Has anyone ever heard of this? Skipping the self checkout in order to protect people's jobs? Seems like good reasoning, but after you get beyond step one, it falls apart.
Professor Boudreaux offers his opinion in this blog post from yesterday on Cafe Hayek. It's in his usually sarcastic tone, but brings up some inconsistencies in anyone's thinking that not using technology is somehow better for the economy.
Similarly, Blockbuster going out of business can be viewed as a bad thing and indeed it was a difficult situation for many people. Hulu, Netflix, Red Box, etc are blamed for putting them out of business, which I think is correct. My family were frequent Blockbuster customers in an effort to keep us kids mildly sedate during key periods of the day and would spend a healthy sum of money in video rentals. Now for less than half the price, my family has instant access to thousands more choices than the Blockbuster store saving money and time. Seems like a win, win situation to me. And this streaming video service is a whole new industry barely imagined a decade ago.
As history has clearly shown, true ingenuity of the types mentioned above is best achieved in an environment of political and economic freedom.
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