Because Red Hat is a pure open source company, its culture is something between a democracy and a commune. This comes from the nature of open source, where writing software is always a collaboration.

With that kind of culture “you might be arrogant in believing that open source is the way to go,” she [Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Marketing Jackie Yeaney] says, but this prevents people from becoming arrogant themselves—including executives.

“If you believe in open source, you know you don’t know best. There’s all these other people around that can provide input and make it better,” Yeaney says.
[...]
“It’s not that people think they are going to take a vote, or that all of their ideas will get in. But they want to be part of the process and be heard,” she says. “You have to build credibility and respect at a place like Red Hat, and it really doesn’t matter what your title says. It’s more what you say and do who is going with you.”

“It’s one of the only places I know where the CEO can say ‘I’d like XYZ to happen’ and it may or not happen,” she jokes.

This type of work environment is coming to every company, too, Yeaney is convinced.

“A lot of what Red Hat faced because of the open source culture all companies are starting to face because of millennials in the workplace and social media. Companies are becoming more open whether they like it or not,” she says.

I hope Yeaney is right and that this type of cooperative, collaborative work environment will spread, and fast. In such a work environment, it seems to me that people can only succeed and advance based on merit and value added, their ideas must be deemed worthy by several coworkers and collaborators for them to be implemented, ideas are more likely to be improved by collaboration before being implemented, people have to earn the respect of others instead of respect being forced on underlings, and they will have a much harder time rising to the level of their incompetence, as the adage goes.

That’s not to say other, more traditionally structured companies don’t strive to exhibit these characteristics to some extent, but my guess is that Red Hat’s advantages stem directly from its exhibiting these characteristics to a much greater extent. Red Hat seems to have a hierarchy without much hierarchy. Maybe some people would call their work culture left-libertarian. Either way, the existence (and, in fact, abundance) of non-traditional work cultures, business models, and employment situations, aside from the actual nature of any specific work environment, is libertarian because a free society would obviously have more companies structured like Red Hat because it would have more variety in all societal institutions and structures. In a free society it would be legal and feasible to at least try many business models that are either outlawed or made impractical by State regulation, and if they are profitable and attractive to employees, then all libertarians would say let them flourish.

Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.
[...]
In the early 20th Century, a different moral panic gripped the United States: a rural nation was rapidly moving to anonymous cities, sexual mores were changing, and Americans became convinced that an epidemic of white female slavery was sweeping the land. Thus a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport any person across state lines for prostitution “or for any other immoral purpose.” Suddenly premarital sex and adultery had been criminalized, as scam artists would quickly figure out. “Women would lure male conventioneers across a state line, say from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey,” David Langum explains, “and then threaten to expose them to the prosecutors for violation” unless paid off. Inveighing against the law, the New York Times noted that, though it was officially called the White Slave Traffic Act (aka The Mann Act), a more apt name would’ve been “the Encouragement of Blackmail Act.”

That name is what brought the anecdote back to me. A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act. At issue is how to catch child pornographers. It’s too hard now, say the bill’s backers, and I can sympathize. It’s their solution that appalls me: under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

I kid you not — that’s it.

As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn’t require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history — being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information. As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.) “It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I’m not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children.”

Among those risks: blackmail.

In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I’ve Googled in the course of researching this item include “moral panic about child pornography” and “blackmailing enemies with Internet history.” For most people, it’s easy enough to recall terms you’ve searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. …

You’d thing that Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who claims on his Web site to be “an outspoken defender of individual privacy rights,” wouldn’t lend his name to this bill. But he co-sponsored it! You’d think that the Justice Department of Eric Holder, who is supposed to be friendly to civil libertarians, would oppose this bill. Just the opposite.

(I didn’t quote the part about tea partiers failing to oppose it because they obviously have, once they have heard about it.)

I’m not the least bit surprised Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder supports (supported?) this bill. It’s completely consistent with this regime’s hunger for power and disregard for all civil liberties.

