Free Information . . . Markets!

In today's world, information is found in abundance. This increase in supply has driven the cost of obtaining information quite low in the developed world. Places where the information market is regulated heavily like china or North Korea there is a much larger percentage of their populations living in extreme poverty than other developing nations like Brazil or South Korea. This is because information is a factor in every market transaction, whenever goods are being traded both parties use information to determine what is in their best interest. Since most real markets have imperfect information, they can only use the information they can afford. This problem means that when information is expensive and hard to get, people cannot represent their best interests in a transaction and this will lead to wide scale economic disparity.

That is why I feel that information market should remain untouched by any government body wishing to attain overall prosperity. The only reasons information would be controlled is to give someone, somewhere a better insight to a transaction. That to me is representative of crony capitalism, which the average economist knows is only good for the few and bad for the most. By crony capitalism I mean an institution that fights against asymmetric information for their own personal gain. These sorts of institutions are holding back governments and markets across the globe, and removing them should be a focus of modern economists. Markets should be free, and the information market is no exception.