A friend told me about this opinion piece on the NYTimes.

THE NEW YORK TIMES. Yes I said the New York Times. Liberas are so screwed even the New York Times is bailing

Apparently there was race between a Model T and a Hummer.

In other words, a quick way to see where free markets have been able to make light cheap for all.

Recently Darwin rebuffed a post talking about the lack of need for states to regulate corporations because non state entities are quite capable of doing it by themselves.

And remember when Corporate Accountability International broke up the AT&T monopoly in the 70s? That really proved how we don’t need government interfering with the market.

Your argument is that only the state can break up monopolies, which I will grant, can be harmful to markets, however I question the idea that monopolies can form in free markets.

The second you said AT&T I knew it was over. A cursory glance at it’s history yields several examples in which the state played a critical role in giving AT&T a monopoly. Hell at one point the telephone industry was nationalized with AT&T in charge.

However, the instance that I found most interesting was when state and local governments started granting AT&T monopolies over their regions to avoid redundancy infrastructure and costly competition (an oxymoron if ever I have heard one). Ostensibly this was done to reduce the cost of phone service in poor rural areas by reducing the amount of infrastructure needed by competing companies.

Hence, your example demonstrating the need for state intervention reveals that it was in fact the state that enabled AT&T’s monopoly. But the whip cream on top of this tasty milkshake of irony is that the state argued that granting monopolistic control to AT&T would help the poor by reducing the cost for developing the infrastructure needed for phone service in rural areas. This is precisely the rationale you uses on many occasions for regulating free markets.

These kinds of arguments always remind of one of our fundamental distinctions. You argue that one should distrust companies more than government while I argue the opposite. Governments have a monopoly on coercion, companies are incapable of coercion, unless, government wields it monopolistic power on behalf of that company. Bizarrely, in cases where this happens you don’t aim your sights on the bureaucrats and politicians that enable the company’s coercion, but rather criticize the companies implement for gaining governmental preference: the lobbyist. In your completely misplaced zeal to silence the lobbyists you happily give up first amendment rights which consolidates ever more power to the state.

Such strange argumentation is very common amongst liberals who are woefully ignorant of state power, and basic economics. You seem to fall very comfortably into this category.

Via Instapundit, a link to a post about how the press is covering a shooting in Philadelphia. The author notes that many of the news sources mention the shooter was a felon much further in their articles than that the homicides were committed over a bet.

The idea here is that the reporters, intentionally or not, are highlighting the senseless nature of the homicide before indicating that the senseless act was caused by someone that was already forbidden to possess the gun needed to commit the act.

I find this kind of argumentation compelling. Left leaning bias is not explicit. Professional journalists are good enough to realize a set of indisputable facts must be reported. In fact most news sources do a good job of this (excluding the war), including Fox News. The bias becomes more apparent as the reporting requires more and more editorial input. For example, how does one arrange the facts in a story? In this case, most news sources put the disputed fact of what started this fight closer to the front then the fact that the perpetrator was a felon.

Like all news sources Fox News makes these kinds of editorial decisions. Unlike other news sources, Fox news is excoriated for its biased editorial decisions. Some on the left don’t realize that there is editorial slack on how a story is reported. They are accustomed to the typical left narrative and assume any deviation from that narrative is untrue. This is quite common from left leaning naïve readers that have never bothered to think about the editorial decision of reporting a story because they implicitly agree with the way the story is covered. Readers leaning right are much more aware since they have been frustrated for years with the dearth of editorial news coverage in accordance with their bias.

Hence the countless liberals I have ran into shocked to discover MSM has a bias.

Apparently a small portion of those that have been released from Gitmo have turned up in Afghanistan fighting our forces there. Im sure you guys have already heard about this. It’s been covered almost as much as the illegality of Gitmo.

As a news source hoping to convey neutrality you would have a vested interest in covering this story. It precisely the evidence supporters of Gitmo would use to show that detaining non-citizens helps prevent the death of ours and our allies soldiers and citizens.

Apparently a robber entered the residence of a 91 year old man and beat him unconscious with a soda can. When the old man regained conscious he got his gun and shot the robber in the throat. If supporters of gun control had their way this would not of been an option, but at least gun control would stop illegal gun usage.

The funniest part:

When police arrived, officers said Williams told them, “I can’t feel my legs and I got what I deserved.”

He is taking responsibility for his actions! Ha, he has more integrity then your typical liberal.

Link here:

A Qatar sheikh held up a British Airways flight at Milan’s Linate airport for nearly three hours after discovering three of his female relatives had been seated next to men they did not know.

The value of one person, in this case the sheikh, were superseded by the cultural values of the other travelers. Values of different cultures will inevitably lead to conflict which must be resolved. The aggregation of resolving these conflict will very clearly begin to show preference for one culture’s values over another one’s.

So you mean getting corporation to admit when they are being less than honest doesn’t require the federal government. Other private companies can put pressure on these companies to come clear? Well you don’t say.

A group called Corporate Accountability International has been pressuring bottled water sellers to curb what it calls misleading marketing practices.

Aquafina is the single biggest bottled water brand, and its bottles are now labeled “P.W.S.” The new labels will spell out “public water source.”

“If this helps clarify the fact that the water originates from public sources, then it’s a reasonable thing to do,” PepsiCo (nyse: PEP - news - people ) spokeswoman Michelle Naughton said Friday.

But I was told that only way to protect against mean evil corporations hell bent on profits was to constantly increase the size and power of the federal government. Could that so called wisdom be wrong?

Clicked on a link to a CNN article and read the first paragraph and half and stopped. It was obviously bullshit. Here’s how I knew.

The fight between U.S.-led forces and militants in and near Baghdad and the sectarian civil war raging in the capital has overshadowed another grim wartime reality — the factional strife in Iraq’s southern Shiite heartland.

The use of the expression ’sectarian civil war’ can not be found by any pro war media sources I have read. This includes Michael Yon who claimed well before any left leaning news sources that Iraq was heading towards civil war back in 2005. He reports a reversal these days in large part due to the surge. Another good source for actual, if not sobering news on Iraq is the site Iraq Slogger.

The next paragraph states

Experts who study the region attribute the instability to turf battles

I stopped reading there. This is a front page article whose second paragraph begins with some ‘experts’ opinion. Supposedly news covers facts and when it has commentary it marks it clearly as such. Even Fox news understands this basic journalistic principle. This article has failed to do so. This is precisely why I devalue the use of experts so strongly. For any political, scientific, legal, or personal matter an expert can be found to substantiate your claims. Given that the first paragraph tells me the author of this article already has determined a fictional narrative for Iraq, I know that this hand picked ‘expert’ is going to substantiate the author’s fantastical Iraq. Nothing in the first paragraph and a half indicates that an attempt solid journalism has been done. It’s only a thinly veiled attempt at passing a writers opinion as ‘news’.

Oh MSM how you lean to the left. It’s just so sad.