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.

We have, in our own recent history, a striking example of a free information medium that moved easily into the pay category: Thirty years ago, if you wanted to watch television, you went to the store, bought a TV set, came home, plugged it in and that was it. You didn't have to pay for the content. Now, however, most of the country pays fees for cable or satellite hookups. It's true, of course, that those transmission systems also added value to the viewing experience -- uncut, commercial-free movies, live local sports, 24-hour news. Newspapers need to think harder about how they too can add value.