The Elliott Wave people ask, "Is the Greater Fool Era Ending?"

Answer: No.

Here is proof. Strategy Analytics has recently published another of those truly loony market studies, this one claiming that mobile phone operators will lose $12 billion from broadband wireless over the next several years.

It's nonsense because its premise is false, namely that those profits are out there to lose.

Yes, it's possible that if WiFi and WiMax didn't exist that all broadband revenues would go to cellular. It's also true that if freeways didn't exist all inter-city traffic would be by railroad. But that does not mean I impute a loss of billions to the railroads.

The fact is that unlicensed wireless is a more efficient method for getting broadband in than licensed spectrum. This is because licensed spectrum is a government scam, licenses designed to make money for government, based on a false premise, namely that spectrum is scarce.

Spectrum Is Not Scarce. Spectrum is wildly abundant. Engineers have been proving this again-and-again over the last 20 years, bringing services in new frequencies to the market, and finding ways to re-use spectrum creatively. We have cellular, in fact, only because of spectrum re-use, cellularization and sectorization.

This study, like others of its ilk, is dangerous. It implies that something can be done by government to put down science, and worse, that something should be done. This is a dangerous thing for either a business or (worse) a government profiting from that business to be thinking.

Makes you thank God for India.