• Pursue state-level litigation to enforce the “public use” limitations found in every state constitution.
• Today issue a formal pledge for governors in each state to sign promising to oppose efforts in their states to use the government power of eminent domain for private development, and to support legislation and other efforts to ensure that citizens of their state are safe from eminent domain for private development.  IJ and the Castle Coalition will soon extend this pledge to legislators and city officials nationwide.
• Support citizen activists nationwide who are urging their state and local officials to set stricter standards for the use of eminent domain.
• Establish a Castle Coalition presence in every state so ordinary citizens will be poised to mobilize the minute eminent domain is abused for private ends.  Citizens can join the Castle Coalition at www.castlecoalition.org.
• Host a conference in July in Washington, D.C., to train activists in fighting unjust takings.

I'd suggest another front: shareholder and consumer activism to get businesses to pledge not to use eminent domain for their own private purposes.

"We have to create a great experience every time you touch the brand, and the design is a really big part of creating the experience and the emotion. We try to make [a customer's experience] better, but better in her terms. If you stay focused on experiences, I think you will have a lower risk of designing something that may measure well in a lab but may not do well with the consumer."

Here's how that resolve plays out in a new product. The bottle for Crest Pro-Health Rinse is so appealing that Steve and I almost bought some, even though we never use mouthwash. It looks especially good compared to the nearby Listerine, which even in its friendly blue form "looks industrial, like Janitor in a Drum," says Professor Postrel.

To supplement the glamour shot, I'm including some on-the-scene photos from Walgreen's. My photos don't capture the full emotional impact of the design, in part because the mind's eye screens out a lot of the ugliness of drugstore shelves. (In the bottom photo, check out the pegboard background and the adult diaper packaging creeping over from the adjacent aisle.) The next frontier for consumer-products designer is doing something about the hideous store environments in which their products appear.

But, of course, Hackers--a great book, and a touchstone for anyone interested in the history of computers--is not about people who break into computers. Subtitled "Heroes of the Computer Revolution," Hackers is about people, starting at MIT in the 1960s, who played around with computers and whose enthusiasm gave birth to the personal computer revolution. Today's high-tech criminals and identity thieves are a completely different subject. A quick look at the book's Amazon page could have kept Whitaker from insulting Levy and revealing his own ignorance of technological history.

UPDATE: Steven Levy emails:

Mark's point in his letter's editor (which I saw before publication and was OK with) was simply to say that I had reporting background in the kinds of people with the wizardry to potentially frustrate security. The exact language he used was accurate: that "Hackers" was about the people who CAN break into computers, not that I was writing about crooks. As you eloquently acknowledge, the book's focus is on quite a different kind of hacker (although there are few people I wrote about, like John Draper, who pioneered techniques that would later be abused by the dark side.) But for the point that he was making, citing Hackers and Crypto with those very brief descriptions was sufficient. Thanks for the defense, Virginia, though none was needed here.

Posted by Virginia at 11:43 PM | TrackBack

NEW LONDON RALLY: On July 5th, New London will hold a city council meeting and we are coordinating a rally beforehand to ask city council to save the homes of Susette Kelo and the New London residents. If you are anywhere near Connecticut, we hope you'll join us and voice your support for the homeowners and property rights. The rally will be held at 6pm at New London City Hall, 181 State Street, New London, CT. By saving these homes, we can show the country that, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, eminent domain abuse is wrong.

Posted by Virginia at 04:52 PM | TrackBack

For lots of informed commentary, and good links, see the Volokh Conspiracy.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds, who observes that Kelo may prove analogous to "Bowers v. Hardwick decision, which didn't make new law, but which led to a sea-change in public attitudes." Bowers was the 1986 ruling, also 5-4, that upheld Georgia's criminal statute against private, consensual oral or anal sex. The ruling galvanized efforts to repeal anti-sodomy statutes, to challenge such laws under state constitutions, and, ultimately, to get Hardwick overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Glenn notes that Bowers, unlike Kelo, "was consistent with the law going all the way back." That's not the only difference. Bowers upheld laws that most Americans assumed were essentially symbolic and unenforced. One reason the decision was so shocking was that Mr. Hardwick had actually been arrested in the privacy of his own bedroom, demonstrating that the laws could have real-life consequences. Still, even sodomy law supporters didn't want stricter enforcement. Bowers wasn't going to lead to systematic police sweeps of the nation's bedrooms.

