Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition.
Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer provided insurance through the tax code so nobody cares about controlling medical costs. Why is housing so expensive? Because local governments literally make it illegal to build housing infringing on the private property rights of landowners with idiotic "zoning" laws and by doing things like declaring run down parking lots to be "historic" parking lots that must be preserved. Why is the labor market so skewed against labor and in favor of capital? Because numerous government laws make it harder to start businesses than it should be and also because government subsidizes employers providing "benefits" through the tax code. Why did the railroads collapse and most of the US become dependent upon cars? Because the government regulated the railroads to death with the Interstate Commerce Commission and subsidized both cars and car infrastructure. You can keep going on and on with examples but the answer is almost always something that the government did to screw up the market.
While this can be the case, numerous of the examples you have given (medical costs and the labor market to name two) have fewer problems in countries with much stronger government intervention/regulation.
If your government creates poor regulations then maybe that should be tackled directly (by electing less incompetent/corrupt officials) rather than concluding that regulation itself is bad.
Most of those countries such as Canada made certain markets like health insurance public, where it was deemed for the publics benefit not to be run for profit as there's far too many externalities and moral issues. We made the same choice with police and public attorneys. Sometimes, in very rare cases usually invoking peoples health and safety, it makes sense for it to be public.
What doesn't make sense to me is that massive meddling western governments do to prop up these monopolies. Copyright is a perfect example. Or just look a Boeing in 2024 or many Wall St orgs after 2008, special treatment and artificial barriers to completion is a huge and ever growing problem.
And these debates always just dismissed and downplayed because all context gets thrown out and it turns into vague gov regulations vs markets fights, as we see here in this thread.
The cyberpunk future of megacorps ruling the planet will be the result of gov interference in the vast majority of cases. And only a small amount due to lack of any monopoly antitrust enforcement. But both have the same root cause of forever expanding gov technocracy->megacorps define the rules and buy politicians->no one wins.
I'm actually in favor of some government intervention to fix the mess it created or where that is politically more plausible than a free market solution. Antitrust action to break up large companies would be great as would banning non-competes and addressing the culture of companies requiring absurd numbers of interviews to get a job. I also favor regulations to stop fraud such as making it illegal for airlines to sell more seats on a plane than they have.
In medical care, I'd prefer a Singapore style system where the government covers catastrophic care but you have a savings account for everything else. I think that's more viable than a pure free market because a college student who comes down with cancer or gets shot in this very high crime country probably can't afford to pay out of pocket for medical care. Likewise with somebody who gets laid off because their employer wants to increase its stock price.
In general though, I like that we have had significantly higher economic growth than European countries over the past generation and want it to stay that way. So I prefer libertarian solutions over socialist solutions wherever possible.
I appreciate your ideas and do tend to lean libertarian myself overall, but let me offer another perspective as well.
As someone who has lived in both places (European country with many social programs & the US in several states) — yes, wages and “economic growth” are lower in Europe, but the standard of living is very high.
Most people, in the European country that I lived in, ate healthy high-quality food that was cheap compared to the US. There were many bars and restaurants nearby where friends would regularly meet up, but there were also lots of parks that would be filled with people having picnics.
Registering for healthcare was mandatory, but it was cheap — even with our high salaries, we only had to pay 100€ per month for unlimited everything-is-fully-covered healthcare.
The police were generally trustworthy and hands-off. They had a bit of a reputation for being lazy and not responding for non-emergencies, but the streets were incredibly safe - me and my (female) partner were both totally comfortable walking alone at night throughout the city or countryside, and nobody we knew had major problems either (other than teenagers being weird).
Sure, it looks economically worse to ride your bike or take the train to work and walk to the grocery store, since those things don’t cost nearly as much as driving. And having a picnic in the park with a friend and a baguette doesn’t add to GDP like spending $40 on DoorDash to eat McNuggets in your basement.
But the human element is that life is actually much more satisfying and rewarding to get exercise and be a part of your community.
My point is, without having lived experience, it’s not very informative to just compare economic growth alone.
The problem with that is if you have some. Non recognized illness. Maybe something that gives constant pain but hard to detect. If you are a student, it would be really bad.
For IP there is a market failure if you don't have government regulation. IP is non-rival and non-excludable, and non-rival non-excludible goods don't really work well with free markets.
