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Al Franken's Warning On Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "Democratic Sen. Al Franken weighed in on Net Neutrality over the weekend at the Netroots Nation conference of liberal activists in Las Vegas, calling it 'the First Amendment issue of our time,' and warning against Republican plans for less regulation. More from a blog post on CBSNews.com: 'Speculating on what the Internet could morph into under the Republicans' preferred lack of regulation, Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.'"
The "free market" theory is obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.
That's funny, I feel the same way about anything Al Franken has to say about, well, anything.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
It's the former, "Comcast controls everything b/c the government keeps its hands off."
Free market is never stated in terms for the consumer. It is always stated in terms for big business.
Ensuring that ISPs can't discriminate against the little guy (such as myself) is elitest?
What the fuck are you smoking?
My guess is oxycodone and hydrocodone.
Free Martian Whores!
I can't find the exact words, but I watched a documentary on poverty the other night, and one of the economists basically said this: "In a purely capitalist economy, the market solution to a famine is a lot of dead people. Demand for food then falls, the supply again reaches a price equilibrium, and then the problem is considered solved."
My first thought when I read this was, "What does he think caused the famine in the first place?" The most likely answer is government regulation and/or corruption.
But ignoring that, I would like to know what economic system he would propose that would solve the problem of a famine more efficiently than a free market. If you have a famine, that means that there isn't enough food for everyone. How are you going to determine who gets fed and who dies?
In a free market system, the people who are most efficient at providing goods and services that people want gets fed. When you have a famine, the goods and services that people most desire is food, therefore the people who can provide others with food are those who can get what they want. Therefore those who provide food have an incentive to produce even more food. This means that in a free market economy, any famine that develops will be as short as possible.
In any other economic system, someone other than those who actually produce food (usually the political class) get first dibs on what food is available, meaning that those who produce food are likely to work at less than optimum efficiency which results in the famine being extended beyond the minimum possible time span.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison