eporters complain about business. We overlook the constant improvements in our lives made possible by greedy businesses competing for your money. Think about how our access to entertainment has improved.
people complained that Blockbuster’s chokehold on video entertainment was so strong that the company would be able to censor anything it didn’t like. Special sanitized versions of movies were distributed through Blockbuster. How would we ever get to see the movies as they were originally intended? Clearly, Blockbuster was a monopoly. Government should regulate “Big Videotape” and break up the Blockbuster monopoly! Government didn’t. Yet Blockbuster is now bankrupt. Its competitors offered so many better things. That’s something to think about now when people call Facebook and Google monopolies. A few years ago, people claimed Netflix had a monopoly. But without government suppressing competition, Netflix had no way to maintain its temporary hold on the streaming market. In the 1990s, people complained that Blockbuster’s chokehold on video entertainment was so strong that the company would be able to censor anything it didn’t like.
“When I was a kid,” says Sean Malone in a new video for the Foundation for Economic Education, “my TV broadcast options were PBS, Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS. Depending on the weather, it was hit or miss whether or not they were even watchable.” 1977 brought the first video rental store. “We literally had to rent a VCR along with two or three movies we could get on VHS from Blockbuster,” Malone reminds us, pointing out how much changed. “Now just about anything I’ve ever wanted to watch is available at the click of a button.” Here’s a short version (click here for video) I released this week of the FEE video. It wasn’t government or big movie studios that made the amazing array of new options available. They dragged their feet. Malone points out that “the astounding wealth of home entertainment options we have today are the result of entrepreneurial startups, like Blockbuster.” Blockbuster letting people watch movies whenever we wanted was a big improvement. But people are ingrates about the things capitalism makes possible. In the 1990s,
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February 2020
American Consequences
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