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January 8, 2011
An editorial in The Australian---The great power of Adam Smith's invisible mouse--- celebrates digital capitalism in no uncertain terms:
We live in an age where the internet provides a marketplace that is the nearest thing yet to a classical economist's utopia, the perfect market where individuals have perfect information and where there is perfect competition available with a click of a computer mouse. It is a time where new and nimble entrepreneurs can compete with, and beat, enormous organisations that have dominated markets for decades. It is an era where entrepreneurs create new uses for digital devices that their inventors did not envisage. Most important, we live in an epoch when capitalism is doing what Adam Smith understood in the 18th century it one day would: improving the lives of ordinary people by providing them with the power to buy the best products at the most competitive possible prices. One of the enduring criticisms of classical economics is that consumers have never had all the information they needed to make rational decisions -- they do now.
So why has The Australian done all it can to attack the Gillard Government for building the national broadband network infrastructure? Why oppose the infrastructure that would enable ordinary people to buy the best products at the most competitive possible prices?
Why is it silent about the News of the World's systematic phone hacking in the UK. After all News of the World is owned by News Corp. Imagine the response by Murdoch's papers if the BBC or the ABC had routinely engaged in phone hacking "persons of interest".
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Apparently the free market is good, as long as it's happening to someone else.