So says Scott Adams, creater of Dilbert and now author, in today’s WSJ.

Read the full piece here.

The New York Times isn’t the only one calling for the FTC to go after Intel for its purportedly exclusionary discounting. The reliably interventionist American Antitrust Institute concurs. In a recent letter to the FTC, it wrote…

Read the full piece here. 

This time from Paste Magazine (HT: Peter Schwartz via Wired Blog Magazine), and motivated by the Radiohead Experiment, and with an interesting twist…

Read the full piece here. 

I just wandered down to the local Panera Bread for lunch and picked up someone’s discarded copy of today’s New York Times. One of today’s editorials, F.T.C. Goes AWOL, claims that the Federal Trade Commission “clearly shares the ‘starve the regulators and coddle industry’ philosophy that has driven the Bush administration for seven years.” The evidence? The FTC’s refusal to open a formal investigation into Intel’s loyalty discounts, which are offered to computer makers that minimize the use of processors made by Intel’s rivals.

Read the full piece here. 

From the Economic Times:

The European Union’s antitrust agency is becoming more influential just as its US counterparts have grown more cautious and inactive, experts say. The European Commission’s recent success in forcing Microsoft to carry out antitrust sanctions underscores the differences, and academic researchers say the US is also hanging back in merger challenges. That makes Brussels, more than Washington, the place where companies must go to get their deal through and where companies must ready themselves against possible antitrust action. It also means competition agencies around the world look to Brussels.

“Influential” v. “cautious” and “inactive.” I get it. The implication is that EU antitrust enforcement is good and US enforcement is bad. The proof? One is allegedly more interventionist than the other. As a general matter, I do not find “more is better” arguments (see, e.g., here) causally linking agency activity to the quality of antitrust policy to be very persuasive.

Read the full piece here.

Michael Kimmelman at the NY Times. Luke Froeb beat me to the punch of this one and has already got a post up, but this is too good not to share. The article is on book sales and book culture in Germany, the latter of which is…

Read the full piece here. 

I’ve been watching the news coverage of the San Diego fires this evening hoping for any bit of good news. It hasn’t come yet (a map of the San Diego fires, evacuation centers, and some photos is available here). I was born and raised in San Diego and many family members still live there. At least one family member and several friends have been evacuated.

Read the full piece here.

Todd Zywicki recommends Kurt Eichenwald’s The Informant, the fascinating story of the prosecution of the Archer Daniels Midland lysine cartel in the 1990s, and asks whether the famous DOJ videotapes and transcripts of cartel meetings are available online.  I’m not sure if they are online, but the DOJ does make the tapes and transcripts available free of charge (or at least used to) by mailing or faxing a request to the following address…

Read the full piece here.

Abstract

Economists generally agree that free trade leads to economic growth. This proposition is supported both by theoretical models and empirical data. Further, while the empirical evidence is more limited on this question, the general consensus among economists holds that trade restrictions are likely to hurt the poor. Even if the latter consensus turns out to be wrong, if free trade leads to superior growth, governments would have more resources to redistribute to the poor. It is surprising then that philosophers and human rights scholars do not advocate liberalizing trade as a way to improve the welfare of the poor as a class. While many scholars in these fields are silent with respect to the effect of free trade on the poor, some actually argue that liberalized trade is harmful for the poor, contrary to the claims of economists. In this article, we argue that any serious scholar concerned with the plight of the poor needs to address the theory and evidence regarding the effects of trade liberalization on economic growth, suggesting that the standard policy prescriptions of the philosophers and human rights scholars are, at best, of second order concern and, at worst, likely to be counterproductive in terms of improving the welfare of the poor.