Posts by Keir Leslie
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You aren't able to purchase a $500 Ferrari because it doesn't exist, so, no, in fact a market doesn't exist even in the sense that there is a `customer willing and able to purchase'. (There is in the sense of `market' in which market means `demand' but that definition is pretty lacking.)
If you are going to invoke the free market you can't then start playing fast and loose with the word `market'. In a free market system the word market has a particular meaning, and if we're going to discuss the free market you have to accept that.
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Humbly begging the gracious forgiveness of Your Pretentiousness for daring to use "market" as shorthand for "consumers willing and able to purchase the product".
Er, no, that's not what you were using it to mean either, because in that case a `market' only exists when there is also supply, in which case it can't exist prior to the decision to supply a certain good, which rather contradicts your assertion that the market somehow exists independent of the supply side of the question.
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Well, no, you are wrong. Markets require a buyer and seller; that's just what a market is. Colloquial usage might differ, but when discussing public policy involving economics, colloquialisms are to be avoided.
You can hardly start going on about free market economics and then get miffed when people start talking about markets the way a free market economist would.
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My market, however, would remain, possibly less-satisfied than it is at present, but exist all the same.
Much much less satisfied if orthodox economics is anything like correct.
I think you are using `market' to mean `demand', which is wrong. One can have demand without a market existing if there is no supply, which is rather the point at hand.
(The gatekeeper/consumer stuff is all rather tangential to this.)
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That wasn't the same as creating a market for consumer electronics.
No. (Here I am going to do nasty things to some innocent economics, so I do apologise.) But the fixed expression of an idea has certain characteristics: it is non-excludable (if I have it I can't really fence it off and stop you getting it, short of physical fencing it off, which makes distributing it impossible) and it is non-rival (my having it doesn't make it any less valuable to you).
And in that case markets don't exist without state intervention to make the good take on certain characteristics of a rivalrous/excludable good. And if the state doesn't intervene*, they generally won't be provided. And that would be economically inefficient.
So there really is a sense in which markets in IP & related markets in CDs and such are creatures of the state, in a different way from that in which markets in hammers are creatures of the state.
* Not needfully by creating a market, but by subsidy or whatever even.
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Yes, copyright is the state creating a market. The state creates a bundle of rights that may be bought and sold. It may not in fact be creating the market you are assuming me to mean, but that is not really my problem.
The state doesn't create an audience, which is what I think you are using `market' to mean.
Also, you really have the most ridiculous idea about arts funding.
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I'm not saying it's particularly true these days, but remember there's people involved in New Zealand football who grew up back in the 60's and 70's when that sort of thing was way more common, and it does get passed down from the old guys.
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Mm, but then there's a lot of people for whom rugby fans are still the guys who talk about wogs & poofters playing football.
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Creators have a role in any model, as by definition without the creators there's nothing to distribute.
There is an obvious model which eliminates creators: where there is nothing to distribute. Markets fail to provide public goods all the time.
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Keir, copyright is not the state creating a market.
Er, it is the state creating a market. It may be that the market decides certain things are worthless, but it is quite meaningful to say that by creating a right that can be bought and sold the state creates a market*.
You can't do with creativity as you can with manufacturing or design.
Again, LA. Yes, yes, I know what you want to say, which is that NZ culture is different from American culture, and that we couldn't get that from overseas. But quite clearly there is an international market in culture, and we quite clearly do outsource large parts of our cultural identity ( Dr Who frex.) So it really doesn't make sense to hold up culture as somehow safe from off-shoring. (I could do that thing with %ages of air time for NZ music now vs 20 yrs as an example here; if it can change one way it can quite happily go the other.)
In fact that's what a lot of this ACTA stuff is, it's the totalising market etc etc.
* I guess in that rather arcane usage of the London Stock Exchange the state isn't `making a market' but I don't even know if the LSE does that any more.