Kelo, by contrast, isn't about cultural symbolism and largely unenforced law. It's about common practices. American cities quite regularly take property from some private parties to give it to other, usually wealthier ones. Now that practice has the Supreme Court's blessing. Kelo could very well lead to much more aggressive use of eminent domain for "economic development." Bowers was offensive, but Kelo is scary.

That's all the more reason to crank up the grassroots activism. Cities can legally bind themselves not to abuse eminent domain. On (of all places) D Magazine's Frontburner blog, a local lawyer points to a charter amendment passed by the citizens of Carrollton, a Dallas suburb, in 1998:

"Provided, however, nothing included above or anywhere in this charter shall authorize the City of Carrollton, or any corporations, agency or entity created by the City, or pursuant to the City's approval and authorization, to institute and exercise the power of eminent domain to acquire private or public property if the purpose of the acquisition is the promotion of economic development for a private business enterprise which business enterprise would own any right, title, or interest in the property so acquired." (Emphasis added.)

The Institute for Justice, which brought the Kelo case, is organizing grassroots efforts via its Castle Coalition. (Steve and I are donors to IJ and this site is running the Castle Coalition's Blogad without charge.) From their site:

Right now, there is a tremendous momentum against this abuse of power, and we ask each of you to begin organizing to change the law in your city or county or state. The Castle Coalition will help you write the language, but now is the time to start organizing your friends and neighbors. Your local government will tell you there’s nothing to worry about, that it would never use eminent domain, or that it's only as a “last resort.” Don’t believe a word of it. Your only protection is a change in the law (or good state court rulings, which is what the Institute for Justice is working on).

While Kelo rightly sparks the immediate demand for political action, motivated by a visceral sense of injustice, over the long run a lot of intellectual work needs to be done. Kelo is the logical result of the argument that spillovers of any sort--in this case, the positive effects of business development--constitute externalities, and that externalities justify government intervention. What's wrong with that argument? If it's fine for air pollution (as I believe it is), why doesn't it apply to refusing to sell your house to a business that would enrich the local area? Why doesn't it apply to offensive speech?

These are not easy questions, and they need to be asked. As political scientist Aaron Wildavsky warned before his untimely death in 1993, "externality" (and even "pollution") is an elastic, socially constructed concept whose application depends on what you like or dislike. If spillovers are all it takes to justify government action, liberalism's most basic freedoms--from freedom of speech to private property--cannot survive.

Looking primarily at negative spillovers, I wrote about the problem in a 1999 Reason editorial and have addressed the problem of aesthetic spillovers in a number of pieces listed here under "Aesthetic Conflict". In his review of The Substance of Style, John Nye also considered the problem of externalities.

Get them talking shop, however, and they don't talk about what a phone can do or how many famous people use it (former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was photographed using a RAZR phone), but rather how people react to it. What gets them excited is unwittingly creating a new gesture.

Pfanner fished into a pocket for his own RAZR phone to explain what he meant. With the phone closed, he demonstrated how easy it is to open and close with one hand--flick the top portion up with your thumb and then close it again with the thumb. There's something about the tactile sensation that makes this action something you want to do repeatedly, like a nervous habit.

"I see people opening and closing these phones all the time," Pfanner said. "Seeing people do that with their hands is pretty cool."

My new Motorola phone, alas, is a cheapy and not quite this exciting.

The Bush administration is doing the economy long term harm by not reforming our post-9/11 immigration and visa policies. Since the terrorist attacks, foreigners have had to go through considerably more hassle to enter this country. No one is arguing about the mortal necessity of tightening our screening procedures. But it defies belief that this, the most technologically advanced of nations, can't come up with software and hardware to expeditiously assist in determining who should and should not gain entrée.

Despite the weak dollar, the number of visitors from overseas during the past three years is down 23%. International conventions and seminars are not taking place in the U.S. because organizers can't be sure their delegates will be allowed into the country.

More alarmingly, foreign students are increasingly turning to non-U.S. universities. Australia, Canada and other nations have been effectively luring these students by assuring them that if they qualify, they won't have to undergo repeated, humiliating hassles at their borders. By contrast, foreign students now in the U.S. know that when they go home for summer vacation or holidays, their probability of returning to school is no sure thing.