There are three general ways to address that. (1) Ignore it, which tends to lead to underproduction. (2) Have the government pay for production of IP, which becomes public domain. The downside of this approach is the government has to decide which IP to pay for. (3) Give IP the necessary properties by law for it to work well with a free market. This can fix the underproduction problem but does result in underconsumption.
It might be possible to address the issue in (2) of the government deciding what gets funded. One common suggesting is to fund production through a tax on something that tends to correlate with consumption such as internet access. The money from the tax would fund creation, with the money a work earns going up the more it is downloaded. There'd have to be something to deal with cheating though.
I think there's a case for short term copyrights (28 year terms or less) but I don't think patents are necessary for innovation. You generally can't stop people from copying your food products but we still have a ton of new foods on a regular basis because inventing new food is lucrative even without a government monopoly. The extreme competition and the ability of grocery stores to come out with a store brand copycat keeps big food honest and prices low. Recently, many people have started buying store brands instead of name brands which is why there are tons of signs at the grocery store about price reductions these days.
I do think it'd be hard to make sufficient money to fund a video game or a movie without copyright because they are inherently non-scarce goods once created that can be copied at effectively zero cost. I don't think it matters for books, most of which don't make money for their authors anyway. I also don't think it matters for music because the money there is from live performances and people only care about Taylor Swift's songs because she's singing them.
If we got rid of copyright, government could subsidize the production of works that would be copyrighted by creating a UBI and/or returning to the old norm of a single income household. Many people already create these kinds of works for free and/or ask for donations.
The FOSS community, which only uses copyright law (in the case of GPL) to force FOSS code to stay FOSS or (in the case of MIT) to require attribution, illustrates what the software industry would look like without copyright. Some people, including myself at one point, even work for companies writing FOSS code. Most software companies already make money by selling support contracts, cloud services or ads rather than from selling licenses to copyrighted software so fully abolishing copyright would have surprisingly little impact on tech.
You say that as if corporations don't have a greater ability to screw up the free market so completely.
Why doesn't Disney have meaningful competition? Because they bought them. (Also applies to health care. PE firms buying up everything has hurt us a lot.)
Why don't other just-shy-of-monopoly streaming companies lower their prices to take Disney's customers? Monopolies over streaming rights for shows and back-room deals.
Why don't customers take them to court? Binding arbitration clauses in the click-wrap contracts. (This also applies to your housing problem, by the way - the free market can not work when there is collusion. And that's not my assertion, that's economists' take on the effects of collusion.)
I'm pretty sure this isn't the government who has fucked this up for us customers, it's the corporations. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the Regan era and the polarization of the FTC and other administrative agencies is what allowed this kind of collusion, copyright abuse, and monopoly formation.
EDIT: I'd also ask one further question: Why is the government taking any action in big company's favor? I posit that it's due to the the companies taking semi-legal actions with the legislators who can make laws. Why are the actions legal? Because of prior illegal actions - more back-room deals - no doubt.
The specific problem with COBOL is that COBOL is both a language that was badly designed on the day it was created and that there is a stigma against programmers who have worked with it. This stigma is also a problem for other languages such as Visual Basic and PHP and it can make it harder to find programmers willing to work in those languages. Nobody wants to be "unemployable" because they worked in a stigmatized programming language even though the idea of stigmatizing programming languages is objectively idiotic.
This wouldn't be a problem if organizations that are still using COBOL code would pay high salaries for COBOL programmers because there are people who are only writing code for the money who'd be happy to work with a terrible programming language if it makes them money. But they generally also want to pay antiquated salaries from decades ago for COBOL jobs if they even offer a salary at all. Because they would have migrated their system off of COBOL decades ago if they actually cared about properly maintaining it!
Not sure if COBOL is actually 'stigmatized', but it definitely doesn't match the experience requirements in the job postings for most places where young programmers want to end up.
It might well make a "second half of a career" job for not-quite-so-young programmers looking for an alternative to the tech-stack-of-the-month carousel. But the jobs tend to be with big old orgs (so, start with banks and government), which might not seem so attractive.
> In every round, the interviewer should leave with the impression that you answered their questions as honestly as possible because you’re looking for the right fit, not just a job.
