OpenMarket: Business and Government

Despite prominent headlines to the contrary, the world is not actually falling apart. As our friends at places like Human Progress tirelessly work to remind us, global trends on everything from war and famine to longevity and literacy are looking good.

Not too long ago, I pointed out that antitrust regulation is often gamed by special interests and rent-seekers. A recent story in The Wall Street Journal gives a fresh example. A group called the Free and Fair Markets Initiative (FFMI) has been advocating for antitrust actions against Amazon. Unsurprisingly, some of its funders are Amazon’s competitors.

In a new video for the PolicyEd channel, economist Russ Roberts takes on the popular—though misleading—narrative that ordinary working Americans haven’t made any real economic progress in the last generation or so.

This week, The Wall Street Journal published an exclusive story detailing how Amazon uses its algorithms to prioritize its brands and products that are more profitable for the company. Amid the flurry of antitrust scrutiny and investigations into big tech, this seems like a big deal. Yet outside of big tech, prioritizing your own products and the products that make you the most money is called the basics of staying in business.

Over the last three months, the news has been filled with stories of people falling ill from a mystery lung ailment supposedly caused by vaping. The majority of the coverage has been incomplete, inaccurate, and done little more than scare and confuse the public. Anti-vaping activists and certain public health agencies that have long wished to ban e-cigarettes have skillfully exploited this confusion to convince people the outbreak is a manifestation of the health threat posed by e-cigarettes, of which they have long warned.

There are a lot of useful conferences, meetings, and conventions that fill our calendars, and one that we're especially looking forward to this year is the Policy Circle’s 4th Annual Leadership Summit in Chicago. The Policy Circle is a non-profit organization committed to advancing women’s leadership through expanding knowledge of public policy, and they've got some excellent speakers lined up.

Cartels need government support because they contain the seeds of their own destruction. Self-interested companies acting selfishly naturally undo their own cartels.

In The Wall Street Journal today, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is spearheading a multistate antitrust investigation into Google, made an egregious error.

The Export-Import Bank is up for reauthorization by September 30. It should be shut down, as I’ve pointed out before, but reauthorization will almost certainly pass. Ex-Im was either shut down or sharply limited for nearly five years, from October 2014 until May of this year.

Gene editing, specifically somatic gene therapy, cures maladies with traceable genetic origins. This revolutionary science is rapidly advancing, but not without major setbacks. Regulations designed to protect patients from dangerous applications of gene editing, both real and imaginary, are increasing the cost, slowing development, and preventing life-saving research.