You know what else wasn’t surprising? Lamar Smith (R-TX), who introduced SOPA in the House, also introduced PCIPA on May 25, 2011. He is a frightening, alarming, parasitic, authoritarian control freak whose every action and word seem to prove that he should have no access to power of any kind.

On the bright side, the January 17 internet “blackout” day of protest against SOPA and PIPA prompted several lawmakers to withdraw their support for the respective bills, with 13 more following on January 18. As left-libertarians are fond of saying and other libertarians need to be more vocal and specific about, “public” or “community action” doesn’t have to mean voting and government action. Massive protests might very well have succeeded in killing these bills in their current forms.

Ron Paul has introduced a bill to repeal section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, the part that authorizes the President to order the military detention, without charge or trial, of any American citizen who has been labeled as having “substantially supported certain terrorist groups”. Yet another reason I think Ron Paul deserves more attention and praise, especially among libertarian anarchists who demur over actually supporting him because of perfectly valid philosophical reasons (they don’t like his stance on immigration, for instance, so they will not actually vote for or support the candidacy of anyone they have any differences with, or anyone at all, for that matter). Still, it becomes more obvious every day that he is on our side and does a great job spreading the message of liberty from his platform, which is that of a politician. As Glenn Greenwald would be quick to point out (actually, has already been), praising a few of Ron Paul’s positions, votes, and introduced bills doesn’t mean you’re going to vote for him, hope that he wins, agree with him 100% of the time, or even support democracy as an acceptable or effective means of change (well, Greenwald hasn’t mentioned this last one). I, for one, do hope he wins the Republican nomination and would probably vote for him if he did. In fact, I’m likely to vote for him in Michigan’s primary.

The city of Detroit will soon go bankrupt and its finances likely put under the the charge of a governor-appointed (corporate) emergency manager. When Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was elected in 2010, he received much criticism for his “emergency manager” law, which would place a bankrupt city’s finances under some type of corporate manager(s) appointed by him. This criticism reached new heights recently when he defended this law in his State of the State address, said it could apply to Detroit soon, and became the object of street protests outside his home. Maybe if Detroit hadn’t recklessly run up its debt as its revenue plummeted and its idiotic citizenry, led by both unions and corporations, hadn’t twice elected that worthless, disgusting abomination of a human being Kwame Kilpatrick as mayor, the city wouldn’t be in such financial ruin.

But of course Detroit unions oppose any substantial cuts or an emergency manager and basically seem to be saying they don’t want to suffer now, regardless of what this will mean for later. Many other voters, Republicans, and Democrats in and around Detroit are saying the same thing. My perspective on Detroit’s dilemma reminds me of the battle between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and government unions: it is perfectly libertarian and principled to oppose both the public-sector unions resisting the cuts and the governor’s proposals to balance budgets. That said, the city of Detroit and especially the people responsible for its finances don’t have the option of “well, we just oppose everything” and will have to choose some course that will result in its citizens and businesses losing either more or less money. I feel compelled to opine not only on the root causes of their problem (monopolistic government, democracy, a captive tax base, corporate–government collusion, union–government collusion) but also on the situation they currently face: bankruptcy and further debt and loss of money, or bankruptcy and a governor-appointed emergency financial manager. Maybe there are more options, but it’s hard to criticize the governor too much on this point. It seems almost certain that the Detroit city government will go bankrupt, so what’s wrong with an austerity plan that will make it less bad? Medicine tastes bad, but you have to take it. The opponents of the emergency manager say that it is undemocratic and requires too many concessions by unions. Well, democracy and government-supporting (especially Democrat-supporting) unions largely caused Detroit’s problems in the first place, so they sure as hell shouldn’t be relied on to solve its problems. The only thing that seems a little inequitable about the demand that unions make concessions to balance the budget is that unions aren’t responsible for all of the city’s debt; decades of mismanagement by officials and businesses are equally responsible, and they don’t appear to be required to make concessions or any types of payments or contributions to fix the problem they helped create.

