Idiotarian Economics
Arnold Kling's latest brilliant essay explains how "Economic idiotarians are people who implicitly reject market logic and instead see economic arrangements as an either-or choice between idealistic sharing and evil exploitation."

I believe that the Internet is going to create new Market Pricing institutions and intermediaries in the realms of journalism, music, and other cultural work. Moreover, my guess is that these institutions will not resemble today's publishers, and their revenue models may be nothing that today's industry incumbents would recognize. I believe in the digital revolution, but I distance myself from those who see this revolution as a conflict between Authoritarian Ranking and Communal Sharing.

Sometimes, advocates for Open Source Software speak as if Microsoft inflicts its products on the public using Authoritarian Ranking, when instead software should be available for Communal Sharing. I believe that it is more accurate to view both proprietary and Open Source Software through a Market Pricing framework. This leads one to predict that Open Source developers will lack incentive to make their work accessible and usable for a non-technical audience, which seems to be an issue.

The phrase "tax cuts for the rich" is designed to trigger an idiotarian response. You are supposed to see a conflict between the Communal Sharing of the tax revenue that naturally belongs to all of us and the Authoritarian Ranking of powerful rich people stealing from this communal resource.

A successful idiotarian campaign was the assault on "Big Tobacco." The lawsuits against the tobacco companies were reported as a victory for Communal Sharing and a defeat for Authoritarian Ranking. However, from a Market Pricing perspective, this is not so clear. It may be more accurate to say that smokers are people who made choices rather than victims of tobacco companies; and the winners of the lawsuits were the individual attorneys who collected huge fees, not the community as a whole.