Milton Friedman at his Best

So long as the Democrats rule the political landscape in Congress and in the Executive branch, I’m willing to pull out my magical 8-ball to make a few predictions.

1. Obama won’t do anything for the economy. Don’t worry, we’ll hear how terrible our condition is and how we have such a long process to recovery but Obama’s policies will do very little to encourage anything remotely related to economic recovery. Economic recovery does not come from attempting to spend your way out of the doldrums. Trust me. I have a few thousand examples stacked up neatly in credit card bills that still arrive monthly. The difference is that I can’t walk away from my debt or ignore it or my credit rating suffers. Congress seems to think it has no credit rating.
2. Republicans will make a half-assed, half-hearted attempt to rally under the conservative banner only to mock it by electing more incompetant, mediocre representatives to office who are still bitter about homosexuals obtaining equal rights.
3. We’re going to gain a few civil liberties. We’re going to lose a lot more.
4. Democrats will raise taxes on the wealthy – only to realize the wealthy will only pay the same amount of tax if not less due to their incomprehensible economic policies.
5. Government will grow to new heights even leaving George W. Bush shaking his head at the size of government.
6. The war on drugs will continue to incarcerate a disproportionate number of minorities while ignoring the real costs and effects that it is leaving on our society. As long as Obama ignores the reality and complexity of the situation his presidency will degrade from historic to nothing more than the same.
7. Keynesianism will reveal its ugly head only to run into the same problems in created in the first place. You can’t spend your way out of debt. Balanced budgets don’t cut it when you have nearly 57 trillion dollars of debt piled up over the past 20 years or so.
8. A horribly neutered and irriducibly irrelevant health reform bill will make it through Congress that will be sure to make mediocre health care the standard rather than the occasional case. The only people who will be happy with it will be the insurance lobby and the medical community. A congressman will then tell us that we’re somehow better off now without ever substantiating the claim and ignoring the reality taking place right behind his back. (Think officer Brady from South Park)
9. All branches of government will continue to ignore the GAO.
10. Public schools will still be their mediocre selves.
11. Earmarks will reach a new height in dollars while the stupidity level of what Congressmen are earmarking funds for will remain the same (abyssmally high).
12. The Pentagon will pay some ludicrous sum of money for something ironic and moronic and then plead for more money to ensure they can equip our soldiers. The whole Rumsfeld painting is exempted – this was under Bush’s watch.
13. The Federal Student Loan system will teeter on the edge of failure only to be rescued by the same dolts who created it in the first place: government bureaucrats.
14. A giant corporation will collapse in a smoldering heap of failure after some stupidly arrogant crime is committed by an overpaid, well-parachuted executive. The executive will take a leap to safety on the parachute while stockholders will get bilked out of their equity. There will be plenty of fist shaking and a revision to SOX to ensure that all of those businesses who are doing honest business are punished for the crimes of a very small few.
15. Our tax system will continue to grow more complex leaving IRS employees more confused on just what money they are not entitled to.
16. The federal government will continue to pass off surplus and used military gear to local police departments who will be more than happy to deploy anti-personel armor and weapons for no-knock drug raids only to find a small amount of marijuana residue and a violently dangerous dog who was shot running away from the officers assaulting the home.
17. Police officers will continue to be held to some other standard rather than the law. The “Blue exception” to the law will prevail more often than not.
18. Paul Krugman will continue to write political pieces while completely ignoring the laws and rules of the very academic science he is known for: economics. He will violate at least 3 different economic laws or make at least 3 arguments that violate economic fallacies. To go one step further but not included in this prediction – I’ll guess he’ll violate the such staid axioms of economics like the “Broken window fallacy”, “The law of supply and demand”, and, oh, let’s say a contradiction of “opportunity costs”. The media will be quick to point out that he is a Nobel Laureate without paying attention to the fact that whatever he is commenting on directly violates one of many rules of the science of economics for which he won the Nobel.
19. A new drinking game will evolve from Obama speeches in which the rules dicate you must drink once every time Obama says “hope”; two drinks when he says “change”;  drink whole beer every time he attempts to relate to some historical situation as if today is as hard (or harder) than the past.
20. And one for the technology crew: Some new-fangled Internet service will take 10% of the population by storm. This service can do one stupid thing pretty damned well. Someone or some company will buy this other company only to realize that they have no way to monetize the damned thing and have a giant, gaping whole in their books where something like revenue or profit should be.

