Peter's Blog

Although patent law is supported by many different factions as necessary to incentivize innovation, they are actually slowing down the rate of American innovation and damaging our competitiveness with China. It is right for companies to profit from the ideas that they came up with, but the cost of government-created monopoly makes our current patent […]

Regulation is routinely sold to the public as consumer protection, but its actual effect is to shield incumbent firms from competition by controlling who may enter a market and how they may operate. The airline industry illustrates this dynamic well, where a state-organized cartel produces the illusion of competing brands while regulatory minimums quietly become […]

China’s economic rise in recent decades has been nothing short of remarkable. Many attribute this success to the country’s ambitious industrial policy, which involves central planning and heavy government intervention in the economy. However, a closer look reveals that this approach leads to inefficiency and distortions that ultimately undermine economic progress. The following article was […]

Most Americans are familiar with the frustrations of air travel, including high fares and limited options. Those less versed in the history of airline regulation may not realize that this oligopoly was built with government help from the very beginning, and that antitrust crusaders who claim to fight Big Business often end up strengthening the […]

Most Americans understand the visible harm that excessive regulation causes – higher costs and fewer choices in the marketplace. Those less familiar with Austrian economic theory may not appreciate that government regulations also actively create monopolies by shielding politically connected industries from the competitive pressures that drive innovation and spread knowledge. The following article was […]

The FTC was founded on the premise that collusion can be sustained indefinitely, and only regulation can destabilize it. This hypothesis has been questioned many times and in many different ways, but in the last six years, the FTC has had an unusual amount of utilization, primarily spurred by political motivations. Even the FTC acknowledges […]

Everyone knows that discrimination is wrong. Of course, everyone in that circumstance would be assuming that discrimination was referring to judging people by their underlying traits, but it becomes very easy for the meaning of the word to take on a negative connotation that can be used to inform policy in unhelpful ways. Price discrimination […]

While primarily motivated by a desire to promote consumer welfare, antitrust has become a witch hunt which endangers the ability of businesses in general to effectively operate. Antitrust regulation was created on the idea that businesses can effectively collude to keep prices high, and that the emergence of monopolies will create a stable threat to […]