"When legislators control buying and selling, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
- "Real wages for most Americans haven't increased in 40 years": This just so happens to coincide with the Grunch of Giants (here's the kids' version of the same/similar set of concepts)
- "The 2008 financial crisis showed the inherent instability of the current system": Gambling With Other People's Money
- "Modern economies are increasingly based around information. Information "wants to be free"—as the saying goes—but free things are bad for capitalism, because capitalism is about competition and making profits": Flawed, reductionist comparison. See Zero to One
- "Information goods aren't like physical goods. Intrinsically, a computer program is different from a car. Building each new BMW is as hard as the one before": Only partially true. Economies of scale are a thing. Software (information) is the ultimate conclusion of this, because the marginal cost is effectively zero
- "But maintaining the idea that what they're selling is valuable requires a certain inventiveness": Yes, this is called creating value, and is the real key to free-market capitalism
- "They need to appeal to intellectual property principles [...] [t]hey need to maintain monopolies": Not really; you could rip off Facebook 100% and still not have Facebook. Execution and network effects beat artificial protectionism.
- "None of these things are intrinsic to the main capitalistic exchange because the old law of supply and demand has broken down": Are you even listening to yourself? The scarcity is in the access to the data, not the data itself. Forms of creating value that follow this pattern have existed since long before the internet.
- "Up to now, governments and businesses have said that market mechanisms are the best way to deal with global warming. But all evidence suggests that they're wrong.": Report Shows The Oil Industry Benefits From $5.3 Trillion in Subsidies Annually... same with auto subsidies (not to mention roads, which we pay for by default but don't see or feel the cost of)... collectively we've been subsidising hundred-year-old transportation infrastructure already. If not for that, alternative transportation and energy would have been competitive decades ago, or longer.
- "In Mason's economy, we would 'privilege the free Wi-Fi network in the mountain village over the rights of the telecoms monopoly.'": Municipal regulations prevent broadband competition. There's another article I'm trying to find related to this, which talks about an innovative startup working to provide affordable high-speed broadband to remote areas, and how they got shut down by their local BigCo ISP on the basis of municipal regulations.
- "A basic income is a way to spread the rewards of work across socially useful activities": Socially useful activities like what? The central thesis of free-market capitalism is that there's no end to human creativity and the ways it can be harnessed to help others.
Basically anytime someone uses the word 'monopoly', especially in this article, think government intervention.