MORE NONSENSE FROM UNCLE AL GREENSPAN

In a Financial Times op-ed in defense of the Free Market Fairy, Uncle Al reverts to his longtime delusions about the market. The op-ed has factual mistakes about the cause of the current mess and Yves explains some of them. I was particularly upset with this nonsense:

Competition, not protectionism, is the source of capitalism’s great success over the generations.

For decades, AT&T was essentialy a monopoly and had no meaningful competition for phone service. Over that time period, AT&T's Bell Labs made a number of VERY important discoveries, among them are:

Information Theory
Experimental Suppport for the Wave Nature of Matter
Radio Astronomy
The Transistor
The Solar Cell
Practical development of the Laser
The Echo of the Big Bang
UNIX and the Internet
Fiber Optics for Communication
Cell Phone Networks