On Saturday, January 18, 2003 at 20:08:43 (-0800) Eugene Coyle writes: >I think IBM was actually forced to stop the tie-in of the punch cards, >but my memory is hazy. There is a book about it, titled Big Blue or >something like that -- pretty good book, but it has been a long while >since I looked at it. > > Aircraft engines -- the big jet engines -- are frequently sold with a >tie to a maintenance contract, and also leased by the operating hour, >rather than sold. Lots of aircraft sales (and other big ticket items) >are sold and financed by the same entity.
This is good stuff. Shouldn't we really be compiling a compendium of all such abuses? I mean, if we are going to follow Adam Smith and urge competition for the greater good of general prosperity and for the diminution of aristocratic hierarchies, shouldn't we at least be making note of the immense and very successful efforts by business, with extensive support from their shadow, to elude competition? This ties in economically of course with the mass media and their manipulation of opinion by using the properties of the human mind that make it such a wonderful device, but which makes it vulnerable to numerous subtle errors, as pointed out by Tversky, Kahneman, et al. It also ties in politically to the structuring of law to channel democratic behavior away from business power. Perhaps a suitable general appellation for this phenomenon would be "barriers to choice" (that would cover the narrow economic "tie-in"/contract, as well as the science of coercion/mass propaganda, as well as political/legal manipulations)? Because, isn't informed choice the real root of this all? A barrier has a domain over which it operates, the domain of choice. It narrows it somehow, channels behavior in certain ways. A barrier can be erected between consumers and sellers, between citizens and state, between citizens and their own minds --- and thus between citizens. Another feature of each of these is that there is great effort made to conceal them from view, a sort of reflexive barrier to prevent observation of the entire edifice --- they are hidden barriers. Any others? Or am I just repeating conventional, if radical, wisdom? Bill
