.S. with its Federal Reserve, comes closest to an independently managed central bank (independent of political influence), and that, in The Economist's view, is a major reason why inflation in the U.S. remains low, particularly in comparison with other countries whose central banks are tied more closely to political parties.

As for my initial argument, the only thing I can say is that, while unpopular, a few more economists are beginning to express similar views.