Read the rest here. The visa hassles are no small thing, even for permanent residents and foreign-born citizens whose families want to visit them. "For the first time, I feel like a foreigner in this country," one of Professor Postrel's Indian-born colleagues told us at at recent party. We are needlessly alienating people who enrich our country and culture--and who would otherwise spread pro-American sentiment to their home countries. Bravo to Steve Forbes, for raising an issue most politically active people would prefer to ignore.

Toward the end of The Substance of Style, I introduce a theme that will become more and more prominent in the coming years: the re-emergence of a pre-Romantic, or Renaissance, attitude toward the complementarity of art, science, and technology: "The burgeoning demand for aesthetic expertise overturns the cultural assumptions we’ve inherited from the romantics, who opposed art to technology and feeling to rationality; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who equated function with value and variety with waste. In the age of look and feel, technology and art cooperate."

As if to illustrate this point, Princeton recently held a contest called The Art of Science, inviting students, faculty, and staff "to submit imagery produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science." The 55 entries selected for the exibition are now online, and they're impressively diverse and beautiful.

Here, for instance, is one from operations research, a truly unromantic (but really important) discipline.

Check out the whole gallery here.

If you think the easy answer is, "Of course, we have freedom of the press," you aren't be keeping up with employment law. It's an open question, and according to a report in Editor and Publisher, two ex-staffers are suing the Indianapolis Star, alleging religous discrimination on just such grounds. (The Star says it doesn't discriminate.)

I'm blogging with the free wi-fi at Ruby's Inn, near beautiful Bryce Canyon. But I don't expect any more Internet access until Sunday.

"When the terror alert level went up," he recalled in an interview, "you all of a sudden saw zillions of cops around the Capitol and around the Mall."

The pattern gave Professor Klick, now a professor of law and economics at Florida State University, an idea for how to examine a tough social science question: Do more police officers in fact reduce crime?

The answer may seem obvious, but many social scientists have argued that the number of police officers has no effect on crime rates and may even increase them. "If you look at the studies, particularly in the criminology literature, it's either no effect or actually a positive effect," Professor Klick said.

Cities with more police officers have more crime. That is probably because cities with high crime rates hire more officers. But it is hard to separate cause and effect, and, assuming that the officers do deter crime, to figure out how big the effect is.

"We spend a huge amount on police," Alexander Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University, said in an interview. "So we want to know not simply do police reduce crime, but by how much. Should we have more police?"

He and Professor Klick examine the question in a study published in the April 2005 Journal of Law and Economics, "Using Terror Alert Levels to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime." (A copy of the article is available at http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/TabarrokPublishedPapers.html.)

To separate cause and effect, researchers need a "natural experiment" - in this case, an event that changes the number of police officers for reasons having nothing to do with the crime rate. The crime rates before and after the change can then be compared.

Read the rest here.

Here's the view from the porch swing where I'm blogging at Zion Mountain Resort. Forty-nine buffalo, including nine calves, roam these 600 acres of fenced meadow. They only come within photo range in the mornings and evenings, so you'll have to use your imagination at the moment.

There's no cell phone service, and very limitedregular phone servic at the resort. But they've got free wi-fi. I'm on vacation with my extended family (parents, brothers, spouses, kids), visiting Zion National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.

Howard Dean has become the Russell Crowe of the Democratic Party. But unlike Crowe, who has been profusely apologizing for beaning a hotel concierge with a telephone in a fit of bad temper, Dean shows no signs of contrition for the intemperate rhetorical blasts that he sent flying in the direction of the GOP last week.

Dean presents a conundrum for embattled Democrats, who have lost control of the White House and Congress. There are two ways for them to think about him. One is that he's a reckless, emotional politician whose fiery remarks will stir up debate and help the Democratic Party. The other is that he's a reckless, emotional politician whose name-calling cheapens the national debate on issues and hurts his own party.

Judging by Dean's preposterous comments about all Republicans being rich and idle, and mostly white Christians to boot, the latter is inescapably the case. You can't be a good salesman if you spend your time insulting prospective customers, in this case people who haven't been voting Democratic.

Ah, the good old days of Ron Brown.

Projecting even bigger problems next year, the Army is preparing to ask Congress to approve higher incentives and legal changes to broaden the pool of candidates. The Army has leveraged incentives "right to the legislative limits in every category," Rochelle said. Proposals under consideration in the Pentagon include doubling the maximum enlistment bonus to $40,000 for troops in high-demand jobs such as intelligence, infantry, special operations and civil affairs, as well as linguists, Rochelle said.

