Angina Monologue 16

His Majesty was somewhat put out this morning.

I mean more than usual.

It has been His Majesty’s habit to arise early and begin breakfast at 6:30 AM sharp, with his bowl of porridge and the local newspaper in front of him. He is fond of the headlines, especially when dolorous, and of the comics, especially Zits, and of snarking at Abigail Van Buren’s often clueless advice. He has little use for the sports or business pages.

However, our old carrier got fired last week. The new carrier does not get the paper to us until after 7:00, and this puts His Majesty out. It also does not help that the new carrier apparently tagged the mailboxes of all the houses on our street that get the paper with yellow enamel paint, to remind himself which houses to deliver to.

Incredible. Just incredible. It wasn’t even washable paint, such as a child might use for harmlessly marking a sidewalk. It was fluorescent enamel paint.

I am not making this up. Yes, I find it incredible, too.

This is what I call the West Tatooine School of Customer Service. You see it whenever a market is not truly competitive. Out in the Jundland Wastes, you were lucky to find a droid service technician at all, let alone several to offer competing bids for your service contract. In fact, you couldn’t get a service contract. When your droid started acting erratically, running in circles or spouting delusions about being on a secret mission for a rebel princess, you had to call the local droid tech on an incidental basis. He’d show up if and when it pleased him, charge just a little less than it was worth for you to replace the droid entirely, and do just enough to get the droid more or less behaving normally, for the moment. And this assumed you even got through to him; he felt no obligation to answer his commlink or to return messages. And he invariably demanded cash, not Republican credits, in payment for services rendered.

But you put up with it, because he was the only droid service tech within two hundred kilometers of Anchorhead.

Just so, Lord Vader. It’s the same here. There is only one major morning paper within three hundred miles. Compounding the problem is that this newspaper recently contracted with the only major evening paper within one hundred miles to take over their delivery service. It’s why our old deliverer got fired; the evening paper wasn’t interested in picking her up. It is instructive that one newspaper would contract with another, theoretically competing, newspaper to do delivery.

But the evening paper doing the delivery is a more partisan paper with a smaller readership than the morning paper. And evening and morning papers are not in direct competition, given that most people only care to read one major newspaper a day and have a preferred time of day to do so. His Majesty likes to read a major paper in the morning; he then likes to skim the local paper in the evening. This is not an uncommon pattern.

You’re either missing my point or loudly anticipating it, Lord Vader.

Both papers are run by the same large newspaper conglomerate, which extends its tendrils into several states. There’s no real competition going on. Hence, there is reduced incentive to hire capable minions, and you end up with newspaper deliverers who are late and who think nothing of spray painting your mailbox for their convenience.

And when you have that attitude, it’s going to extend to every other area of your operation as well. For example, you’re not going to incur the expense of being really certain your stories are right. Especially when getting them politically correct is so much cheaper, given that little investigative reporting is required to know what the story should be.

It’s not like this is anything new. Toqueville pointed this almost two centuries ago, writing that American papers were astonishingly unreliable and politically biased. He noted now dangerous this would be in a country with freedom of the press, were it not that there were so many papers with conflicting opinions that they canceled out each other’s flaws. To Toqueville, this was was actually an argument in favor of a free press.

And how’s that worked out for modern America?

I suppose Toqueville would rejoice at Fox News. Not the network itself, which is “astonishingly unreliable and politically biased”, to borrow your apt paraphrase. Just at the fact that it is astonishingly unreliable and politically biased in a different way from all the other networks. Of course, the challenge posed by Fox has led to ludicrous claims for the comparative reliability of the liberal media and even to calls for government censorship of Fox.

Fox certainly deserves to be shut down. However, it deserves it no more than NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN; and considerably less than MSNBC.

Then where will we get our news?

The Internet, of course. Granted, the Internet news media are still pretty shoddy, but you expect this when a disruptive innovation first starts taking hold. Drudge runs a pretty crummy operation, mostly consisting of an aggregate of links, but all disruptive innovations eat away at the bottom of a market rather than challenging it at the high end. This is what distinguishes them from sustaining innovations, which solidify the high end.

The ugly truth that no Republican will admit is that not all markets are competitive. The ugly truth that no Democrat will admit is that competitive markets are almost always better than the alternative, and the government is the single greatest hindrance to their development.

The government itself is the prime example of a noncompetitive enterprise. Your American founders understood this and tried to restrict the government to dealing only with natural monopolies. They even tried to break the monopoly on government monopoly, by instituting a federal structure that left the states considerable autonomy while ensuring that they would be required to compete with each other for the best citizens.

Hence, the requirement that anyone born in the U.S. was entitled to be a citizen of whatever state me moved into. Unless, of course, he was a black slave or a woman or an Indian. The requirement to deny citizenship to fugitive slaves ultimately led to some slight unpleasantness around 1860-1865, proving that slavery was the original sin the United States will never shake off. There’s a lot I could say about that.

But just then our morning paper finally arrived. His Majesty was soon mumbling over the headlines as he mumbled his oats.

I’m not sure His Majesty nailed it with his comment about Republican and Democratic beliefs about markets. It seems to me that Republicans actually agree with Democrats that not all markets are competitive. The difference is that Republicans want to make as many markets competitive as possible and Democrats want to make as few markets competitive as possible.

It reminds me a little of what His Majesty said a couple of days ago about the perils of uninformed voters. The Democrats represent a long populist thread in American politics that wants to lower the requirements for voting until everyone qualifies to vote. The Republicans represent a long republican thread in American politics that wants to inculcate civic virtue until everyone qualifies to vote. From that perspective, the names of the parties finally make sense to me.