Desperate times for the newspaper industry have sparked a rash of terrible ideas. The overwhelmingly left wing industry flaunts its ignorance of the way markets work, and its collectivist/monopolist mentality. The latest embarrassment comes from Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times, who sees economic redemption in a cartel arrangement, to control the dissemination of information.Washington ought to extend to the newspaper industry the same sort of antitrust exemption that Major League Baseball has enjoyed since 1922. ...... as long as some major newspapers are giving their online journalism away... nobody can risk charging for theirs. That's where the antitrust exemption would come in: It would allow all U.S. newspaper companies -- and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com -- to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously.An information cartel! What a spectacularly...(Read Full Post)