Another proposal would raise the age limit for active-duty Army recruits from 35 to 40. The Army raised that limit for its reserve elements in March, but increasing it for the active-duty force requires congressional approval. Rochelle said the change would bring in soldiers with greater experience and maturity, while making little difference in terms of physical abilities -- saying that today's 40-year-olds are in better physical shape than they were when the law was written.

Sounds good to me. Unfortunately, too many supposed doves are salivating for a draft, which makes neither economic nor strategic sense. The only way they'll get one is to make volunteer service as unattractive as possible.

Lots of choice accommodates pluralism. As I wrote in my Reason article

Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

The challenge--to designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who offers choices--is to preserve the benefits of choice without forcing each of us to navigate an overwhelming number of choices.

Shortly after the Reason article went to press, I read this report (.pdf file) on a survey by the marketing firm WSL Strategic Retail. Respondents classified product categories like cereal, shampoo, or jeans into four groups: "Lots of choice organized in store so I can find what I want," "Lots of choice but organized in store to make it hard to find what I want," "Too Little/ Few choices," or "I always buy the same product so choice is not important." The results confirm many of my arguments, noting that "Shoppers want abundant selection, and most have figured out how to navigate the shelves to make the right choice." But the survey also points out that not every product category is equally easy to navigate. There's plenty of room for improvement in merchandising and (presumably) design. Among the most confusing offenders: jeans and cell phone plans, two frequent targets not only of anti-choice social critics but of overwhelmed consumers.

As someone involved in antenna design for cellphones, I see firsthand the network operators' stultifying effect on handset design.  In particular, the greatest obstacle to further progress minaturizing phones is the continued need to support the original 800 MHz band. (Maybe the WSJ article covers this...it is a pay site so I can't see.) I've seen pendant designs, wristwatch designs, and Zippo-sized flip-opens die because it is impossible for antennas to operate well at 800 MHz. Lower frequency means longer wavelengths...remember how long those 33 MHz CB antennas were?  No way around it.

New entrants to the market are particularly prone to getting whacked: sensing the demand for a smaller handset, they come to us, only to later discover that they can't meet network operators' RF specs in their oh-so-cool form factor, after wasting both their & our engineering resources (miniature antenna design is a laborious and inexact art; you don't know exactly how much you can squeeze the size down until you try).

 If the operators would permit PCS-only phones (1900 MHz), consumers would flock to their heretofore unattainably small sizes (starting with people who have to wear formal/business attire often).  The market pressure to convert the lower frequency networks would be tremendous.  (Sprint is PCS-only, but the CDMA protocol they use presents different barriers to minaturization...the effect of the two opposing forces is that they about hold even with the GSM phones.)

 As it is now, handset makers compete by piling on cameras, smartphone features, etc. into a form factor that hasn't really shrunk in years.  Granted, it's nothing like the the old Ma Bell days...thank God for that.

On a semi-related note, I use Sprint PCS and often find myself without service while people all around me are yacking on their cell phones. Should I switch? And, of so, to what network?

UPDATE: I switched to t-Mobile. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with advice.

Recent reports in the WaPost and NYT, however, suggest that maybe, just maybe the sugar lobby has overstretched. Here's the Post account, which focuses on beet farmers--the sugar lobby's secret weapon, or so I'm told by someone who unsuccessfully took them on some years ago.

"We should not allow the very tiny minority of U.S. agriculture that believes it will be negatively impacted to derail this agreement," said Rep. Wally Herger (R-Calif.) at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last month, noting that farmers in his district who produce rice, almonds, walnuts and other crops have enthusiastically backed CAFTA, which they feel offers important new export opportunities.

The specter of CAFTA collapsing over sugar is particularly galling to economists who have long criticized federal restrictions on sugar imports. "Sugar is a prototypical case of a policy that favors the few at the expense of the many," wrote Kimberly A. Elliott, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, in an analysis last month....

To critics, that's an argument against the U.S. sugar program. "It's true that beet farmers don't make much money, but that's because it's inefficient to produce sugar from beets -- the rule of thumb is that it's about twice as costly as cane," said Donald Mitchell, a World Bank economist.

According to a study Mitchell authored, eliminating the distortions created by government policies in the United States, Europe and elsewhere could create 1 million jobs in developing countries that are more efficient sugar producers. And American consumers would benefit; workers in sugar-using industries might benefit, too.