This is precisely what I despise about "job interviews". What you ask in the "Do you have any questions?" section of the interview should be irrelevant. I don't want to have to ask questions when I don't care about the answers just because that's what "top candidates" are supposed to do. What you're actually measuring is how much the person you're talking to is willing to read articles like this to come up with fake questions to ask as part of a fake performance so you'll hire them.
The interesting stuff that will make an employment unpleasant is not going to come out in an interview. That stuff comes out over time. To boot, I can think of quiet a few lies/half truths from interviewers. It is like dating, nobody says they are actually a lazy slob and the codebase is a POS on the first date.
For somebody who's unemployed, especially somebody who's been unemployed a while (very common in this market), the main thing you care about is getting employed again.
I imagine somebody who's currently employed wants to know that the company is better than the place they're currently at before they'd accept an offer. But sometimes "better" can be a very low bar to clear because their current company might be awful.
In other words, evaluating the candidate by their questions is just bias towards those who are already in good situations. Somebody being unemployed or employed in a toxic environment doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them especially in an economy where companies continue to lay people off at random.
> In other words, evaluating the candidate by their questions is just bias towards those who are already in good situations.
It sucks for the employee, but the unfortunate truth is that filtering for someone who's already in a good situation is actually a really good filter for the employer. As you say, it doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with them, but being unable to find a job for an extended period of time—to the point where you'll look for anything and not try to filter workplaces at all—is correlated with undesirable traits. Meanwhile, being steadily employed in a chaotic market and asking questions that show you're not desperate and are evaluating me as a hiring manager are both correlated with positive traits.
Again—not that any specific candidate is problematic or good because of those situations, but you will tend towards better hires overall if you watch those cues.
The hiring process sucks and it sucks that this method of filtering works, but it does work.
> The hiring process sucks and it sucks that this method of filtering works, but it does work.
How do you know this? (That this is not just sampling error, survivor bias, and/or confirmation bias)
I speculate that a good hire is almost random. Context matters as well. I worked with someone that was horrible, to later find out they were the other dev that I was going to work with later on a contract job. The different environment was night and day.
That being said, I do think the signal of a horrible hire can more often than not be detected during an interview. Otherwise, IMO, there is too much noise that it is close to random.
This filter works because people that are really good at what they do naturally tend to actually care about the surrounding tools/processes involved. Someone that has no opinions at all about those tools/processes is just showing up, and people that are just showing up are not usually as good as people that are passionate about the work.
That said.. it is stupid/insulting/weird to interview assembly-line workers as if you're looking for skilled artisans. Most companies/interviewers completely lack the self-awareness and ability to reflect on which category of worker they actually need/want, and may not even realize there are 2 categories.
I take you are referring to a different filter. I was responding to:
> "the unfortunate truth is that filtering for someone who's already in a good situation is actually a really good filter "
Be what it may, the "caring about tools/process" filter I also think is fraught with issues. (1) candidate might have already been described what the tools/processes are several times already. Perhaps even up front in the job description. (2) I've learned that tools and processes need to be evolved, gently suggested. It does not go well to say, yeah, drop scrum, do fewer CRs and only when important, add an auto-formatter and all these things. Secondarily to that, those things are not necessarily that important. It is work about the work there, better often to just do the thing then to spend too much optimizing the effort to do the thing. (3) a candidate should be asked what they would change in tools and process. Volunteering that can show a lack of "business focus". (4) any issues in tooling/process might be pitched as opportunities for impact that the candidate could have. In reality those things get political and it might not be a position that is empowered to really change much. So why deep dive into that during an interview - the person is being hired to do a thing, not to just do tooling (unless it is a tools efficiency job of course!)
At the same time, I would agree that someone with no opinion likely has no breadth in the process aspect of development. Yet, does that matter? It is more important for a team to get along than to try to 10x itself by going full bore on process efficiency. The latter is a myth. Focusing on that myth likely is going to be endless meetings/discussion about process and not business problems.
What is more, tools and process are context dependent. What works at a big shop (eg: FB, amazon), or the last shop - might not work at all at the next shop.
