🚀 go-pugleaf

Bob Schmidt writes:
 > Russ Nelson writes,
 > 
 > >I expect freedom will protect the public from commercial excess.  Please 
 > >explain to me again how a lack of freedom will protect us?
 > 
 > It's really very, very  simple -- regulation is the only thing that is
 > keeping most ISPs in business today.  Without it, the local phone company
 > wouldn't have to give an ISP squat, and the ISP would be out of business.
 > Thus, your exalted freedom of the ISP would amount to no more than the
 > freedom to go out of business. 

Freedom for the wolves is tyranny for the sheep.  If a teleopoly is
left in place then of course any ISP would be toast.

One mistake by government does not excuse another mistake by
government.  Both are abrogations of freedom.

 > A little effort on your part to read up on what was going on in the early
 > part of this century when telephone service was a free for all and an
 > unregulated and uncontrolled marketplace proved an utter failure with
 > respect to interconnection would do wonders for your parochial viewpoint
 > and might give you an educated clue as to what is going on today and what
 > is coming down the pike.

Um, the justification for the 1934 Communications Act was universal
service, not interconnection.  Yes, lack of interconnection hurt
customers.  It also hurt carriers by keeping their markets small.  The
mere existance of a problem or its solution by government action does
not mean that the only or best solution was the government action.

 > Learning to think like a peace loving citizen is not that much harder than
 > thinking like a peace loving programmer. <g> The difference is the
 > willingness to consider the broader public interest issues that a pure free
 > market economy somehow never gets around to addressing.

I know lots of people, but I've never met a public.  Who is he?  Where
does he live?  Where does he shop?  Is he male or female?  Black or
white?  Is he a farmer?  Does he work for an automobile manufacturer?
What is he interested in?  How do you know all this?

There is no such thing as a public interest, Bob, because those
questions are fundamentally unanswerable (as we can see from your
[anticipated] lack of an answer to them).

 > Is the AMA full of crap? On some issues, sure. But, good luck convincing
 > anyone to go back to the days of quack medicine and in home x-ray machines
 > when the excesses of the free market were in full force. 

Please explain the mechanism whereby the AMA (which is a doctor's
union.  Unions typically serve their members, not the general public)
preserves the quality of medical treatment.  In fact, bad doctors are
rarely disciplined by medical boards.

You are thinking that you need a government to control you.  You think
that by controlling the government, you have gained back your freedom.
You have not.  Your freedom, once given up, is gone.  You cannot
reconstruct it by forcing the people who hope to force you to do
things.

-- 
-russ <nelson@crynwr.com>  http://web.crynwr.com/~nelson
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