Government by ideological fantasy - at the expense of actual facts - is a terrible idea. So too is government of, by, and for the donors. Far too often government regulators and bureaucrats ignore reality to tilt at ideological windmills. And far too often government becomes one giant stenographer for contributors, writing laws and regulations to accommodate their check-cutters’ every whim and wildest dream.
Thus does equal protection before the law become special treatment for Friends of Government (FOG, if you will). Donors and dumb ideas are favored at inordinate expense to the rest of us.
To wit: “green” “energy” (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ethanol) is neither green nor energy. It’s far worse for the environment than traditional energy sources that actually produce, you know, affordable energy. Governments here and all around the world have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this phony energy. It’s been a titanic failure for decades.
Why has government continued to throw this copious coin out the window to keep us locked into an uber-failed yesterday? Because their ideological fantasies trump reality. Why else? Because donors get government money at dollars-on-the-pennies they donated. To wit: President Barack Obama and his Democrats threw $80 billion more at the fake “green energy” industry in the 2009 “Stimulus.” Eighty percent of that money went to Obama donors.
The more government gets involved the less the private sector can advance. The more rapidly a sector is advancing the bigger an impediment government is. Likely no sector is advancing more quickly than the Tech sector. Enter government.
The Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already done egregious damage there. To appease their ridiculous fantasies and huge donors. About a year ago the Commission’s three unelected Democrat bureaucrats decided to go all the way back in time to1934 landline telephone law and unilaterally impose it on the Internet. Behold Internet Reclassification, so as to impose the ridiculous Network Neutrality.
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The Obama Administration did it because donors asked for it. Donors like Google. No one did more to get President Obama elected and reelected than Google. Just about no company swapped staff with the Obama Administration at such prodigious numbers than did Google.
And after Google greased the skids for Obama, Obama greased the skids for Google. Google spent nearly the entirety of the 2000s trying and failing to get Net Neutrality passed in Congress. Because it is government forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to give uber-bandwidth-hogs like Google unlimited free bandwidth. We the People didn’t want it, Congress couldn’t pass it. So Obama just issued a fiat and gave it to them.
But the problem with buying support is that the “supporters” rarely stay bought. Google is now channeling West Wing President Josiah Bartlet, “What’s next?” And most unfortunately, President Obama’s government stenographers have many, many responses to that request.
Here’s one: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has penned a defense of the next backwards-looking power grab: huge new backdoor mandates via television set-top-boxes, which they have attempted to obfuscate as a deregulation of set-top-boxes.
Set-top-boxes are the devices we lease from cable companies to watch their television packages, which we are doing to a lesser degree as the marketplace has already created myriad ways for us to “cut the cord.” Meaning, give up cable television and the set-top-boxes altogether.
The future (and increasingly the present) of television isn’t boxes, it’s apps (and alternate hardware like Apple TV and Amazon Firestick). Netflix, Amazon Prime, Roku, Hulu and a host of other companies deliver you (via their apps) unlimited streaming TV and movie content using only an Internet connection. No cable TV subscription required. And unlike programmed TV, you can watch whenever you want, wherever you want. So more and more people are cutting their cords.
Meanwhile, the government is yet again stuck in the past. The FCC is dubiously invoking a twenty-year-old law (and seriously, how unbelievably different was how we watched TV twenty-years ago?) - to “open” to competitors the collapsing set-top-box market. This is a terrible idea for a number of reasons.
It is just stupid from an evolutionary standpoint. This is like the government issuing mandates to “open” the horse-buggy industry as Model T Fords are rolling with ever increasing frequency into our driveways and hearts. If you’re “helping” prop up yesterday’s technology you aren’t helping.
This mandate forces cable companies to spend a lot of money totally reconfiguring their networks to accommodate the new boxes. A new configuration for each new box, because each box will most likely connect uniquely to each network. And cable companies have a lot of proprietary information and content to protect so they will have to spend even more time and money reconfiguring so as to ensure its protection. For which we will inexorably pay in higher fees, on TV, and the other services cable companies provide (like Internet). All to make room for more devices of which people want less.
And you will be trading the box lease for the box purchase, which requires more coin upfront. And unlike with the lease, when the next upgraded model comes out, you won’t get it for free. You will pay all over again. And given the rapid technological advancement, how often will that purchase have to happen again, and again, and…?
Think how quick is the smart phone tech turnover (which is a much more intensive product). Where you just purchased the “latest” Google Android only to almost immediately watch Google roll out the next Android. Does Google give you that next version for free? Of course not. Google won’t give you their latest set-top-box either.
Wait, Google wants to get into the going-out-of-business set-top-box business? You bet they do. So the Obama Administration is prepping to issue yet another fiat to make Google’s wishes come true. Again.
Crony-infested and ideologically-blinded is no way to go through life, Son. It is also absolutely no way to run a government.
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