I'll emphasize as well that tools/process are best evolved with focus on areas of greatest need. That is a learning and discovery process. Getting a clear signal during an interview of whether someone understands that, or have just followed the scrum guide without much thought could be a real challenge. Asking someone even if they follow the scrim guide is nebulous, many have not read it, they might say they have but clearly have not. Yet more, the saying of "if you're still following the scrum guide a year later, your process is not agile"
Ergo, I suspect the "cares about tools and processes" will be a noisy filter. Caring too much creates discord on a team and ultimately is distracting. Sussing out willful indifference vs indifference due to business focus (eg: "I really don't care, just point me at the business problems and the rest is bullshit that I'lljust have to suffer through"), vs just shows up. I believe differentisting that alone is a big challenge (and potentially susceptible to a variety of biases). Yet more, is that the most important thing to focus on during an interview, is that really a valuable filter? I'm not sure. Sometimes having a few people not care is good, less bikeshedding.
> For somebody who's unemployed, especially somebody who's been unemployed a while (very common in this market), the main thing you care about is getting employed again.
Rather than seeing this phase of an interview as a chance to "conform even harder" and show smiling engagement in what is already an unfair / coercive farce, try thinking of this as an opportunity to exercise your curiosity.
I mean sure you don't really care, you just need a job. But it's possible to be curious about lots of things you don't really care about. Look at that bird, I wonder where it's flying from/to. Hey it's a car parked on the street, I wonder how many people had sex in the back. Look it's a manager at a company, I wonder how they handle product ideas in that company. Being curious is easy, usually it hurts nothing, and it's a kind of muscle that benefits from flexing. Besides, especially if you've got a long drive or a long interview.. well you're stuck with it, and what else are you going to do.
Yes, your current situation does make a difference in what is important to you and which questions you have. And it also influences the balance at the interviewing table. I can imagine that it is frustrating to feel being evaluated against candidates who have the luxery of saying ‘no’ to a new job and can think critically if they want to work at the new place. Sometimes you have more freedom to say ‘no’ then you think. It can make a difference between night and day.
My impression has always been that very little information given in either direction in an interview is relevant to the next year, let alone the next ten.
In theory it’s irrelevant in practice although companies try to make the process quantitative it is ultimately qualitative because it’s a human rating on a qualitative rubric. The impression you leave on the interviewer always makes a difference in how they represent you in their feedback and panels.
It’s like in school every TA uses the same rubric yet they all grade differently.
If you don't have any interest why do you want to work at that organization? You just want a check? That's not a good way to spend half your waking hours during the work week.
If you aren't already wealthy, you're probably working because "you just want a check". Even if the job you want is to own your own company, you still have to work until you have enough savings. This is how the world has always worked for most of the population in every human society that has ever existed.
If your skills are in demand you can get the check from many employers.
That said, if you want to run a business, and you don't like/want to do anything else, then you're kind of stuck. Unfortunately not wanting to do the job you want to get isn't generally what makes you a great hire but wanting to do a different job without having any skills also doesn't make you a great hire. Owning your own company is easy, go register it and you own it. Getting a check out of that is a little harder.
Yeah. When I’m interviewing folks at my current company, and the Q&A portion begins, I tell them they can ask whatever they want or just reclaim the time; my notes are sealed. More interviewers should operate like that.
You can tell them that, but I don't think I'd believe it as a candidate. I'll assume that every interaction I have with you up until an offer is extended is going to influence your perception of me, whether you're taking notes or not.
It is but "AI" is considered such an "important" technology at the moment that no judge is going to want to be the one that "destroys innovation" by enforcing copyright law. If the perception of the technology changes in the political world in an unfavorable manner, these cases would go the other way or (if there's precedent) they'll pass laws overturning the precedents.
I think this would be extremely useful in increasing Linux desktop adoption. There's an enormous number of Windows users who hate Microsoft's changes to the Windows GUI and wish they could still run XP or 7. There's also a need to make sure it is stable enough that users never have to resort to the command line and that it runs "non-free" software out of the box, especially software originally developed for Windows. The latter, of course, is a necessary compromise to get people who aren't FOSS purists to use the operating system. I think the focus should be on Windows rather than Mac because Mac users generally like Mac.
Linux adoption, in my view, is held back by the existing community's lack of desire to deliver what the average user wants. Things are obviously better on that front than they used to be but Ubuntu is still quite bad at doing what non-technical users want from a computer. Most Linux users seem perfectly fine with that.