The Times report emphasizes "big sugar," ignoring the beat farmers. Here's the opening:

At the Ferrara Pan Candy Company, confectioners of everything from gummy bears to red hots, rail cars used to deliver three million pounds of sugar a week to its bustling plant just outside America's candy capital here.

Today, the trains bring only half as much, barely enough to fill the factory's 65-foot sugar silos. That is largely because Ferrara, in an effort to avoid the high cost of government-protected American sugar, has been moving some of its century-old operations to Canada and Mexico.

The reason for this decade-long shift can be traced to global economics and the domestic sugar industry, which is fast being branded as a spoiler nationally and internationally. "Big Sugar" is in trouble not only here in Chicago, where it is losing some of its customers, but also in Washington, where it is losing some of its longtime political allies.

Rightly or wrongly, the sugar industry is being blamed for an assortment of evils: undercutting the American food industries that rely on sugar, fighting global diet guidelines that aim to improve children's health and curb obesity, and, most recently, for hurting the chance for passage of the Bush administration's top trade priority, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, known as Cafta.

"More and more people have begun to realize that this is an indefensible program from a trade policy standpoint," said Clayton K. Yeutter, a former United States trade representative and agriculture secretary, who is now senior adviser to the Food Trade Alliance, which represents companies in food processing, retailing and restaurants that are lobbying in favor of the agreement. "Beneath the surface one can sense that the house of cards has begun to shake a bit."

From your mouth to God's ears, Mr. Yeutter.

BTW, if you follow the links to my earlier discussions, you'll need to scroll down the page to find the entries. To keep the number of files manageable, my older archives don't break out separate posts.

Under a plan announced by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, those "rich" people making more than $142,582 will see their taxes go up by 7 percent to a marginal tax rate of 10 percent. The "super rich," those making more than $285,164, will see their tax rate go up by 17 percent.

If the Democrats are successful in placing this "tax the rich" scheme on the ballot, some voters may be tempted to approve it because it will not affect them. It was the late Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana who summed up the approach this way, "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree." After all, it's no great sacrifice to vote to tax other people, and the "rich" are always a tempting target. (It is interesting to note that Speaker Núñez, whose pay will go to $127,512 this year, plus a daily tax-free allowance of $138, would not not see his taxes go up.)

However, before anyone is tempted to support the Democrats' proposal, he might want to look at how fast the definition of "rich" for tax purposes has declined. Just last November, voters approved another soak-the-rich measure, Proposition 63, the mental health tax that increased the levy by 10 percent on those making $1 million or more. In just seven months, the political definition of rich has declined by 85 percent to just over $142,000. If we were to continue at this rate, by the beginning of July, those making minimum wage could expect to be classified as rich....

[W]hen the "wealthy" include tradesmen and nurses headed to Las Vegas for a lower cost of living - including taxes - the rest of California ought to be worried. If those making more and paying more in taxes flee the state, those left behind may discover that it is they who will inherit a higher tax burden.

As a percentage of the population, people making upwards of $142K are indeed an elite. But, at least in California, they don't feel particularly rich. "In Los Angeles," a friend once said, "the middle class is people making between $200,000 and $800,000." I might not inflate the range that much, but speaking in psychological class, rather than income, terms, she's right.

At least I'm not begging for donations like my friends over at the for-profit D Magazine blog, FrontBurner. Not that I don't appreciate donations.

When customers enter the Ralphs supermarket near UCLA, they see a sign announcing how many different fruits and vegetables the produce department has on hand: "724 produce varieties available today," it says, including 93 organic selections.

Sixty dozen varieties is a mind-boggling number. And that’s just in the produce department. Over in the cheese section, this pretty run-of-the-mill supermarket offers 14 types of feta alone. Not so long ago, finding feta of any type required a trip to a specialty shop.

During the last couple of decades, the American economy has undergone a variety revolution. Instead of simply offering mass-market goods, businesses of all sorts increasingly compete to give consumers more personalized products, more varied experiences, and more choice.

Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer pulls at The Great Indoors. Amazon gives every town a bookstore with 2 million titles, while Netflix promises 35,000 different movies on DVD. Choice is everywhere, liberating to some but to others a new source of stress. "Stand in the corner of the toothpaste aisle with your eyes wide open and--I swear--it will make you dizzy," writes design critic Karrie Jacobs. Maybe the sign in Ralphs is not an enticement but a warning.