The Monster Cable company claims EBay, Craigslist, Costco, Sears, Backpages, FatWallet, PriceGrabber, and ComputerShopper are “rogue” sites that should be targeted for takedown by the Imperial Federal Government, such as by SOPA/PIPA-type legislation, which of course it supports. While I have to admit I see nothing about a free society that would prevent a company like Monster Cable from existing and succeeding, that doesn’t mean I can’t rail on it for the dishonest, conniving, exploitative, Statist, anti-consumer, piece-of-shit company that it is. Monster Cable has issued cease-and-desist letters to other cable makers for completely frivolous patent infringement reasons. It has sued a mini golf company, an automotic transmission shop, and a deer salt block company for trademark infringement. Monster Cable’s entire business model, other than using the patent system and the courts to try to bully people into giving it money, seems to be exploiting customers who think more expensive HDMI cables are even one iota better than cheap ones. Regardless of company or price, all standard HDMI cables perform identically (barring some defect, which is vanishingly rare). It is not the least bit surprising that Monster endorses fascist government takedown of any website that treats consumers well or doesn’t subscribe to Monster’s fantastical acid trip of a definition of property, theft, and criminality. Fuck Monster Cable and everyone who works for it, especially its lawyers.

Speaking of SOPA, its author, Lamar Smith (R-TX) is, not surprisingly, a hypocrite who violated provisions of SOPA that would have labeled him a criminal. Lamar Smith is a despicable scumbag on the level of Kwame Kilpatrick. He’s a clueless Republican authoritarian control freak who ought to be locked away in a nuthouse for the rest of his life as a precaution for the rest of society.

In case you doubt how much power and influence the United States professional criminal class has on policies all around the world: the U.S. ambassador to Spain threatened to put Spain on a trade blacklist if it didn’t pass SOPA-style site-blocking legislation. Of course, Wikileaks, which has all but vanished from the news in recent months, leaked the documents that revealed this. Later, “American Chamber of Commerce in Spain chief Jaime Malet wrote a cautionary letter to incoming Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. He warned of the potential flight of foreign investment from Spain and urged him to take action on the protection of intellectual property once in office.” Rajoy’s government responded by passing acceptable legislation, known as the Sinde law, within 10 days of taking office.

$56 billion later, airport security is still junk.

So far, 80% of “green energy” loans the Obama Department of Energy has issued have gone to top Obama donors, according to Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer.

TechDirt says SOPA, if enacted, would create “The Great Firewall of America”.

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica says SOPA would kill the internet as we know it by replacing freedom and chaos with order and restrictions. He says that if SOPA were passed into law, the internet of the 1990′s wouldn’t “sound like something from a foreign country so much as something from a foreign planet“. He quotes the violent, aggressive, indecent, anti-social, anti-civilization RIAA: “‘An Internet of chaos may meet a utopian vision but surely undermines the societal values of safe and secure families and job and revenue-creating commerce,’ said the music group in 2010. It later called for ‘an Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos.’” He continues, “The trends have been present for years, but if SOPA passes, it will make them explicit: the chaotic, unfilterable, borderless Internet of the 1990s is truly dead, replaced by an Internet of order, filtered connections, and national borders.”

Larry Downs at CNet.com says SOPA “creates vague, sweeping new standards for secondary liability, drafted to ensure maximum litigation. It treats all U.S. consumers as guilty until proven innocent. If passed, the bill would give media companies unprecedented new powers to shape the structure and content of the Internet.” Downs’s column contains numerous other highlights:

“Rather than give up on the idea of legislating a fast-changing Internet, the House authors have instead built in as many alternative definitions, open-ended requirements, and undefined terms as they could.”
[...]
[SOPA includes] “new authority for the attorney general to cut off access and funding for “parasite” foreign Web sites. (SOPA requires the U.S. copyright czar to determine the extent to which these foreign infringers are actually harming U.S. interests….”
[...]
Search engines (a term broadly defined that includes any website with a “search” field), along with payment processors and advertising networks, can also be forced to cut ties with the parasites. Operators of innocent sites have limited ability to challenge the Justice Department’s decision before or after action is taken.

