Reworded broadband plan resold as new and improved
February 2, 2008 – 4:34 pm by JohnTim Swanson, who closely follows the internet and telecommunications world for the Mises Institute, posted an update on the theft, corporate welfare, and monopoly protection that constitutes federal telecommunications policy, which he wrote extensively about in December (here and here).
This week a report (pdf) was issued by EDUCASE which suggested that the federal government should help bankroll part of a $100 billion endeavor to roll out faster broadband/more penetration throughout the US.
The Ars writeup, like most other media outlets failed to mention that the federal government has already dumped hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and guaranteed loans into this heavily regulated industry—all under glitzy grandstanding (the NII comes to mind).
And it is unclear how the additional funds will somehow do the trick this time around. Plus, neither the EDUCASE report nor the journalists covering the story have come up with an ethical justification for how taxpayers should be hogtied into financing yet another grandiose plan from technocrats.
He’s referring to the National Information Initiative, largely spearheaded by Algore, which gave hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to telecommunications companies to extend high-speed internet to every American home. These companies never even attempted it, never gave any of the money back, and were never questioned by the federal government (at least not very sternly). As we see so often in government, failure is the surest way to grow richer, so the bureaucrats are recommending that hundreds of billions more dollars be taken from people who earned it and given to companies that have no right to it, won’t do anything with it, and wouldn’t offer the resultant products to the populace at a free-market price even if they did.
Whatever other disagreements you have with libertarians, please just admit it: The State is the entirety of the problem with the telecommunications industries, not capitalism in the least bit, and the solution to every single problem is more freedom and less government.
