Why governments' attempts to pick winners produce more losers than winners.
Back from a fantastic week's skiing, and I find that we are being bombarded with comment spam, mostly from domains in Russia and Turkey. Having only enabled it a couple of weeks ago, I'm going to have turn off anonymous commenting, to get rid of these bastards. It's a piece of cake to register anyway, which is all you have to do to leave a comment. We don't need to know anything about you, we just need to know that you exist, so we can filter out the spammers.
We'll investigate ways to allow people registered with other services, such as blogger or OpenID, to use this site with their existing identities on those services. But in the meantime, posting will have to be limited to users registered on this site.
"In all countries all tax laws are to-day written as if the main purposes of taxes were to hinder the accumulation of new capital and the improvements which it could achieve. The same tendency manifests itself in many other branches of public policy. The 'progressives' are badly off the mark when they complain about the lack of creative business leadership. Not the men are lacking but the institutions which would permit them to utilize their gifts. Modern policies result in tying the hands of innvoators no less than did the guild system of the Middle Ages", Bureaucracy (1945)