SOPA also includes its own version of another Senate bill, which would make it a felony to stream copyrighted works. The House version allows prosecution of anyone who “willfully” includes protected content without permission, including, for example, YouTube videos where copyrighted music is covered or even played in the background.

While supporters deny that such minimal infractions would meet the bill’s definition of “willfully,” the actual text suggests otherwise. Prosecutors need only demonstrate that the use had a total “retail value” of more than $1,000.
[...]
The House bill also makes significant changes to provisions in the Senate bill that afford new enforcement tools to private holders of copyrights and trademarks. This “market-based system,” as SOPA calls it, greatly extends existing provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, under which copyright holders can easily issue takedown notices for unlicensed use of protected content.

SOPA’s “market based” provisions are not limited to foreign Web sites. Indeed, they apply to any site or “portion of” a site that is “dedicated to theft of U.S. property”….

Unlike the DMCA, SOPA provides little penalty for wrongly targeting websites turn out not to be “dedicated to theft of U.S. property.”
[...]
SOPA may represent the most intrusive and dangerous effort yet to micromanage Internet infrastructure and services. A wide range of technology-oriented advocacy groups were quick to cry foul. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in its initial review of the bill, determined the legislation would cause irreparable harm. “This bill cannot be fixed,” the organization wrote on its Web site; “it must be killed.”

The Center for Democracy and Technology’s David Sohn, similarly, called out the bill’s broad and vague new standards for “facilitating” copyright and trademark infringement.

He argues that SOPA effectively introduces new monitoring requirements for all websites that allow user content, even comments posted to blogs.

Downs’s report contains so much more information that I’m not even done reading it yet.

The more you hear about Congress’s attempts to govern, restrain, regulate, cleanse, police, and secure the internet, the more obvious it becomes that what our professional criminal class really seeks is to choke our freedoms, destroy the internet’s openness, control our activities and exchanges (and even eventually our speech), and protect wealthy, well-connected, campaign-contributing copyright holders at the expense of the common people. To make this observation is not conspiratorial, it is not kooky; it is obvious. It’s as plain as day. Reading about the input that copyright holders had in writing the E-PARASITE and PROTECT IP acts and the immense support copyright holders are giving them underscores the now-obvious fact that any nominally “private” corporation or person that has an active, interested role in violating people’s rights, diminishing their well-being, or carrying out the State’s depredations belongs squarely in the professional criminal class alongside the politicians.

The fact that these conniving parasites even want such power is proof that they shouldn’t have it.

Amazon.com is resisting the state of California’s new law that intends to force online retailers to collect sales tax for California transactions. Amazon, of course, argues this would be bad for business and the economy as a whole, and it is threatening to simply stop doing business in states that impose a sales tax on it. This is Manjoo’s take on it:

There are two powerful arguments in the tax debate between Amazon.com and the state of California. On the one hand, there’s simple fairness. For years, online retailers—which weren’t required to collect sales tax on purchases from Californians—have enjoyed a huge advantage over physical stores, which must collect sales tax. … Tax proponents also argue that the law will let the state’s businesses compete against online stores, thereby creating local jobs.

Are you fucking kidding me? Raising taxes is a good strategy to create local jobs? What is this, 1700? Is this any different from the mercantilism that the field of modern economics was basically created to refute? One group of companies must impose sales taxes on its customers, and another group doesn’t, and this puts the former group at a competitive disadvantage. The only solution you propose to remedy this asymmetry is to impose equal taxes on the latter group. That doesn’t seem a little odd to you? There doesn’t seem to be any proposal missing from this debate? No other solution strikes you as even worth mentioning? No, guess not.

