The FCC claims it is creating an environment to foster the free market mechanism. Yet, they make the decisions about who is to conduct business, how it is to be conducted, they set prices, control access, delimit choice, select winners and losers, embrace the technology that best supports their political position. What has any of that to do with free market mechanism? They are an anti-democratic, elitist hegemony that is an atavism of the university declared superior system of the Soviet union. It is a system controlled by a few who make decisions disconnected to the information stream conducted by every individual user. It is a reincarnation of Galbraith's WWII price setting control board which enabled the minions to "sock it to the high and mighty". The FCC has achieved the exact opposite of their stated intention. They are a dictatorship of stupidity and we have to live with the results of their handiwork. Please remind me of "checks and balances", for there are none when it comes to this holy cow.
You pay the protection money to this untouchable mob; don't you feel protected? Without them, they contend, the capitalist pigs would collude on a grand scale raising prices and reducing services just like the university illiterati have warned for a hundred years. The educated view is that anyone who believes they would compete simply doesn't know how much they love each other. Even if they don't, everyone knows that profitability rises when competition falls, just look at old Ma Bell. When you have a monopoly, you have to be pretty uneducated to believe your company is failing. Why, every university professor has spent much of the 20th century proving and re-proving that. Has it not become official grammar school text book divine truth?
Is there anyone in SI who doesn't fear an increase of competition? How could all those expert, in-for-the-long-term, well-educated, non-greedy individuals be wrong? No, they know what is obvious and that is that competition kills your trade. Have we not done that exercise on this thread? What does ATHM have if the cable system is unbundled?
T has said they can't make it unless their investment is protected. What we have here is the same attitude that rules the FCC. This anti-free market disease is endemic and so deeply rooted that what comes out under the guise of sound decision making is just random noise. How can you make good business decisions when the factors are determined by perceived social expediency? Eventually the companies mimic this attitude because they too have lost the definition of free market capitalism. I will define it.
Free for all. Wild in the streets. Laissez faire, or no fare. Eliminate fairness. Let the biggest baddest profiteering evil company stomp on everyone. Just think what would happen. We would all turn into slaves? No. Other big greedy types would slug it out with the fat man for the dollar votes. What you get out of this puerile interaction is economic efficiency and nothing is lost including anyone's quaint bag of moralistic truisms.
There are many who disagree. They're wrong. They're wrong because you will have free markets regardless who decrees what. If you attempt to abridge their freedom, the markets will go along until they have evolved a way around any unnatural constraints, so there is never any need to worry about fairness. The only rub, which was demonstrated by that glorious empire, the Soviet Union, which disappeared more discretely than the Baltimore Colts, is that interference with free market mechanism has a heavy cost in wasted lifetimes. Two generations of Russians had their lives squandered by the blatantly false conclusions of third grade European intellectuals which American intellectuals are still trying to support. The only question is whether we want the FCC to squander our lives waiting on 28.8 copper. That's what the FCC believes is in their interest, so they must be in yours.
That good enough? Am I back in form? Did you miss me? Oh, Aten, god of the sun. |
