Bogus Experts Fight Your Right To Broadband

An anonymous reader writes, "Karl Bode of Broadband Reports takes aim at supposed telecom experts and think tankers who profess to love the 'free market,' but want to ban the country's un-wired towns and cities from offering broadband to their residents. If you didn't know, incumbent providers frequently determine towns and cities unprofitable to serve (fine), but then turn around and lobby for laws that make it illegal to serve themselves (not so fine). They then pay experts to profess their love for a free market and deregulation — unless that regulation helps their bottom line. A simple point: 'Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.'"

Comments

It is simple

[Black Art]

Goverment helping people or doing nice things for them is Socialism. Socialism is BAD.

Throwing them to the wolves, however is not Socialism, therefore it must be good.

You're oversimplifying

[misanthrope101]

Government helping people in the US is socialism. In fact, any social spending or infrastructure spending in the US is socialism. Paying for grandma's health care is socialism.

Paying Haliburton and other US contractors to rebuild Iraq--that's not socialism. The discriminator is this--who makes the money? If money is being spread among a bunch of little people, then that's socialism. If money is poured into a few large corporations whose executives make tens or hundreds of millions, then that's the free market. If it's profitable for the rich, it's the free market, but if you're giving money to a single mother of 2, then that's socialism. If you're helping the working poor pay their medical bills, that's socialism, and probably creeping totalitarianism.

But we can brag on TV about building schools for Iraqis, and that's NOT socialism. But--you guess it--large American corporations have won contracts to rebuild those schools, along with those huge military bases over there. What is an what is not socialism has more to do with who gets to pocket the money than it does with any fidelity to Karl Marx. Care to look into how much federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans, compared to how much is spent on rebuilding Iraq? If you spend money in New Orleans, then small local firms may get some of the contracts, and the money may be spent, and most importantly earned, locally. If you spend in Iraq, all of the money goes into the coffers of large companies with sweetheart deals, such as Haliburton.

Small mom-and-pop contractors don't have contacts in the Department of Defense and White House. But if you get big enough, you get to engage in nation-building as part of someone's "vision," like PNAC, and then that isn't socialism, even if you're building the very things that WOULD be socialism if you were building it for Americans back home.

Re:You're oversimplifying

[misanthrope101]

Sheesh, read what I wrote. If money is spent to rebuild infrastructure stateside, then those goods and services are still being provided, no? Even with government-financed health care, or universal internet access, or any such service, goods and services are still being provided. Yet critics wail "that isn't the job of government--you're making government too big!" even though they'll support the same purchases for Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The only difference I can see between building infrastructure in Iraq and building it stateside is that if you build it overseas the contracts are funnelled to a few big-ticket companies, all of which have ties to the White House and Dept of Defense. If you spend the money stateside, more people benefit, but then you don't have high-paid lobbyists clamoring for infrastructure dollars anymore.

Yes, I'm aware of the textbook definition of socialism, thanks, but I was referring to the seemingly obvious fact that if you want to fund infrastructure (water plants, hospitals, power plants) with public funds, the same people who have no problem rebuilding Iraq will complain about encroaching socialism. If you're so concerned about it being a "handout" to give a poor single parent money to live, then institute work programs, and then you'll have the goods and services you care about. But no one is interested in any programs whose main beneficiaries are poor people.

Of course, $100 given to a poor single mother will be pushed right back into the economy, creating just as many jobs as $100 given to Raytheon or some other weapons manufacturer. But everyone acts as if poor people burn their money in little bonfires, forgetting that a dollar spent by a bum is just as good at creating jobs as a dollar spent by a CEO. We basically just worship success, so we funnel money to big corporations as if we need more weapons. Hell, Congress just reauthorized weapons that the DoD said they didn't even need! So yes, the weapons companies are providing goods and services, but if we're buying goods and services we don't really need, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, then that's morally no different than paying poor people $2000 a month to pick up litter. It's just a wealth redistribution program, only one that gets the nod from the "I love the free market" types, while the other is labeled as "big government." Give me a break.

Re:You're oversimplifying

[Bert64]

Iraqi construction companies should be rebuilding iraq... Financed by the american government.
The Iraqi construction companies built the country in the first place, and the american government destroyed it. American companies shouldn't be profiting at the expense of Iraq, Iraq should be compensated for their losses and this compensation should go into the local economy.

It's useless to round all fuzzy values to 1

[tepples]

If it's a bit State regulated, it's State regulated. If not, it's free.

If false is the law of the jungle and true is totalitarianism, then whether a particular enterprise is regulated by the state is a fuzzy-valued membership function, not a boolean-valued indicator function. The prohibitions of murder and bank robbery are state regulations; therefore, all business is state regulated to some degree. Your way of defuzzifying this, by rounding all fuzzy values greater than false to true, makes your logic useless.

Re:Not really anything new

[dangitman]

"Competitively" is a good thing - because state help shifts the burden of business' poor planning from this business to the taxpayer. There is also no "middle ground" - either you have help or you don't, you succeed by your own merits or have assistance or gimped opponents.

But what if the State does the opposit of helping - i.e enact regulations that shift the burden from the taxpayer to the private corporation, and make corporations responsible for actions like pollution and product safety? That's not "free" and it's not "helping" - so I guess there must be more than two options, huh?