And then there’s the other side of the argument: ARE YOU KIDDING, YOU WANT TO RAISE MY PRICES, WTF???
[...]
In other words, this isn’t an argument between two equally reasonable positions. It’s an argument between reason and emotion, between your brain and your gut. Amazon has no intellectually sound arguments against collecting taxes from residents—by all ethical and civic standards, its position is unsound. Instead, Amazon is counting on our emotions prevailing…. [emphasis added]

Are you motherfucking kidding me? Amazon has no reasonable arguments against collecting taxes, and its anti-tax position is unsound by all ethical and civic standards? Since I can pretty well guess the type of intellect that would arrive at this interpretation of the Amazon/California sales tax debate, I am going to guess that Farhad Manjoo deems all arguments against online sales taxes unethical and unsound, not just the particular ones Amazon is making and not just in the state of California.

To make it clear which other arguments against online sales taxes I am referring to (and all taxes that have ever been or ever will be imagined, proposed, debated, or implemented in the history of the universe), let me state the only argument that is needed: All taxation is theft, and all taxes are therefore unjust. All tax collectors, tax bill writers, tax imposers, tax renewers, tax failing-to-opposers, and tax supporters are either thieves or accessories to theft and would be dealt with, in a just society, in proportion to the severity of their crimes. Taxation is nothing more than legalized theft by a professional criminal class, a gang of thieves writ large. It is a metaphysical impossibility for any tax to be the slightest bit just by any consistent, logical, moral, or ethical standard, in any situation or for any purpose whatsoever.

Now that that’s clear, and since Manjoo claims to be all for reason and logic and against emotion and inconsistency, let’s muse at what else he must consider unethical, unreasonable, and unsound for ethics’ and consistency’s sake. I’ve already mentioned that Manjoo’s version of logic would deem American abolitionists’ anti-slavery position unethical and unsound because abolishing slavery would prevent northern whites from enslaving people like their southern counterparts did and prevent blacks from enslaving whites as equally as they were enslaved. Also, the Jews in Nazi Germany were using only emotion and not reason when they opposed the Nuremberg Laws instead of supporting equally oppressive laws for all. (Godwin demerits: -5.) According to Manjoo’s logic, the solution to our seemingly never-ending War on Terror and the terrorism it inspires that forced us to wage it is for some Middle Eastern countries to invade the Unites States, kill thousands of civilians, take out a few of our war leaders, and overthrow our government, because obviously two (million) wrongs make a right. Instead of eliminating the regulations that restrain some individuals and businesses but provide loopholes for large, powerful, well-connected corporations, Manjoo must favor ever-increasing restraints to trade until no one is allowed to conduct any economic activity (except the government, of course). Instead of simply legalizing prostitution and marijuana, Manjoo must favor outlawing sex after a date in which the man pays for dinner and must long for a return to alcohol prohibition, because under current law, prostitutes and marijuana growers and sellers suffer from “unethical” and “unfair” disadvantages. Manjoo’s twisted version of logic and consistency also dictates that violence against women, gays, and children be combatted by fostering a more violent, aggressive culture on all sides rather than striving to eliminate as much violence as possible in the first place.

I think Farhad Manjoo’s ideal society must be that of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, in which everybody is hindered equally by a wise and all-knowing State.

If people like Farhad Manjoo had any influence in society, we would live in a world in which a parasitic political class tried to take as much wealth from its citizens as it could, demagogues spewed rhetoric of fairness and equality while swindling everybody, the masses blindly followed them and ignorantly parroted their slogans while failing to scrutinize their policies with any intelligence or skepticism, and a fascist police state imprisoned world-record numbers of innocent citizens for victimless crimes while fostering an ever more violent, discordant, divided, intolerant, uncooperative culture.

