Larry Lessig is a great thinker, but even he makes mistakes from time to time. The most recent installment of his Wired Magazine column is a case in point:

In “Crushing Competition” (issue 14.05), the usually razor-sharp Lawrence Lessig mistakes the revocation of a subsidy for the fostering of competition, and thus makes a correct point midst a dense fog of confusion. Byzantine tax regulations are a free lunch for accountants, and their simplification is analogous to closing an oil industry tax loophole or ending soybean subsidies. The state of California is thus right to make its tax forms simpler—but not for the reasons Lessig cites.

Instead, Lessig argues from broken analogies that any competition, even from government, is good. But government is uniquely able to crush its rivals with regulation and subsidize money-losing operations indefinitely through taxation. For example, private emergency services and private schools—two cases Lessig mentions—face ruinous competition from deeply entrenched, subsidized government services. Far from being “outrages”, attempts to cut (the taxes which provide) public funding for such services are laudable efforts to introduce to these industries the very competition Lessig so rightly celebrates.

Michael Hartl
Orange, California