Happy Pseudo-Baseball Season, All. Where stadium seats are empty – because our heads are empty. As the China Virus FREAK OUT!!! continues unabated.
Happy Pseudo-Baseball Season, All. Where players and coaches kneel in subservience to one of the nation’s Communist Parties. (The Democrat Party is also Communist – but is slightly reluctant to openly declare it.)
While it is pseudo-baseball being played – we can still use the game for real analogies.
To wit:
Would you want to play in a baseball game where the umpire – is also pitching for the other team?
How are those ball-and-strike calls going to go? Those close plays at at the plate?
The umpire is supposed to be impartial. Umping – while simultaneously playing for the other team – is not impartial.
Oh – and government is awful at everything it does. So you want it doing as little as possible.
When the ump is also a game participant – you get absurdities like this.
U.S. Post Office Losses More Than Double to $8.8 Billion for the Year, While Revenue Rises
The US Post Office is obviously a government entity – while also a participant in the shipping business. The government taxes and regulates the likes of FedEx and UPS – whilst also competing against the likes of FedEx and UPS.
A government participant can lose billions of dollars a year – because the rest of the government covers its losses. FedEx and UPS have no such perennial backstop.
A government participant with perennial government money backstops – can rig the game in its favor like this:
For Every Amazon Package It Delivers, the Postal Service Loses $1.46
Amazon – sends a LOT pf parcels. The USPS sending them at a loss – screws everyone else in the game. Because no one else can afford to lose money on doing what its doing for a living.
“Amazon…is primarily a shipping business. It relies on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver two-thirds of its packages.”
Only 2/3? With the government’s per-package mass handout – I’m surprised it isn’t upwards of 99%.
Of course government writes the rules – to which the other participants must adhere. So it can rig the game in its favor – as often and whenever it wants.
End USPS Monopoly of First-Class Mail Delivery
What’s easier than rigging the game against your competitors? Outlawing your competitors.
“Government Shouldn’t Be a Participant” – is a universal truth. At all levels of government incompetence.
To wit:
“For decades, local governments have made promises of faster and cheaper broadband networks. Unfortunately, these municipal networks often don’t deliver or fail, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill. Explore the map to learn about the massive debt, waste and broken promises left behind by these failed government networks….
“More than 200 networks nationwide are estimated to have some form of taxpayer-funded internet service. In each of these cases private internet services are readily available.
“Government-owned (i.e. taxpayer-funded) network projects have needlessly reduced resources available to help more pressing needs such as improving education, infrastructure and public safety.
“These networks also unfairly compete against private businesses. Worst of all, these projects have proven to put taxpayer dollars at risk, leaving hardworking constituents to foot the bill, often at a steep cost.”
As stated, this ain’t a novel idea.
2009 Stimulus Bill Includes $7.2 Billion for Broadband
Which was the equivalent of setting $7.2 billion on fire. Plus tens of billions more – as the recipient localities then had to dig themselves out from under their federally-initiated disasters.
Too many DC Denizens remain steadfastly impervious to facts – and any limits on their stupidity.
And government bureaucrats nigh everywhere – will of course always take even more DC government money.
Which brings us to the present.
Democrats Pitch $100 Billion Broadband Plan, Repeal of State Limits On Muni Networks
State limits on government broadband?:
“There are currently 19 states with such laws.”
Which means 19 states – aren’t completely addled. They’ve seen the abject failure government broadband is – and have decided to not continue to be quite that stupid.
DC’s Democrats won’t have any of that sense being made. And they’ll force feed these states more government – no matter what they want.
Unspoken in all this – is the key level of government to Internet access…is local.
It is from local governments the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must get permission to do business. To get permits. To access poles and rights-of-way. And on, and on, and….
And of course – all those permits and permissions cost money. And that ain’t the only way local governments screw ISPs. The ways – are as numerous as the stars in the sky.
Local governments get to omni-directionally extract money from ISPs. And regulate the daylight out of them.
And then governments want to compete against the companies they’re screwing.
It ain’t great.
Want Cheaper, Better Internet? Limit the Local Government Shakedowns of Internet Providers:
“The number of cities and towns making these ridiculous demands is staggering. The wide variety of these ridiculous demands is mind-numbing.
“All of which are geared by government – to find new and additional ways to extract ever more money from the ISPs.”
Seriously, please peruse that piece. It contains more than a dozen of the insane stupidities to which local governments subject ISPs. Which of course is just the tip of the dumb-berg.
Governments get to impose all of that inanity upon ISPs.
And then they want to compete against them too?
When they’ve spent the last quarter-century proving they are absolutely awful at pretending to be ISPs?
No. Thank you.
This first appeared in Red State.