To paraphrase Abe: Linux is an ecosystem of the community by the community for the community.
And I agree with you, the community (most of it) couldn't give a rat's arse what Joe Average wants. Heaven forbid you ask one of them how to do something that goes off of the One Linux Way(tm).
There is no One Linux Way: that's why there's so many different DEs and other various competing projects.
GNOME itself is an attempt to give Joe Average what he wants: the whole idea of modern GNOME is to take a tablet-oriented UI and put it on a desktop computer.
The problem is that the people behind projects like GNOME think they're the next Henry Ford, who famously said that what people really wanted was a faster horse, and instead made what he wanted people to have (i.e., motor cars that are in any color you like, as long as you like black).
> There's an enormous number of Windows users who hate Microsoft's changes to the Windows GUI and wish they could still run XP or 7.
The Windows 7 UI has aged pretty well too, even if the glossy visuals have become somewhat outdated (though personally I think they look better than modern flat stuff). I rigged up an old laptop of mine with 7 not too long ago and plugged into a modern monitor and it was striking how nice it was compared to 11.
High-fidelity 1-click reproductions of XP/7 for Linux would be very popular, I think. Bonus points if they can use the hundreds (thousands?) of XP and 7 msstyle themes on sites like DeviantArt.
I think the "Aero" UI in Windows Vista was the high point for Windows UI. The OS ran poorly and its fundamentals (like all Windows versions) was junk, but the UI looked really nice. This modern flat stuff is crap.
Aero was still used in Windows 7, with some additional nice features. But I agree, it was the high point of Windows for me - jump lists, Aero Peek, window snapping. It was all transformative.
Then they threw the baby out with the bath water in Windows 8.
I never really used Vista, only 7, but it seemed like 7's UI look was watered down compared to Vista: Vista looked prettier to me from what I saw of it.
I started in the mid-90s, and though I didn’t use 95 much I did use 98SE (which is aesthetically very similar to 95) and 2000 plenty.
For releases with the classic Windows look, I think 2000 is best. It makes a few refinements to the theme that at least to me make it more pleasant to use than 95/98.
I started well before Win95. I can still see that Aero was MS's peak UI, even though I never seriously used the OS myself (my workplaces all seemed to skip Vista).
Uber drivers, by any reasonable standard, are contractors not employees. Uber does not, to the best of my knowledge, tell them when or where to drive nor does it force them to pick up passengers. That's the distinction between contractor and employee.
Declaring Uber drivers to be employees seems to be a political move, likely lobbied for by low wage employers that are being forced to offer higher wages because many of their former minimum wage employees are now contractors for apps.
There's a long history of "Baptists and bootleggers"[0] pushing for regulations that serve both of their interests. The term comes from the 2 main groups that advocated for laws against the sale of alcohol in the southern US. The unions can easily be secretly in cahoots with McDonald's or the taxi industry.
Its also clearly not just something they're pushing in New Zealand given that California voters had to overturn a similar state law via referendum[1] a few years ago. They did this by a 17 point margin at the same time that they voted for the left wing candidate for president by around a 30 point margin[2]. In virtually any other state in the US, declaring Uber drivers to be "employees" would almost certainly lose at the polls by a much larger margin.
Many users will see "contact us for pricing" and assume that means you can't afford it. That's fine if your customers are enterprises but definitely not for consumer products that middle class people might actually buy.
A lot of time when there’s something like that, I’m fine not having a firm number, but it’s nice to have at least a ballpark idea of cost. (I found this particularly egregious with musical instrument pricing where I didn’t know if I was looking at a $1000 instrument or a $20,000 instrument, so I generally assumed that these would be cases where I clearly couldn’t afford it so best not to wonder—not to mention the cases where the list price was often as much as double the actual street price for an instrument).
I suspect most Tor exit nodes are controlled by the US government and/or its allied governments. It doesn't make much sense for anybody else to run an exit node because your IP gets banned by much of the internet and you get unwanted visits from law enforcement.
"What kinds of people operate tor exit nodes and why do they do it" is one of those questions that I know I'm not even supposed to admit being curious about, let alone ask, in the company of people who are most capable of accurately answering.
