Google Gets My Data, I Get Search and Email and That. Help help, I’m Being REPRESSED!
5th February 2015
Tim Worstall at The Register discovers that, yes, government employees are pretty much all socialists.
“Whenever regulators gather to discuss market failures…”
The subject under discussion is the ownership of data and EULAs and all that stuff that so excites a certain sort of techno-pessimist. And that’s what leads to the spraying: the assumption being made that people who are trading something they don’t value much for something they value more is a market failure.
To an economist this is what markets do: people don’t seem to value that data, that information, about who they are, where they are or what they do – or not very much. They certainly don’t seem to value it as much as the things they get by allowing access to it: the Facebooks, Googles and so on of this world.
That’s not the usual definition of a market failure, that’s the efficient working of a market. The data, the thing being valued, is moving from a place where it isn’t highly valued to one where it is more valued. Moving something from a lower valued use to a higher is the very definition of wealth creation.
The piece he’s sputtering about appeared in The Guardian, which is pretty much all socialists too. Funny how that works.