The proliferation of choices goes well beyond groceries to our most significant personal decisions. Young, well-educated adults in particular have unprecedented freedom to make whatever they want of their lives: to decide where to live, what to do, whom to befriend, whom (or whether) to marry.

"Since graduation, we've struggled to make our own happiness," Jenny Norenberg, a young lawyer, writes in Newsweek. "It seems that having so many choices has sometimes overwhelmed us. In the seven years since I left home for college, I've had 13 addresses and lived in six cities. How can I stay with one person, at one job, in one city, when I have the world at my fingertips?"

It's all too much, declares the latest line of social criticism. Americans are facing a crisis of choice. We’re increasingly unhappy, riddled with anxiety and regret, because we have so much freedom to decide what to do with our money and our lives. Some choice may be good, but we've gone over the limit. The result is The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, the title of Yale political scientist Robert Lane’s 2000 book on the subject.

To these critics, providing too many choices is the latest way liberal societies in general, and markets in particular, make people miserable. "Choices proliferate beyond our pleasure in choosing and our capacity to handle the choices," writes Lane. Like cheap food and sedentary labor, the argument goes, abundant choice is not something human beings are biologically evolved to cope with. We'd be better off with fewer decisions to make.

"As the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear," writes Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice, published in January 2004. "As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize."

Schwartz's book has become a touchstone, not just for social critics but for self-help gurus and marketing professionals looking for the Next Big Thing. Its argument also offers a scientific-seeming alternative to public policies that expand choice, notably in health care and retirement accounts.

Schwartz, writes Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby in an article on private Social Security accounts, "shows how a certain measure of choice can be liberating but how too much is a treadmill--sometimes even triggering depression. Freedom and choice are wonderful things that allow us to realize our human potential. But there's a limit to how many choices each of us has time to make, and most people in the rich world are pretty much maxed out already."

Read the rest here. For related articles, check out this site's Variety section.

In other Apple news, GeekCulture.com features a "dress Steve Jobs" game. Instead of his standard black T-shirt and jeans, you can play digital paperdoll with pimp costumes and armor.

One reason the American high-tech industry has been able to create so many innovative products is that it was able to maintain a close, direct relationship with the individuals and companies that used its products. High-tech companies could quickly determine whether their software, hardware and online services were meeting user needs, and they could revise and improve these products rapidly and continuously.

This direct feedback loop between the high-tech industry and its user base became even better and faster in the past decade because of the Internet. The Net created both an electronic-commerce system where products could be directly purchased, and electronic forums where user comments and complaints could be better heard.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has called this Internet-aided feedback loop "frictionless" because it minimizes the distorting and masking effects of the middleman. It is one of the purest examples in history of the benefits of free-market capitalism.

But in recent years, as the high-tech industry has begun to offer wireless-phone products, this connection between technology producers and users has been blocked by huge, powerful middlemen. In the U.S., the wireless phone carriers have used their ownership of networks to sharply restrict what technologies can actually reach users....

However, I believe that, in the name of valid business goals, the U.S. carriers are exercising far too much control over the flow of new technologies into users' hands. In an ideal world, any tech company with a new cellphone, or with software to run on cellphones, should be able to sell it directly to users. These customers would then separately buy plans from the cellphone companies allowing those devices to work on the networks.

But that isn't how it works. In most cases, manufacturers must get the network operators' approval to sell hardware that runs on their networks, and carriers don't allow downloading of software onto phones unless they supply it themselves. I once saw a sign at the offices of a big cellphone carrier that said, "It isn't a phone until 'Harry' says it's a phone." But why should it be up to Harry (a real carrier employee whose name I have changed)? Why shouldn't the market decide whether a device is a good phone?

This seems like a market opportunity. The first network to let consumers use pretty much any phone they want to would attract lots of new business.

Depending on who's calling or which alarm I'm using, my phone plays "California Dreamin'," "I'm Just a Girl," "London Calling," and "Rock Lobster." None of them sound much like the songs, but at least they don't sound like someone else's phone. And, lest I confuse the phone with the radio when I'm driving, it also vibrates.

One of my goals as an Economic Scene columnist has been to broaden readers' understanding of what questions economists ask (sometimes at the risk of reporting what seems obvious to the non-rigorous). Contrary to the way it's portrayed in most media, economics isn't mostly about interest rates and the stock market. I do, however, tend toward reporting empirical results, the better to avoid the problems Tyler discusses.