Venezuela's Supreme Court was packed by Hugo Chavez 20 years ago[0]. He expanded the Court from 20 to 32 judges. When he did this, he also filled 5 existing vacancies with new judges. In other words, their Supreme Court is controlled by the Maduro regime.
Interesting. In the past few years, I heard about how expanding the US Supreme Court was a reasonable approach to take. I wonder if proponents were aware of this case in Venezuela.
As with anything, it's all about implementation. The Supreme Court's size fluctuated over time, with different presidents increasing--or decreasing--it, often in response to the Court's actions or the major political disputes of the day. And often for even more partisan reasons than the current arguments for expansion.
John Adams and the Federalist Party reduced the Court from six to five; Jefferson restored the Court to six before expanding it to seven a few years later. Congress bumped it up from seven to nine in 1837, and Lincoln added a tenth during the Civil War. After the war, and at least partially motivated by vacancies that would have offered Andrew Johnson the opportunity to nominate justices who would screw with the Reconstruction plan, Congress reduced the Court from ten to seven. In 1869, Congress increased the Court's size to nine...and nominated two additional justices the very day the Court ruled paper currency--greenbacks--unconstitutional, who would then enable the Court to reverse that decision.
That said, there are non-partisan arguments for expanding the Court. We now have thirteen circuits; historically, each justice was responsible for a circuit but when appeals courts were added, the Supreme Court wasn't expanded. And then there's the expanded use of the shadow docket for more consequential questions. All of that's dramatically increased the Court's workload, and fixing it would probably be preferable...assuming that the act of fixing it didn't cause other issues.
Beyond that, not all of the expansion proposals amount to "add as many as we can." Many of them are tied to other reforms that are meant to lower the perceived stakes of each appointment, and grant a sort of regularity that ought to appeal to both parties without succumbing to what Venezuela current has to deal with.
FDR tried it during his time, wanted to expand it to 13 I think. It didn't work. But what we really need for SCOTUS is time limits and automatic replacements at intervals to take politics out of the process a little bit.
There's a perspective from which FDR's attempt to pack the court did work: He didn't expand the court, but the credible threat that he would do so got the justices to back off on blocking the New Deal policies he was implementing.
We already periodically replace them, that period just happens to be their lifetime. If you shorten that period you lower the stakes if the "other side" gets to fill a slot, you'll get another chance to rebalance in X years, where X is a known value and doesn't require someone to die (or willingly relinquish power).
I am at least. It's "a reasonable approach to take" in that it may be an effective mechanism for accomplishing certain goals like diluting the power currently concentrated there or preventing some specific action the court may take with its current majority.
I don't think there's a framework that can universally tell you whether supreme court expansion is always good in all cases or always bad in all cases. Taking effective action is bad when you do it for bad reasons and good when you do it for good ones. Unsatisfying but there it is.
I personally would not call that a reasonable policy proposal but it is (unfortunately) constitutional due to an oversight by the US Framers in 1787. The appropriate way to stop it from passing would be to vote against politicians who advocate it as they are unfit for office.
One reason why authors should self-publish is to prevent their books from being bowdlerized by the publisher in the future. You can't predict what will cause future "morality enforcers" to faint. Self publishing also means you can publish things that the current "sensitivity readers" (i.e. censors) would never let you publish.
Of course, this isn't foolproof because your descendants or heirs might also be willing to bowdlerize your work or even take it out of print altogether. So another option would be to just release all of your copyrighted works into the public domain upon your death allowing anybody who cares to publish uncensored copies.
Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer provided insurance through the tax code so nobody cares about controlling medical costs. Why is housing so expensive? Because local governments literally make it illegal to build housing infringing on the private property rights of landowners with idiotic "zoning" laws and by doing things like declaring run down parking lots to be "historic" parking lots that must be preserved. Why is the labor market so skewed against labor and in favor of capital? Because numerous government laws make it harder to start businesses than it should be and also because government subsidizes employers providing "benefits" through the tax code. Why did the railroads collapse and most of the US become dependent upon cars? Because the government regulated the railroads to death with the Interstate Commerce Commission and subsidized both cars and car infrastructure. You can keep going on and on with examples but the answer is almost always something that the government did to screw up the market.