Hi! I'm the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibriate everywhere! There are a bunch of things that can lead to markets working poorly. For example, transactions are not free. Theoretically, if a rambunctious man could persuade his neighbors to let him blast his stereo at high volume in exchange for a bit of cash, all would be slightly better off -- but since this would require repeated bargaining with a bunch of neighbors, in practice it probably would not happen.
Another problem is that humans and fairies are not omniscient, nor are we perfectly economically rational, no matter how much the sparkles in our hearts may ache with yearning to be so! Perhaps there is a way to replace NBC with something far better, and in order to make it happen, all we need is some hard work and a few billion dollars of investment money, carefully applied. If only we had the foresight to take such a gamble -- but in this imperfect world, none of us have the clarity of foresight needed to make such a huge gamble reasonable.
And that's before we need to worry about ugly stuff like regulatory capture and violent coercion! If you can improve any aspect of this situation, I will shoot abundant glitter out of my wand in your honor, and the world will be improved!
