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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (78794)	8/2/2006 4:30:43 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

The rightwing is for UN-regulation not just DE-regulation. They did the same thing with the S+L's and look what happened. The energy gouging is even worse because it all takes place behind their fortress doors. Without stronjg leadership in the White House we can't even get through those doors.

To: TimF who wrote (78794)	8/2/2006 11:41:17 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

Tim - Some people seem to think that it's always a bad idea for government to regulate businesses. I don't agree. Too often, the need to maximize profits causes companies to act against the general public interest. Here's an example of how government regulation of technology can be a good thing. In the 90's, The European Community got together and decreed that all cellular telephone systems in Europe would use the GSM standard. The U.S. government didn't want to get involved in making a decision like that. They wanted to let the market sort it out. The net result is that Europe is way ahead of the U.S. in terms of the quality, reliability, and availability of cellular telephone service. They also have much better availability of broadband over cellular. Here, we had a bunch of companies trying to maximize profits by building their own networks that weren't compatible with each other. It ended up as kind of a mess, really, and it wasn't efficient in any way. A lot of money was wasted in duplicating efforts, and companies that bet on inferior technologies like TDMA eventually had to switch, which was very expensive and inefficient. How about that? The free market solution was less efficient than the "socialist" one. - Allen