Parallel Processing
March 2002
by RSW (c)
"It's never been this bad, not even close," says one expert in the WSJ's Telecom Troubles Spread From Upstarts To Sector's Leaders.
Now that it is obvious to everyone that telecom deregulation has been a total bust, it's worth recalling that when it was rolled out in 1996 it was the nearly universal view of all academics, economists, regulators and politicians that the interventionists' brilliant competition plans would improve service across the board and form the basis for many new and vibrant businesses.
Now, instead, "competition has become unexpectedly cruel" and the industry that was once heralded as the wave of the future is on its way to being buried in bankruptcy. Of course, in keeping with the hypocrisy of the day (or naiveté -- it's often hard to tell which) the interventions were not billed by the interventionists as such. Like all antitrust efforts, they were billed as the best way to actually free the industry of intervention, demonstrating both the incompetence of the experts and their willingness to cover their incompetence with hypocritical pretense: "No, we're not intervening; we're only here to fix this industry by creating free market competition." And none of them even today would consider that the answer isn't still further intervention. Almost none, for example, would repeal the antitrust laws that underlie all telecom intervention.
As described [previously], telecom isn't the only industry that is being destroyed by a combination of the incompetence and hypocrisy of experts. OK, OK -- maybe some of them are just naive. But how many times can you see them make the same mistakes before you stop believing that? The fact is that, regardless of the etiology of their errors, they all build careers and aggrandize power for themselves by dint of their interventions. And the point I want to make today is that their push for money, prestige and power -- regardless of the source of its energy -- is capable of creating bandwagon effects so powerful that everyone else gets sucked into their we-can-fix-it fantasy. That is why almost everyone believed in deregulation of telecom, and deregulation of electric power, and deregulation of airlines, etc, etc, etc[...n]o matter how demonstrably false the claim, the interventionists keep on uttering it -- and keep on intervening. |