Now if you made it this far, you’ll realize that I think I can have most of these crossed off as accomplished in about a month or so. My larger point is that if you expect there to be some great change afoot, you’re probably more wrong than I am.

I ran across a post at one of the companies I like to keep tabs on, Cleversafe. They have an interesting product that allows you to disperse data across a network rather than just simply copying data. This gives the advantage of using far less disk space than you would use by copying data over RAID and several backups. But that isn’t my point.

There was an interesting post in their blog with some informative economic insight that you normally wouldn’t think twice about. In the post, the author notes that back in 1956, a 5MB hard disk drive cost roughly $50,000 or $10,000 per MegaByte.

With the recent announcements of 4TB hard drives on the horizon, the author reflexively does the calculations to arrive at the 1956 cost of the same disk space: $40 billion. That’s right, if you needed 4TB of storage in 1956, you would have… a $40 billion investment. Of course, that is in 1956 dollars. In today’s dollars, inflation adjusted, the grand total a 4TB size of a drive would have cost is:

$302,002,380,304

You are reading that right. If a 4TB hard drive was built in 1956 by IBM, it would have cost you roughly $302 billion in today’s dollars. So what is the lesson? It isn’t that a 4TB hard drive is really worth $302 billion dollars.

There are quite a few different lessons that can be derived from this. For many of us in technology, we tend to take progress for granted. However the technology and PC market is one where we can see how markets really work. Prices are continually driven down by innovation. Think about that – our current computers are yesterday’s “super” computers. Many “super” computers are nothing more than a chain of systems similar to what we have on the desk top now.

The real economic lesson in this story is that while a lot of people complain about the “stagnating wages” of the “middle” and “lower” classes, you can only complain insofar as you are able to ignore progress where prices are constantly driven downwards.

Reason – Nick Gillespie

One of my favorite anecdotes that exemplifies unintended consequences is one call “Bootleggers and Baptists”. Wikipedia has a decent explanation.

If you want to skip the link and get the summary it goes something like this:

It isn’t often that you find bootleggers and baptists on the same side of the fence. Consider moral laws that prevent merchants from selling booze on Sunday. Now a baptist would wish alcohol not be sold at all, and especially on the day God rests. Afterall, would you really want drunks out on the road while all of the fine church-going folk are spending time with their families?

The problem that most people miss is that the bootleggers are more than happy to sell alcohol when the churchgoers are busy praying and singing. They could charge a markup specifically because the law does not permit alcohol sales on Sundays.

If you’re not too slow, you might see the bit of the paradox arising. If someone were to challenge the law because it is absurd on its face, you end up with the bootleggers and the baptists on the same side of the voting booth. Bootleggers would end up with very little money and the baptists would lose out on forcing their moral superiority on anyone who doesn’t agree.

A bootlegger therefore has to do very little if the baptists pursue keeping alcohol sales illegal on Sunday. In fact, they will throw as much support behind the baptists as possible if they were smart.

Whodathunkit.

LA Times runs an article where David Axelrod, an Obama advisor states:

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama, said, “We have to act. Every economist from left to right agrees that we have to do something big in terms of job creation, but we want to do it in a way that will leave a lasting footprint.”

I bet I can think of at least two economists who disagree with Axelrod’s assumption. And there are a host of other economists who disagree, whether they view the Austrian tradition in a positive/negative light.

The problem here is that our new administration is posturing this as a Global Warming-type “scientific consensus” issue that has already been used and beat into the ground. I’m sure Axelrod will start backpedaling and trying to reign in the comment with something to the effect of “the best economists” or the “brightest economists” to properly qualify the statement. Unfortunately, those definitions would be at the sole discretion of Axelrod and only as qualified as Axelrod is to determine who is the best and brightest.

The problem is that we don’t turn to scientific study to determine what the future is. We infer from the data that we have in an attempt to predict, with some reasonable probability, of future events.  There is a significant difference.  Prediction carries the inherent possibility of chance – the product or outcome of the unexpected is a distinct probability.

With this in mind, an economist’s opinion is only that – the opinion of the scientist. To assume an economist can predict the future with any certainty, which Axelrod appears willing to assume through the “consensus” opinion, is nothing short of malarky. If you believe that an economist knows the future any better than a carnival fortune teller, you are sadly mistaken.