Manjoo has the gall to continue typing after assaulting his readers with such an affront to logic and decency. He delves into some legalistic arguments about Amazon’s “presence” in the state of California and the California laws that should make its sales taxable, so, you know, of course, if some politicians in the past voted for and judges in the past approved of various tax laws—politicians and judges whom possibly a very small minority of current California voters have actually voted for and tax laws that possibly no one in the state of California or elsewhere was actually allowed to vote on—then those taxes are “fair” for all of eternity or until our wise and gracious overlords take it upon themselves to repeal them for us. He dismisses Amazon’s position as either disingenuous or childish or both, because some politicians and judges have said Amazon’s sales should be taxable. That honestly seems to be the extent of his argument. What an apologist, Statolatrist boob.

Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Paul Misener (aptronym alert!), put out a statement that borrows from the rhetoric of the Tea Party. The ballot initiative is “a referendum on jobs and investment in California,” he said, and “with unemployment at well over 11 percent, Californians deserve a voice and a choice about jobs, investment, and the state’s economic future.” If Amazon spends substantial sums to push such a ballot measure next fall, it’s hard to see how it could lose. The ads write themselves: Don’t let greedy lawmakers tax your Internet purchases!

Though I doubt most voters would care to pick apart such a populist message, such a sound bite falls apart under scrutiny. For example, the idea that Amazon is an “out-of-state” retailer in California is a complete fiction.

You see, opposition to sales taxes is all emotion and demagoguery. There is no economic, rational, or moral argument behind it.

He concludes,

The reasons for Amazon’s tax battle are obvious. It’s not that it can’t institute a sensible tax collection regime, but that it won’t, because it has no incentive to do so. Amazon’s position may be indefensible, but it has a trump card. Raise your hand if you want higher prices. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Gee, an absence of taxes promotes economic activity because prices can remain lower. Companies that don’t have to impose sales taxes have an economic advantage over those that do. Our entire country and especially the state of California seem to be suffering from a deficiency in economic activity (and also personal savings), so I wonder what we could do to spur some more economic activity and help people sustain or augment their bank accounts. Maybe ELIMINATE TAXES INSTEAD OF IMPOSING NEW ONES?

I know it isn’t fair to berate this poor liberal columnist because he suffers from a lack of imagination that would allow him to envision any activity, personal or economic, private or public, that could be conducted between two consenting parties that didn’t require the benevolent hand of the State enabling and supporting it, so he could never imagine supporting any measure that would decrease government revenue or decrease government spending, but I honestly thought that it would have occurred to someone with a job that affords him a personal computer and an internet connection that one solution to the sales tax inconsistency that exists between internet and brick-and-mortar stores is to ELIMINATE EVERYONE’S TAXES! Is that too abominable to even mention? Is that idea so abhorrent that it never even occurred to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. It would never occur to him that government (particularly, California’s state government) is a huge part of our economic problems and that any measure to decrease its revenue should at least be considered.

The bottom line is that Amazon’s transactions with its customers are mutually consensual exchanges that harm no one, and the absence of sales taxes on them also harms no one. If others are harmed by other taxes, then the solution is to eliminate those harmful taxes rather than attempting to harm everyone equally.

Robert Heinlein famously said, “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Manjoo wants politicians that you didn’t vote for to control your behavior, control your money, and control every company’s behavior and money as well. He has no good intentions on this issue, and his ignorance or bias is not an excuse. People like him are dangerous and uncivil, and we are surrounded by them.

Speaking of large internet-related companies, Canadian ISPs admitted that their pricing structure (which they call “usage-based billing”) is designed to discourage/reduce internet use by its customers. Cory Doctorow writes, “In other words, they’ve set out to limit the growth of networked based business and new kinds of services, and to prevent Canadians experimentation that enables them to use the Internet to its fullest.” Michael Geist, whom he quotes, says that this pricing model, therefore, is more accurately called behavior-based billing. As a rule, private companies in a free market always strive to attract more customers in order to do more business and make more money, in contrast to government-created “companies” and government agencies, which always seem to be seeking to limit the amount of products or services they have to provide to customers (water, electricity, every office you have to go and wait in line). This indicates that Canadian ISPs are not truly private companies in anything resembling a free market.

