On the matter of competition and business imperatives, particularly involving big data, Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, had this to say at her speech to the Digital Life Design conference in Munich:

If a company’s use of data is so bad for competition that it outweighs the benefits, we may have to step in to restore a level playing field[.]

Continuing:

We continue to look carefully at this issue….

Never mind that they’ve found nothing:

this certainly doesn’t mean we never will[.]

There isn’t any wrong doing, but we’re going to keep looking for it, anyway. Because jobs. Because government bureaucrat jobs.

What’s wrong with China’s stock market?

Just about everything, according to a statement from Xiao Gang [at the time, Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission] delivered at a national meeting of Chinese securities officials….

In the statement, Mr Xiao defended his handling of successive market meltdowns, blaming the “abnormal volatility” on “an immature market, inexperienced investors, imperfect trading system, flawed market mechanisms and inappropriate supervision systems.”

He got that last part partially right—and only that much.

What’s wrong with the PRC’s stock market is inexperienced regulators and the idea that a functioning national economy can be managed—governed—from the center.

The Obama administration is proposing to spend nearly $4 billion in a decade to accelerate the acceptance of driverless cars on US roads and curb traffic fatalities and travel delays.

No. The Congress needs to refuse to provide the funding for this.

Leave aside whether we want driverless cars on our roads. There’s an arguably positive role for government to actively support, even help fund, basic research. However, once the theory from such basic research has been developed sufficiently (a private enterprise-defined criterion), bringing any related concepts to market is purely an engineering matter and so must be solely a free market/producer/consumer decision. The work, then, should be funded only by private enterprise.

Government has no business picking winning or losing technologies, and that’s what it does when it funds bring-it-to-market schemes. That’s unavoidable, no matter the intentions of the politicians pushing such an expense.

President Barack Obama’s proposal here is intended to facilitate the development of regulations to govern driverless cars. Leave aside here the Progressives’ idea that Americans and our businesses need a government rule for every aspect of what we do, or don’t do. This…regulation development…is nothing more than another bring-it-to-market scheme.