“Fair trade” appears to be a noble assembly of words. We all trade and it should be fair, right? A quote, which I can not adequately attribute to a proper author, was told to me that generally questions the premise of fairness: “Fair? to whom?”(1)

It is a simple question that presents a quagmire of logical reasoning in order to answer it. Even the definition of the word can be problematic:

According to Princeton:

free from favoritism or self-interest or bias or deception; conforming with established standards or rules

The problematic nature of the word is that when joined with the general term “trade”, it largely becomes meaningless. Trade is:

According to Princeton

the commercial exchange (buying and selling on domestic or international markets) of goods and services

First, we need to look at the general definition of “fair” and “trade” in the context of the given statement – or how it is implied and applied to arguments. First, we will analyze the word “trade”. Trade in common parlance is generally an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. Within the scope of a capitalistic system, trade is conducted in the pursuit of profit. There is an inherent level of self-interest built into the system.

When the farmer sells cotton to the mill, he does so with the expectation of gains above the costs of producing the cotton. The mill then refines the raw cotton and sells the refined product into the marketplace with a markup that is generally driven towards producing a profit. The shirt maker buys the fabric, makes his changes, adds buttons or zippers (etc.), and then puts the shirt out to a distributor. The product will eventually make its way into the hands of the consumer who will use the final product. At each step, the motivation of profit is built into the changing product.

At each step, each agent in the process acts in its own self-interest; the primary interest is survival and the secondary instinct is profit or gain on an exchange. This is important because self-interest is one of the more common components of the definition of “fair”. Much of human and animal compulsion is driven by self-interest. At some primitive level, we become motivated towards the idea of self-preservation which requires self-interest as a primary driver of action through life. Profit itself is only achieved when our self-interest is refined to such a state that it creates excesses in other areas of our lives and business. In the commercial world, profit is largely derived from our pursuits whereby it creates, most often, a monetary surplus distributed amongst the owners of a business. We then enter into a bit of a paradox in that our pursuit for profit can only truly be achieved by refining self-interest processes to such a degree that it creates more surpluses.

While it may be argued that I am creating a straw-man argument based on the dictionary definition of the word or concept of fairness, it serves as the only tangible definition of what we are working with. For the sake of argument, if we remove self-interest from the definition, we find a more palatable, but equally flawed remnant.

So we are left with a rough-shod definition composed of:

“free from favoritism or bias or deception; conforming with established standards or rules.”

Consider for a moment that trade itself is generally composed of two parties who are privy to the transaction at hand. There may be more parties involved, but with a reasonable assumption that all trade is a casual 1:1 relationship, the entire remnant of our definition of fairness is lost. When engaged in trade we make a decision to enter into a defined agreement with another party. Trade takes place after the decision of who to trade with has been decided.

It would be a mistake to retreat one step back into the decision making process to define trade as the consideration of a given transaction; consideration and choice is a process used to arrive at decisions in matters of trade.

When we look at the relationship of trade, when two parties come together, we can infer some valuable information simply by the standard in which the trade was conducted. If the cotton farmer goes to the mill and presents his harvest, the mill owner will then consider his own position and self-interest when considering the purchase of the materials. The mill owner’s consideration is to drive the price as low as possible while the farmer’s ideal action is to drive the price higher. At some point during the discussion, the farmer and the mill owner will either reach a decision to trade cotton for money respectively, or they will agree to no transaction. If there is no transaction, there is no trade. If the farmer feels he can get a better price for his cotton elsewhere, he is free to take his business elsewhere. If the mill owner believes the farmer is asking too high of a price, the mill owner can choose to trade with another party.

In some cases, either or both parties in the transaction will come away with the feeling that they “had no choice” or they were coerced into making such a decision. Maybe the farmer was the only farmer and the mill owner had to accept the price . Or maybe it was the other way around. Regardless, most people who ascribe to “fair” trade ideals view this as a zero sum game. However with a world of buyers and sellers, the marketplace is far broader than the minds of fair-traders. The assumption is that if either party has an advantage, all possible choices are none.

Our remaining definition again:

free from favoritism or bias or deception; conforming with established standards or rules.

Favoritism and bias are generally not applicable to amicable trade transactions. While favoritism and bias may play a part in the process of deciding who to trade with, it is not a part of the actual transaction taking place. Both parties reach an agreement and the trade is executed.

