Slashdot's anti-"free market" lies

[yesthattom]

“Karl Bode of Broadband Reports takes aim at supposed telecom experts and think tankers who profess to love the ‘free market,’ but want to ban the country’s un-wired towns and cities from offering broadband to their residents. If you didn’t know, incumbent providers frequently determine towns and cities unprofitable to serve (fine), but then turn around and lobby for laws that make it illegal to serve themselves (not so fine). They then pay experts to profess their love for a free market and deregulation — unless that regulation helps their bottom line. A simple point: ‘Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn’t be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.’”

http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/06/10/31/2341240.shtml

Gosh I just finish one LJ post to my libertarian brothers and then I see this on Slashdot? Sheesh. There is no irony in what is listed above! The towns that want to offer free WiFi are ruining the free market because it is social engineering: Towns that provide free WiFi are trying to actively attract high-tech businesses to their town. That’s government social engineering! If they just did nothing, the free market would play out and companies would decide which town to move to without government intervention. Which, by the way, means a little place called “anywhere else”.

Proponents claim that the cost of providing WiFi is so low that a government can provide it to an entire town for considerably less money than the tax revenue that will be gained from companies moving to their town. Yes, that’s right... it’s all about getting more taxes so they can have more big government programs... like schools and fire houses and who knows what else... possibly more money for police to “fight crime” (which we all know is a code word for “stopping the free market”).

You’d think all the unemployed people in those towns would have enough free time to protest against such government craziness.

Comments

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I think that the term "free market" is getting a lot of use without being understood. If one wants to tout the glories of a "free market," one is talking about a perfectly competitive market-- and even among markets that exist, few are perfectly competitive. You can even do with markets that aren't perfectly competitive, but have free entry-- potential competition is nearly as useful in producing efficiency as actual competition is.

Of course, there are still problems with externalities-- activities for which there is no market. Similarly, one can say that private intellectual property rights, which are valuable in stimulating research and innovation, automatically lead to imperfect competition, evens trict monopoly for a time. Very true.

Even then, there are still questions about whether a market *is* competitive, let alone perfectly competitive.

But for cripes' sakes, "free market" doesn't mean "whatever existing firms want to do, including restricting entry." Not in any sane world....

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I love when people post serious replies to my posts tagged "parody".

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

And I love it when people are snarky at me when I'm in solidarity with them.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I wasn't intentionally snarky.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Your tags don't appear on my Friends Page.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Do no tags appear (i.e. your LJ style doesn't display them) or do they just not appear on my posts?

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

None, I think. When I open your post (which is still in my style) I see the tags, but not from the Friends Page. So once I've decided what I want to say, I may not notice the tag even after I open your post to comment on.

[dossy.livejournal.com]

"You’d think all the unemployed people in those towns would have enough free time to protest against such government craziness."

Since they're unemployed, they probably can't afford 'net access, so they're waiting for the township to provide free wi-fi so they can surf protest websites.

*chuckles*

It's like rain. On your wedding day.

[sachmet.livejournal.com]

On the flip side of the coin, some towns that want to provide wireless to their residents are also doing it because they have a public infrastructure they want to create for emergency services, and providing it to residents makes sense, before taxes are even considered.

As a former ISP sysadmin who was deploying wireless, we actually had the city we were based in investigate putting receivers in cars for cops and firemen, so they could use their data terminals, IP radios, and other things without having to detour to a station or waypoint.