Free kibbles

POLITICS:

Obama pressures New York Governor Patterson not to run for re-election. You got to be kidding me. Patterson isn't dragging down Obama. Obama is dragging down Patterson. Somebody should tell Obama to resign before he does any more damage. Jimmy Carter seems to have running mouth disease.

WAR:

Top US General in Afghanistan says the US mission there will fail without more troops. What is the mission? Will it fail even if we send more troops? Should we be fighting that mission? Pull the troops out now. I bet Obama pulls our troops out soon. He'll say he did he his best, our troops did their best, but they couldn't overcome 7 years of mismanagement by Bush. I don't care who he blames. Pull them out now.

MISC:

New study based on newly declassified intelligence shows that the Soviet Union was not the aggressive nuclear threat our government told us it was. This should come as no surprise. They weren't ideologues looking for martyrdom. We long ago learned it was not the economic powerhouse we were told either. We fought the Cold War exactly wrong. The Cold War was fought to empower the Cold Warriors running the government, not to keep us safe. We fought the Cold War by becoming more like the Soviets, shackling ourselves with burdensome government to our detriment. It wasn't until Ronald Reagan loosened those shackles by lowering taxes that we won the Cold War. If we had stayed true to our principles, kept government small and individuals powerful, we would have won the Cold War decades sooner at least. And today we're shackling ourselves even more, and we will suffer grave consequences for it.

FCC proposes net neutrality rules. As nice as that sounds, it guarantees shortages. Let's understand the problem. If every user and every site could connect with no bandwidth problems, there would be no need for any rules. Everybody would be happy. But because bandwidth is limited and some users and sites take up tremendously higher amounts of bandwidth than everybody else, internet service providers are considering rationing bandwidth. The free market is trying to allocate scare resources optimally, which is what it does better than anything. Net neutrality is just effectively a price control. Remember when Nixon set prices for gas too low? We ended with shortages and gas lines. Government enforced net neutrality will create shortages of bandwidth. When you try to go to your favorite site, you will have to wait. It's be like 100 people waiting for $5 of gas while one person was pumping $1 million into his own gas tank.

So as soon as the government sticks its nose in this business, it will create shortages that will demand more government interference. It's the never ending downward spiral. Pretty soon we'll have government allocating bandwidth based on political priorities instead of the demands of web users and providers. This is another doorway through which government plans to control speech on the internet. The government should stay out of this and let the robust competition in the marketplace allocate the scare resources as effectively as possible, but I don't think that's going to happen.