Saturday, 3 August 2013

Government Proposes in Effect to Put Itself in Charge of Apple Pricing

By Hunter Lewis

This is yet another illustration of  why the US economy is in such deep trouble.
A federal judge found that Apple had violated anti-trust laws in its e-book arrangements with publishers. This was actually an attempt by publishers to regain control over their e-book pricing from retailers, Amazon in particular, and  ended when publishers signed  consent decrees with the government. This should be the end of the story but instead the government now wants to appoint a monitor who will review all Apple pricing for the next ten years.
What is not generally realized is that most government economic policies amount to price interference, manipulations, and controls. No economy can thrive without an honest and unmanipulated price system, as the Soviet Union demonstrated so vividly by collapsing. Yet we are at a moment in which our government wants to control more and more prices throughout the economy, now even wanting to control a leading technology company’s prices for a decade.

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