Another company that is not close to being entirely “private” and operates in a market that isn’t close to being free is Time Warner. Time Warner supported a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would prevent city governments from introducing fiber-optic broadband infrastructure in their cities. Simple pro-business right-wing conflationists reflexively support a bill that would prevent city governments from doing anything (especially providing a product or service that can and/or should be provided by private companies) and reflexively support the interests of private businesses. They are not entirely wrong, because the ultimate solution is not to get city governments into the fiber-optic broadband business or any other utility. However, the solution that would help the residents of cities where broadband is scarce, expensive, or nonexistent is to remove the regulations that are keeping it that way rather than passing new laws that seem to be mainly aimed at propping up telecom giants. No, I don’t know what laws North Carolina or any other state might have passed restricting competition and expansion in the broadband industry, but, well, look at this bill. It’s a bill that the state legislature will pass that will have profound effects on the telecom industry. It is undoubtedly one bill out of thousands across the country that have set regulations and restrictions on telecommunications, always to the detriment of the average (or, especially, poor) citizen.

Higher education might be the next asset bubble. Well, it’s certainly overpriced, a situation that is entirely the result of government interventions (mainly guaranteed loans to everybody) whose purpose is to make college affordable to more people. All government action has unintended consequences.

This is a great TED talk by Indian scientist Sugata Mitra about how children can teach themselves (and motivate themselves) when given the opportunity (and the necessity) to do so.

Speaking of the problems with traditional, regimented, government education, Boston University Psychology professor Peter Gray writes about the seven sins of our forced-education system. He expands upon a previous post in which he called forced education “prison”. In this post, he also outlines seven reasons compulsory education is harmful to society and not just the children who are currently forced to go to school. Numbers 3 and 4 are “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance” and “Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.” It’s a really good, brief read.

Sixty-three percent of people killed in the Iraq War have been civilians.

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

Glenn Greenwald is dismayed at the speed with which the Obama regime’s official reason for sending military aid to Libya changed.

Glenn Greenwald writes another masterful post on America’s two-tiered justice system: one standard of justice for legislators, high-level bureaucrats, and their big-business cronies, and another standard for everyone else. It is not possible to read Glenn Greenwald consistently and objectively and remain an Obama supporter, or possibly even a Democratic Party supporter.

However, aside from those philosophical or economic arguments, you can take the easy road and can cite the fact that everything the government touches turns to crap and that government involvement always, necessarily, invariably leads to government control and government restriction. Your politics and philosophy aside, governments only exist to regulate and control everything, and their control only spreads and strengthens over time, not recedes when it becomes unpopular or impractical. As Mises wrote, one government intervention always seems to lead to another intervention to fix the problems that the first intervention caused, et cetera ad socialism. The fact that a net neutrality debate is even necessary is solely due to prior government intervention in creating telecom monopolies and regulating them through the Federal Communications Commission, and the net neutrality legislation that we will inevitably suffer will only beget more legislation. Here’s a helpful hint for your daily life: when you hear “legislation”, think “restrictions of free choices backed by threats of violent punishment for disobedience”.

In the case of the government controls that will follow net neutrality legislation, it might not be exactly the problems caused by such legislation that lead Congress and the FCC to instate new measures to fix those problems, but rather the opportunity to control and the lust for power will simply be too great to pass up. As a rare intelligent and informed redditor put it (hat tip Mises Blag),

So let me get this straight….the government, the same government that punishes success through the tax code, prevents innovation through burdensome regulation, can’t spend within its means, bails out billionaires with working people’s money, and has created a ponzi scheme in the form of social security to threatens to bankrupt the nation, and generally screwed up everything it has ever touched, getting involved in regulating the internet, is going to help increase speech, entrepreneurship, and innovation? Pardon me for being a little skeptical.

