Hm. It's odd my two main hobbies -- arguing about libertarian politics and RPGs -- overlap, but check this out: http://www.rpgplanet.com/dnd3e/interview-rsd-0300.htm (Do a search on 'network' to find the relevant section of the interview.) Apologies to Matt and the II, but from where I stand, the theory seems pretty sound. People buy thing because other people buy them. People are stupid. So it goes. Where Phill, the DOJ, and the rest of the left-liberals screw up is going from this obvious conclusion to "Therefore, government must point guns at people to make them make smart buying decisions." All of leftist 'thought' hinges on the highly dubious premise that you can MAKE people smarter, either by threatening to shoot them (Stalinist/Hitlerist socialism) or simply tying them up so they can't hurt themselves (modern 'liberal' socialism). Neither works. Capitalism tends to produce superior goods and services over time, but this isn't it's moral justification. If it was, I'd argue for a massive AI project designed to produce a super-computer which could use evolutionary algorithms to make optimized everything and control the factories. The moral justification for capitalism is that it is based on individuals making their own decisions about how to spend the products of their own labor. If a lot of these decisions are illogical, short-sighted, emotionally biased, or self-destructive -- well, that's humanity. There isn't any New Socialist Man on the horizon, so we are much better off letting stupid people spend their OWN money on stupid things, rather than turning 'the means of production' over to these morons. Want to know what happens when 'the people control the means of production'? Picture no art but painings of Elvis on velvet -- forever. Is Microsoft on top because of stupid human buying patterns as opposed to superior software? Yeah, probably. What should the government do about this? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.