France has announced that it may begin levying a tax on advertisement clicks (yes, a tax on clicks) in order to reallocate resources to industries “hurt” by the digital boom.

To get it out of the way, I’ll take a couple of sentences here to express an indignant rant : Seriously, are you kidding, France?!? This is like taxing printing presses in order to prop up scribes. This is like taxing neuroscientists to prop up phrenologists. This is like taxing the inventor of the wheel to give cash to some asshole who drags his crap on the ground!

Anywho, the main thrust of the proposal is to establish a form of protectionism. The idea here is that France doesn’t receive tax revenue from online advertisers who make money from French people who click on ads. Hellloooooooo, this is the nature of the internet. French companies have just as much of a chance to make revenue off of foreign clients (where they won’t be taxed for their clicks by each respective government). What the French government basically wants to do is tap into the success of international firms and to give a handout to some domestic producers. This kind of tactic is employed by various banana republics and it’s not exactly a recipe for competitive domestic incentive structures. Protectionism, like cheating in school, really only hurts those who practice it.

Furthermore, the Sarkozy administration endorses:

“a proposal to force the music industry to offer their songs across all digital distribution platforms if they didn’t negotiate such deals voluntarily within a year. Such a move is necessary, he said, because of the collapse in sales of CDs and the absence of a corresponding rise in online music sales.”

Honestly, who the hell is the French government to tell the music industry how to run itself? And yes, some sectors of the music indistry are struggling and I’m sure the last thing they need is a mandate that they are obligated to fulfill.

I was at one time under the impression that Mr. Sarkozy had a rudimentary education in economics, but he seems to be doing everything possible to dispel such a myth. Here’s the icing on the cake:

By the middle of this year, Sarkozy also wants to give French teenagers vouchers worth €200 to spend on online music services, with half the cost to be subsidized by the government.

Young people, he said, have been conditioned by the press to expect online content to be free, where previously they had to pay for magazines and newspapers. That expectation is one of the reasons why young people won’t pay for music, he said, and the goal of the music vouchers would be to get them used to paying for online music once again.

Oh, I SEE. So the way to cure kids of their expectations that music is free is to give them a 200 EURO voucher to ‘buy’ music for free, eh? Makes PERFECT sense.

Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6947706/France-plans-Google-tax-on-internet-searches.html

http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=16504&Title=Why_France%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%98Google_tax%E2%80%99_sounds_like_protectionism

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186356/president_sarkozy_adds_his_support_to_french_google_tax_plan.html

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam

A great conversation reflecting on our newly bygone decade: the oughts. Maybe not the best decade for the US of A, but there’s hope for the word as a whole and therefore America as well.

I still don’t understand what’s controversial about this.  Why shouldn’t Hume say what he’s thinking when he is asked to provide his take on the Tiger Woods scandal?  If anything, he was just being honest.  If you don’t agree with him, that’s fine — but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Hume, as a Christian whose faith was renewed following the suicide of his son in 1998, believes that his religious beliefs trump competitors.  With few exceptions, isn’t this what faith is all about?  The belief in Truth with a capital T to the exclusion of other faiths?

To repeat: Hume was editorializing.  If he dropped “Christianity is the only true faith” in the middle of anchoring a straight news show, I’d be upset about his journalistic integrity, but the man can say what he wants when he’s asked for his opinion.  Tiger and Fox News Sunday viewers are free to ignore his advice just as I ignore the hundreds of “HELL IS REAL” billboards that dot the interstate highway system.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html

This December 17, 2009 WSJ article outlines how Iraqi insurgents were able to intercept the downstreams (ie the video feeds) from unmanned Predator drones.  This would undermine much of their plausible deniability, I would imagine.

I absolutely love bloggingheads.tv and I’ll be sharing some of my favorite episodes on this blog – hopefully folks will enjoy them as much as I do.

It seems only appropriate that the inaugural “Ted’s Bloggingheads Pick” features Robert Wright and Christopher Hitchens.  Wright is a regular on Bloggingheads and is absolutely fantastic at exposing the logical gaps in the arguments of his counterparts.  Hitchens is, of course, Christopher Hitchens.  This December 10, 2009  diavlog was the second of two which the duo taped consecutively, and Wright gets a bit testy with the unflappable Mr. Hitchens.  The pair’s first meeting focused on the Iraq war and this episode centers on the subject of religion and morality.

Without further ado: