Lose the Drama and Give Markets Their Due

Having been exposed to a particular article in this morning's Wall Street Journal, which echoed a similarly misguided effort in yesterday's Journal, The Business Press Maven turned into an empty silhouette of a man.

As a result, I need to step back for one moment from analyzing the business media's work on any particular company or economic issue to get at the larger issue of why so many are so wrong about so much. It has to do with the small little fact that they don't understand in the least the way the entire capitalist system functions.

Ours is a dynamic system. And it is rarely, if ever, a zero sum game. But journalists consistently write about it as if it were. Read this morning's "Broadway Strike Weighs on New York City" and see if it doesn't hit you right in the orchestra pit, too.

It is full of typical estimates (we've heard 'em a million other places in the past few days) that the stagehand strike, which began this weekend and shut down a bunch of Broadway plays, will "cost" New York City on the order of $17 million a day.

That was an estimate given by a theater organization, and it was then followed by a Times Square neighborhood alliance, which weighed in on "the immediate and palpable sense that the wind has been sucked out of the sales."