We’re left with a shorter definition at this point: “free from deception; conforming with established standards or rules.” The expectation in trade is that the underlying assets involved are equal. The value of the product to the buyer is the price paid to the seller. Even as a buyer getting a “good deal”, the exchange tells us the value. If I trade coconuts for peanuts, I may give 15 coconuts for 5 pounds of peanuts; thus, five pounds of peanuts is worth 15 coconuts to me. In most trade, the value of the exchange will vary from transaction to transaction establishing a value at any one given point in time.

If you were to present me with 4.5 pounds rather than the agreed amount of 5 and did so knowingly attempting to cheat me, you have committed fraud. While there is a penalty for committing fraud under the laws, such a penalty does not prohibit the action of deception from being taken. The American court system is formed around making the incomplete whole. In a dispute, disregarding any general regulation for a moment, I am capable of bringing the case to the court system to resolve the dispute if I am unable to satisfactorily reach an agreement to make my position whole. Our system of laws is a veritable mechanism for resolving disputes with a sense of neutrality. Up to this point, we have a single mechanism in trade for the resolution of issues that have come to an impasse.

We, again, venture into dangerous area when we dwell on the final part of the equation: conforming to standards and rules. The difficulty in any state where trade is a core part of the functional economy is the competitive nature of the economy itself. In the United States, the power of the government over regulation is sweeping. And it is in the regulation where the devil comes to play. With the power to dictate the rules of trade, and a government derived of many individuals with their own self-interest being put into play, we can easily see the appeal of government as a mechanism for protectionism.

Where some of a different political persuasion seek to limit or interfere in private trade through regulation, an outlet is created for those who engage in trade to come to the government seeking favors. While a business has no ability to vote, the voice of business is often vocalized by the plethora of lobbyists that inhabit the capitol. Businesses vote with the only resource that creates a general incentive for most politicians: money. While not always cash going directly into the pockets of politicians, money does find a way to rest in election funds, slush funds, special programs, padding for trips and junkets and so on.

Incentives. Humans tend to respond to incentives when they are significant enough to overcome the doubts within the conscience. When an external body, creating the standards and rules, is empowered to enforce rules that affect trade, it also creates an outlet for favoritism where the field can be tilted in any given direction depending on the political climate.

The general “tilt” of the field comes in many forms. Often they come in the form of the addition or removal of regulations over industries. Other times they manifest themselves as subsidies or increases in tax rates or tariffs. So long as the government is accessible, the field can be changed.

Until now, I have focused strictly on the definition of “fair”. Fairness to the supporter of fair trade is the implication that the traditional mechanism of trade is inherently unfair. Yet there is a caveat. The fairness of trade, to a fair-trade person, will not be directed at the two parties involved in the act of trade. Fair trade is fair only to the competitive marketplace by supporting policy and regulation that restrict two parties from trading freely. This manifests as many forms of regulation and law.

Loosely speaking, I have discussed how law can be made and swayed. We know that Congress will generally make the law unless it has been relegated to a special body (such as the FCC). If the state finds a violation, it brings the case to the judicial branch for enforcement. In most cases, the third-party involved in every transaction is neither wanted nor privy to the transaction taking place itself. It creates an external feedback mechanism that permits third parties, not involved in the transaction, the ability to interject their own terms to protect their own interests. This is just one facet of a larger economic definition of “rent-seeking”.

This gap in the economic system of trade leaves us with a distinct problem. We suddenly have to deal with two of the terms that violate the definition of “fair”. Through rent-seeking activities, it permits non-privileged parties the ability to serve their own self-interest by soliciting empowered bias or favoritism from the one source with the power to enforce its own arbitrary rules: government.

In the short run, rent-seeking can be effective and produce results sought by the rent-seeker. However, in the long run, the intended result dissipates as the rush of unintended consequences rise to replace what “should have happened”. A few of the more prescient examples of our recent economic history serve this point well:

US steel companies faced increasing pressure from foreign made steel products. In an effort to protect US steel interests, the government artificially raised the cost of imported steel. The intended effect was to buoy the steel industry and prevent the loss of jobs. The long term effects are generally far worse. Unable to trade freely, the tariffs meant to protect steel jobs in the US, developers and consumers of steel are forced to raise prices or pay higher prices, shift contracts or abandon projects altogether. While the protection of jobs is often plainly visible and easily measured in the nearest degree, the unintended consequences are more difficult to see for most of men. We can not see the general loss of work for construction workers who can no longer work on a building because the price of steel has risen too high and there is little choice in the market. We can not, with any certain specificity, measure the costs of protecting others at our expense.

To effectively protect jobs in the steel industry, we must forgo jobs and some business in the construction industry and peripheral consumer markets of the steel industry. This may take the shape of lost jobs, slowed growth, and lost contracts.

Any evidence of the social and economic costs of protectionism and “fair” trade will generally come long after historians have ascribed the time period in a positive or negative light. We see the economic difficulties in the decision process coming to bear in the automotive industry. Once the pinnacle, if there is such a thing, of American business, all American auto manufacturers have found the sharp edge of competition through past decisions that formed the industry. The unionization of workers, while of decent intentions, has far outlasted its welcome. The pressures of unionization have ensured that wages perpetually moved upwards with no regard to the nature of the market or competition. When you consider in recent reporting the non-production labor wage for GM auto workers was at or above $28 per hour, you can see labor expenses serving as a conduit of poor resource allocation. These jobs often require no specific educational requirements or notable skills aside from physical ability and, at times, dexterity.

As the auto worker’s wages have risen, it has shifted GM and similar companies out of the competitive marketplace, given that American automobiles are manufactured purely in the United States. Despite adding destination taxes on imported vehicles, it has done little to offer GM any competitive advantage in the present – costs which are generally passed on to the consumer, GM and other domestic manufacturers have shifted many production facilities to locations outside of the United States for vehicles destined for the US auto market.

It is not uncommon to find that a significant number of “U.S.” vehicles are now equally foreign as “import” models. Companies such as BMW and Toyota have found that non-union production in the United States can be equally profitable and offers them a competitive advantage. But domestic manufacturers are largely tied into labor contracts that force the very opposite effect they are designed to have: they reduce and eliminate jobs rather than increase or protect jobs.

Now it may be also argued that neither steel nor auto industries are heavily effected by so-called “fair” trade. Yet, if we ascribe to a fair trade policy in the auto industry, we would find that the fairness of the trade removes any possible competitive advantage for a business or industry to take such steps towards improvement. If a vehicle is manufactured in Mexico where the labor wage is largely unbound by American union wage rates and we apply fair-trade policy, the policy would force the wages to rise for those foreign workers above a market wage.

While this may be a blessing for the foreign worker, the consumer of the product will feel the impact as the cost of the product will need to rise to compensate for these changes in costs. Where competitive markets ensure the constant reduction in costs and prices, fair markets ensure rising prices. Where those who advocate fair trade policy seek to address both their own self-interest and the interest of those making low wages, their actions will ultimately put the very products they produce further, or proportionately, out of reach.

We must recognize that labor and the self-interest of workers and unions are often tied into a transaction where they generally have no direct interest in the result. The goal of labor is to produce products or services. The goal of the organization and shareholders is to take the products and services and ensure they are sold into the market profitably. When labor becomes overly powerful and not held in check, it seeks to reduce the profit of the owners and divert those gains towards the labor group.

This creates a significant conflict of interest within the organizational structure. The fundamental nature of business is not to employ, but rather derive profit from ideas and abilities put into motion. While labor may feel their high wages are justified, it is consequently unfair to the owners who have a vested interest in the profit of the business.

The farming industry suffers from the same problem. The domestic U.S. sugar industry is heavily subsidized in order to artificially raise the price of imported sugar to a level where domestic firms can compete. To put this in perspective, consider the fast food icons McDonalds and Burger King. Burger King, at one point, was owned by a British company. Let’s say that Burger King sells its double cheeseburger at a cost that is $.50 lower than McDonalds. Let’s say that the average cost of the double cheeseburger at McDonalds is higher than the cost at which Burger King sells theirs for. So McDonalds finds a politician willing to hear their troubles, stresses that if this type of “unfair” competition continues, it will have to let go of employees through layoffs and close unprofitable restaurants. The proposed solution is a foreign corporation food tax of $.50 per double-cheeseburger sold.

