Funny you should mention the internet. There's a bigger problem than the Liberal fear over Republican propaganda on the internet (which admittedly preys on people who rely wholly on TV, radio and blogs for education)
Internet providers have invested billions in Washington for the privilege of dividing the country into fixed no-compete zones where they don't have to compete to retain customers - meaning: they don't have to incur the heavy costs of innovating or offering competitive pricing. Large corporations not only merge to avoid competition, but they also make pacts to stay out of each other's region, and they lobby Washington to create impossible entrance barriers for new competitors. [Your news sources tend to under-report the way big business uses Washington to distort markets in their favor]
The US ranks 31st in terms of internet speed. Here is the problem: most Americans only have 1 option for high speed internet - they're stuck; they can't vote with their feet and discipline suppliers with rational market signals.
Allow me to say it one more time: because internet providers have divided the country into regional monopolies, they don't have to do things like upgrade from copper wire (slow and inefficient) to fiber optics (fast and efficient) in order to retain customers.
(Even Adam Smith was worried about the formation of a state protected rentier class who gave kick-backs to their political servants for the right to fleece customers)
You understand the difference between competitive capitalism and monopoly capitalism, right? Competitive capitalism is when corporations drive over the bones of the living and the dead to innovate and offer competitive pricing. Competitive capitalism is a blessing. Monopoly capitalism is when corporations use the power of government to build a fence around a product or utility and simply charge rent as opposed to re-investing or innovating to retain market share (-an absence of competition allows them to perpetually raise prices and diminish services. This is what happened in health care too, which is another thing that eroded middle class purchasing power and, by so doing, intensified the current slump. Main Street businesses are dying because too many of their consumers are being fleeced by state protected monopolies). I'm begging you to research telecom monopolies rather than dismissing my claims with pithy aggression. I'm sure you would rather see a healthy market in telecom as opposed to an over-consolidated anti-competitive rat's nest. Do you want our largest political donors to benefit from a 3rd world internet infrastructure where they don't have to upgrade or innovate? Tragically, the special interests which own Washington also invest heavily in our trusted "news" sources, which keep us dangerously uninformed about this problem.
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