The housing market is greatly hampered by various levels of government. Look at Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac. Look at building codes. Look at zoning regulations.

In the US, pretty much nobody goes without food unless they have mental problems, in which case their problem is mental, not foodal.

Okay, but note that we're talking about linear infrastructure here. It's a hard problem to solve no matter who's doing it. No matter how you solve it, 1) there will be problems and 2) people hankering to solve it the other way.

Two words: Public Choice. Here, let me google that for you: http://lmgtfy.com?q=Public%20Choice

And you would be right if it were "deregulation", but it wasn't. It was just "bad reregulation". There was never a customer-regulated market for electricity in California, so nobody can say that it failed!

They're a lot more free than they used to be, and the prices are a lot lower. Do you want to see them even lower yet? Give customers more freedom to regulate.

But my point -- that corporations are not free to do anything they want in so-called "free" markets -- remains.

ITYM Linear infrastructure, which is hard to regulate whether by governments or customers. There's no magic wand.

There is no such thing as deregulation. Markets are regulated by their customers. The only way to get deregulation is to NOT regulate by government, and yet force the customers to buy anyway. And gee, that's exactly what happened in California when it deregulated.

Airplane tickets are fantastically cheap relative to 30 years ago when the deregulation started. You could pay $1,000 to fly coast to coast in 1980 dollars. Now, the last time I flew it was $450 in 2010 dollars.

There are no free markets. There are only markets controlled by governments and markets controlled by customers. The markets controlled by customers work out pretty well for customers. The markets controlled by governments work out pretty well for governments and the politicians that run them and the lobbyists who fund them and the corporations who make money because the politicians control the markets in their favor.

Oh, no, we're already trespassing on the abyss's property.

and you didn't make them any less nervous. )

Actually, there *is* such a thing as unlimited Internet. You have a certain bandwidth limit, and you are allowed to suck down data all day long at that rate. Trouble is that's not an efficient use of their network, nor your time. People usually want high speed when they want it, and are willing to put up with total download amounts rather than being speed limited.

So, 5GB == 40Gbits/month = 1.3Gbits/day = 55Mbits/hour = 15Kbps **unlimited** (like, really, completely unlimited, download at 15kbps all day long).

The article you link to is three year old, or should I say three years wrong. Talk to any Verizon reseller or rep, and they'll tell you "no such thing as unlimited, everything has a 5GB cap, and beyond that we charge you $.01KB."

One of these days, some victim of a botnet is going to initiate a class action lawsuit against Microsoft for publishing an insecure operating system, with the injured parties being the people whose machines were induced to participate in a tort.