Obviously, had we cracked down on this conspiracy earlier, every road in America would have street cars running up and down it.

Obviously.

I, for one, can't wait to spend three hours on my commute to the other side of the city.

There's nothing wrong with "maximizing profits" - are you implying we should be taking a loss? Buying up resources, combining them, and reselling them for less than they were worth before? Isn't that destroying value? (Yes, Amtrak takes a loss, but there's plenty of other rail companies that don't.)

Do you know firsthand that overtired personnel are uniquely a problem in rail? Why not healthcare, aviation, or even retail? Do we have to if the problem in rail first, or can we pull in things that work from other sectors? Or can you explain why that wouldn't work?

(This just seems like a really cheap shot at whatever it is you're trying to shoot.)

Are we also screwing over the poor by not outright giving them a vehicle to drive, a place to live, and free Internet? Disadvantaging the poor doesn't automatically imply unfair. Especially if you're living in New York City, already one of the most expensive places to live.

Higher gas prices means that people have less money to pay for other goods, so prices won't uniformly go up - goods not reliant on gas will fall in price. This reflects and redistributes allocation of goods based on the new "cost" of gas.

This means more tax money to spend, of course, so goods demanded by the government will also rise in price. (If it means, however, that they're borrowing less money and keeping the same spending habits, then the interest rate will fall.)

However if this were due to a natural disaster, the increased prices would reflect the new scarcity of gas and the fewer number of total goods bring produced overall. Having fewer goods to allocate among society (in this case) isn't "unfair", that's just the cold hard truth that no law will fix.

Those same people also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Saying "The first Congress did it" is not generally a good argument for interpreting the Constitution.

And the Constitution does permit states to perform inspections on imports, though they can't tax them for revenue:

No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws

Though I'm actually not sure how inspection of imports is constitutional Federally, it clearly should be given the threat of invasive species, I'm guessing the Framers figured state-level control is sufficient.

The whole point of bringing it up was to demonstrate the government isn't subject to it's own laws. Thanks for proving my point, though.

I know I'm going up against many years of case law here, but... the Fourth Amendment doesn't say anything about privacy. It says no searches and seizures without a warrant.

So the question is: Is it legal for MetroPCS to hand over the data, presumably in violation of their privacy policy and CPNI laws? Or did they do it because they were threatened and intimidated?

Ok? I'm here arguing against legal monopolies. Patents, government utilities, crony capitalism, it's all the same here.

I'm not sure how you "force" someone to share Internet, the Internet is built on sharing. I want to run a packet over your network, I pay or peer to connect to your network, problem solved, we're sharing a connection.

If a no network service provider is providing service, that probably means it's unprofitable, i.e. the total number of resources that would have to be expended to provide service exceeds the benefit the service will provide. Most people living in these areas aren't going to be running businesses, they'd be perfectly well served with some form of wireless connection which would do just as good a job with far less expense. No act of Congress can overturn this fact of economic law.

It's like subsidizing people to live in flood zones with federal flood "insurance", Housing is great, especially if you want to take the risk and assume the cost, but that's wasteful and just stupid.

Ah, an NSA shill. Welcome to the conversation.

If you wanna be taken seriously, maybe present a coherent point?

That's exactly what I'm arguing against.

That's a non sequitur. What if I replaced "Internet" with "Food"? You get a bunch of nonsense that, without exception, has caused famine and millions of deaths.

Who decides what is "infrastructure"? Of course /. will think Internet is vital; someone else might think food is vital. But that's not a reason to leave food to the government! Why would the Internet be different?

The Internet is too important to leave to the government. Or does the NSA and FCC need to tell you?

Find me a case where a vaccine caused autism. Go on, I dare you.

Now find me a case where predatory pricing benefitted a corporation. Or, stop denying basic facts of economics.

No one said anything about the Federalist papers being law. It's an argument by logic, which means you have to employ logic if you want to argue against it.

Further, if that's not as good as a dictionary then what is? Surely the Federal government doesn't gain the power to chuck kittens at foreign countries if we googlebombed "militia" to "feline warfare" - the powers don't change just because the language does.

Likewise, "general welfare" has never implied the power to do whatever strikes one's fancy just because someone asserts it's in your best interest. Remember when it was in our best interest to not drink alcohol on Sundays? Remember when it was in our best interest to plain not drink alcohol? (Ok, at least they got a Constitutional amendment for that one... but then it was repealed, and they banned drugs anyways.)

Raising an army doesn't imply conscription. The act of the executive branch doing something hardly means what they're doing is constitutional. It just means they're getting away with it, often with the implicit agreement of Congress and/or the courts.

The competitor here was taxpayer funded. That's the closest thing we'll ever see to immortality: When they fail, they don't go bankrupt, they get increased funding.

But let's assume EPB didn't engage in rent-seeking, the same article you link to describes how predatory pricing is almost entirely hypothetical:

Obviously, predatory pricing pays off only if the surviving predator can then raise prices enough to recover the previous losses, making enough extra profit thereafter to justify the risks. These risks are not small.

However, even the demise of a competitor does not leave the survivor home free. Bankruptcy does not by itself destroy the fallen competitor's physical plant or the people whose skills made it a viable business. Both may be available-perhaps at distress prices-to others who can spring up to take the defunct firm's place.

Further, the threat of litigation discourages entry into the market and price competition.

The term predatory pricing comes from the time when massive consolidation of railroads and oil was driving down prices. Smaller competitors sought reasons to stop it.

The price increases never came, of course. Same as computers today.

This point was rebutted by the people who wrote the general welfare clause, in Federalist 41.

To paraphrase: But what color can your objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.

Essentially, if the "general welfare" clause included things like a militia to defend the homeland, and post offices, as you presumably maintain, why even bother listing them separately?

It did take off; many people wrote XHTML documents, and it's default in e.g. Drupal. The problem was IE didn't support application/xhtml+xml until recently, which is exactly what gave XHTML all its functionality.