Best columns: Business

How the Internet shortchangescreative types

Jaron Lanier

The New York Times

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“I was wrong,” said computer scientist Jaron Lanier in The New York Times. As one of the early developers of the Internet, I was always telling creative people who feared that the Internet would rob them of their livelihoods that they should “stop whining and figure out how to join the party.” The worriers, it turns out, had a point. Because “there’s an almost religious belief in Silicon Valley that charging for content is bad,” few writers and artists are able to make a living on the Internet. Instead, heavy hitters such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook assemble “content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users.” The companies rake in big bucks, while creative people go unpaid. The creative types can’t get out of this bind alone. They need the help of geeks like me. If “software engineers and Internet evangelists” can design a system geared to “absolutely free” content, they can also “design information systems so that people can pay for content.” It won’t be easy, but “we owe it to ourselves and to our creative friends to acknowledge the negative results of our old idealism.” Information may want to be free, but artists, quite reasonably, want to get paid.

Why should we subsidize nuclear power?

Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren

Forbes

As conservative libertarians, we don’t often find ourselves agreeing with liberal activists, said Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren in Forbes. But our hats are off to Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, and the “other vocal rockers” who have been campaigning against taxpayer subsidies to nuclear power producers. Specifically, they’re upset that the Senate wants to hand out billions in loan guarantees for nuclear plant construction. Now don’t get us wrong. Unlike the musicians, we’re all for nuclear power—but only if it makes economic sense. Right now, “no investor would lend significant amounts of capital” to a nuclear power company without federal loan guarantees. That alone proves that the current system for financing nuclear plants is unsound. True, investing in nuclear plants is an extremely risky proposition. But it’s not the government’s job to eliminate those risks. All government should do is ensure a fair, efficient process for obtaining construction permits, eliminate unnecessary regulations, and guarantee that fossil fuels don’t enjoy an unfair cost advantage. “Once those tasks are complete, the role for government ends.” If nuclear producers can’t stand on their own two feet, Uncle Sam shouldn’t prop them up.