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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.'"
1: Socialism and capitalism are coexisting RIGHT NOW. Unless you believe that your ridiculous anarchist fantasy could survive the predations of organized nations using just its privatized, non-communist military. Every nation has a completely communist, authoritarian military. The military produces no goods and subsists entirely off of taxation of the labour of real people. The same goes for the police, and indeed the government itself. Are we socialist? Hardly. You don't have to choose, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just some kind of deranged fanatic that's one pamphlet away from assasinating people and blowing up buildings.
What the hell do you call that, if not a government? It may not be a federal or state government, but it's people organizing and consolidating money and power to accomplish goals. That's government (probably municipal in this case). That's why anarchy never works. People invariably want to gather together to accomplish goals that they couldn't achieve on their own. Rather than waste all their time overseeing every aspect of the project, they appoint a few people to manage it while everyone else just contributes resources and gets back to their own work. Now they have a government and taxes.
Centuries of ... human nature have made us accept that organization is natural, unavoidable, and overwhelming. The most organized group will, at best, assimilate the rest; as often as not, it will annihilate them.
I work for a living. I work fucking hard at shitty jobs to pay for school so that I can do better, more valuable jobs at some point. Unlike the cowards I deal with everyday, paying a few taxes doesn't reduce me to fits of crying and impotence. I drive our roads, I use our sewer systems. I benefit from a government that defends the border and fights crime without my needing a personal bodyguard. I benefit from the fact that the government stomps monopolies and prevents them from price-fixing or creating (much) artificial scarcity. We've seen anarchy -- anarchy is the five minutes before a warlord enslaves you and your family and puts you to work picking opium poppies at gunpoint. Anarchy is the window of opportunity for the worst kinds of government to establish themselves. Anarchy is so monstrous that it convinces everyone to put power into the hands of a despotic church or a monarchy, and thanks them for the safety of slavery.
So you know what? I'll take the minor hassle of a few taxes, and having to fill out a few forms now and then. It's that, or paying ten times as much in protection money to the local organized crime ring that has a monopoly on security and murders anyone that tries to compete.
The real crux of it is that democracy trumps economics. If 50%+1 of the people say that we should all pay taxes for a health care system, we do it. If 50%+1 of the people say we turn the rest into dog food, we do it. There are balances to prevent rash, insane changes, but ultimately the people can do anything. The people want a national bank to buffer against economic fluctuations (imagine if entire military had to be sold for scrap everytime there was a downturn), so we do it. The people don't want losing a job or becoming too sick to work to be a death-sentence, so we establish a welfare system. The people don't want to have the spend time and money doing background checks into supposed hospitals and doctors everytime they have a medical emergency, so the government regulates hospitals and medical licensing. Are you tyrant enough to say that we should cast aside democracy because of your weak spine in the face of a deduction from your paycheque -- a paycheque that is already being scaled-up to take that deduction into account?
Only a fanatic suggests that an issue is black-and-white. There are always middle grounds. That's why