I’ll tell you what will really happen. The first 6 months will be fine. Then, first you will see federal taxes on internet purchases, then you will see ‘fairness’ controls that will restrict the content of what you can say, then you will see political speech regulated in the name of ‘campaign finance reform’, then you will see federal business licenses required for selling goods on the internet, required encryption backdoors, required technologies, national ‘internet IDs’, mandatory content filtering, a ban on anonymizing technologies, and 1,000 other terrors that I can’t even imagine right now. Regardless of the pure intents of the people wanting to push government enforced net neutrality, this will make the internet subject to politics and big money interests.

Here is what you will really get… Boy MP3′s sure are disruptive technology, not anymore! The president just appointed the head of BMG as the ‘internet czar’ (czar=no senate approval required!), after a $5 million campaign contribution, and he just decided that MP3s only exist to facilitate copyright infringement, and therefore must be filtered by all ISPs. And you just thought it would make your netflix download faster.

Government enforced Net neutrality is a dangerous idea that only serves to open the door to the destruction of the internet at the hands of government regulators. A better way would be an industry consortium that self-regulated net-neutrality and ostracized companies that didn’t play ball. Plus, people need to vote with their dollars. Your ISP is throttling Netflix? Don’t do business with them.

Contrary to that dolt Al Franken saying that net neutrality is the most important free-speech issue of our time, net neutrality and everything else internet- and telecom-related are solely a government-control issue. We are all born with the absolute right to completely free speech, and the State can only infringe upon that right, not protect or augment it.

In the heady days of the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the global Internet was, by its nature, an anarchic zone of untrammeled speech inherently immune from the control of governments quite apart from any formal legal constraints on censorship. But as political scientist Henry Farrell, among other scholars, has observed:

[A] small group of privileged private actors can become “points of control”—states can use them to exert control over a much broader group of other private actors. This is because the former private actors control chokepoints in the information infrastructure or in other key networks of resources. They can block or control flows of data or of other valuable resources among a wide variety of other private actors.

The freedom of the global Internet comes with an increased dependence on globalized intermediaries, over whom political actors in large and valuable markets will typically exert enormous leverage. A dissident publication running its own press may have an incentive to resist that political pressure—but a multinational credit card company or hosting provider, for whom the publisher is a relatively insignificant source of revenue—will often find its bottom line better served by compliance. As Farrell notes, we’ve already seen a similar strategy pursued against offshore gambling sites, whose payment processors were threatened with litigation by ambitious prosecutors.

It’s a sobering validation of Friedrich Hayek’s famous dictum that to be controlled in our economic pursuits—perhaps now more than ever—means to be controlled in everything. Whatever you think of Wikileaks, the idea that a controversial speaker can be so effectively attacked quite outside the bounds of any direct legal process, thanks to the enormous leverage our government exerts on global telecommunications and finance firms, ought to provoke immense concern for the future of free expression online.

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), also known as the domain-seizure law. With this flabbergasting dismissal of basic rights to free speech, perhaps some Democrat supporters will change their tune and begin openly criticizing many in their party for being the freedom-hating fascists that they are.

[UPDATE: Ooh, it looks like Senator Ron Wyden, another Democrat, has put a hold on the bill, preventing it from being passed during this session of Congress and forcing it to be re-introduced in the next session if anyone wants it to be voted on. That is very good news for the internet and the First Amendment.]

The Senate will soon vote on the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2010, which would give the federal government the authority to dictate food prices, growing practices, how food is transported, and which foods can be eaten, grown, sold, and traded. It would most likely give more leeway and power to producers of genetically modified foods, which, validly or not, millions of people distrust and refuse to eat. This law would be to our daily sustenance what the Federal Reserve is to our money and the Drug War is to drug consumption—think raids, imprisonment, black markets, bureaucracy, impoverishment, degradation of standards, and massive shortages. The House version is sponsored by John Dingell, a worthless specimen of sub-human scum who apparently hasn’t taken away enough freedoms, ruined enough lives, or killed enough people in his heinous, disgusting waste of a life, and who is also my representative from the 15th district of Michigan.