From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 05:24:49 +0800
To: hallam@etna.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Anonymous stock trades.
In-Reply-To: <9606062327.AA04162@Etna.ai.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <199606071452.KAA18055@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



hallam@Etna.ai.mit.edu writes:
> 
> >I suppose it depends on what you call "open", eh, Phill?
> 
> >If by "open", you mean financial markets where, as Milton Freedman says,
> >each new regulation raises the cost of entry and protects the surviving
> >firms by killing their smaller competion with red tape, then we have "open"
> >markets.
> 
> Well, Milton Friedman's method for saving the whale is to leave it
> to the free market, if people want whales in the oceans they won't
> buy whale meat.

Dr. Phill Hallam-Baker, PhD, seems to know even less about free market
environmentalism than he knows about futures and options.

Of course, what Dr. Phill Hallam-Baker, PhD, suggests is idiotic. As
any free market economist would tell you, the way to stop a resource
from being destroyed is not to pray that people won't buy it but to
assure that someone has an ownership stake in the resource, thus
assuring that their investment would be destroyed if the resource
vanished. Thats why, for instance, timber companies happily clear cut
government land that they have leased (after all, not clear cutting
would mean that they wouldn't extract maximum value for their lease
under the idiotic terms that the leases are made under) but will
almost never clear cut their own lands, because that would reduce
their long term value.

Dr. Phill Hallam-Baker, PhD, however, does not understand economics in
spite of his PhD and thus attributes views to free market economists
that they do not hold, as in his whole cloth synthesis of a viewpoint
which he ascribed to Milton Friedman which Milton Friedman would never
in a million years espouse.


Perry