The problem is one that if McDonalds’ proposal passes, price conscious consumers who buy double cheeseburgers from Burger King may be more inclined to go to McDonalds. Rather than McDonalds competing in the marketplace, it has sought “rent” from the government. Now Burger King must comply and pay the government a tax which will raise the price of the Burger King double cheeseburger to the same price as the McDonalds burger. If Burger King fails to comply, it faces the rule of law rather than McDonalds as a competitor. In most cases, this would not be “fair” to Burger King as it both impacts their ability to compete and diminishes a type of competitive advantage in some cases.

Final Words:

The point to take home from my writing is one that should hopefully shed some light on the contradictory nature of the so-called “fair” trade argument. If we tend to lean towards a literal definition of fairness, fair trade in common parlance can never be fair when parties not-privy to a given transaction are provided the opportunity to interject their own will with the threat of force. The only “fair” trade, in true form, is free trade.

clipped from www.breitbart.com Justice Dept Approves XM-Sirius Deal WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department approved Sirius Satellite Radio’s $5 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio on Monday, saying the deal was unlikely to hurt competition or consumers. The Justice Department, in a lengthy news release explaining its decision, said the two companies compete not just with each other but also with other forms of radio and entertainment. “The likely evolution of technology in the future, including the expected introduction in the next several years of mobile broadband Internet devices, made it even more unlikely that the transaction would harm consumers in the longer term,” the Justice Department said. “Accordingly, the division has closed its investigation of the proposed merger.”

In a free land, you do not need the permission of the government in order to conduct private business.

I love the “fabulously” wealthy, rich people who earned their stripes working from the ground up to build business empires. The modern business is truly a study in the success and failure of human groups.  So it is no surprise to see some wealthy people patting themselves on the back for a job “well” done.  And it is no surprise that there are those amongst their very ranks who tend to spank themselves for the wealth they have created and/or amassed over time.

A recent article in the NY Times interviews several business executives considered to be at the “pinnacle” of wealth.  There were those who compared their gains to the efforts of the early American industrialists (Carnegie, et al.) while the authors made no effort to diminish these comparisons. The oddity that struck me is how wealthy industrialists of the modern era appear to be largely mixed in their opinions regarding the re-distribution of their wealth.  Some feel that they should be taxed more. Others feel they should be taxed less. Yet still others think the current system is just fine.

What I found odd is that Warren Buffet seems to take a conflicted stance. As many books and lore about the guy state: he’s a simple guy who likes simple things who lives a simple life – and he never gave his kids any of his money. None of Warren Buffet’s money is going to his kids – instead he’s giving it all away to the Gates Foundation. The confusing part? He feels that (from my impression of the article) we need to distribute the income after it is earned. Redistribution is essentially a forceful method of taking one’s wealth and giving it to others.   In much the same way he wouldn’t give his children any money – they had to earn it independently, why should he give it to someone else? On either hand, you’re giving your money away so what does it matter whether it is your children or others? Neither group (family or government) earned it within the marketplace.

The Baltimore Sun reports: recent fee hikes granted by a royalty review board is knee-capping the bootstrapping Internet radio industry. The recent hoopla over the royalty hikes is causing many casual participants in the marketplace to drop out. So just what are the issues involved?

The Copyright Royalty Board has removed some of the caps on royalty fees. For some broadcasters, the fee increases amount to doubling their dues to the cult of the music industry. In some cases, I can understand and side with the music industry. They are seeking to gain on their investments. But more of my mind and heart fall on the opposite side, with the radiomen.

Music and entertainment are interesting things. In the case of radio, while many stations make money off marketing breaks, or in the case of Internet radio – off of advertising links or banners, etc, radio also does a double service for the music industry. Think about it – the music industry charges you to market their product for them; radio has long been a marketing driver of new music, not the end point on the marketing tool chain.

We have our blessed government who likes to step in and manipulate the marketplace: remove “payolla” marketing dollars from broadcasters hands, regulating radio frequencies to stratospheric price levels for access to airwaves, and other pieces of legislation that is, purposefully or not, keeping people out of radio instead of removing barriers to enter the radio market.

Bands and labels with lesser muscle can not gain traction, even in niche radio, that would put them in spots next to similar and more popular, if not equally talented, artists. Traditional mainstream radio is less apt to take large risks on unknown talent – an area that has been well served by Internet radio. All of the risk falls on broadcasters with little to no risk involved by the music industry. How they think they can cannibalize this marketing channel is beyond me. It makes for stupid business; at the same time, it makes more sense to use ideas such as Creative Commons.

If people ever wonder why I think Steve Albini is a god – here is why.