What do you see as the advantage of the ban over what we have now with the wholesale retail system for cell?

I'm not horribly familiar with the wholesale system, so I can't comment much on it. I prefer it because it matches the system I imagine for land lines.

Everyone I know uses a major carrier (AT&T with a couple on T-Mobile) these days. I remember Sprint used to not have any service outside my city limits. If that's changed, then good - there's no big deal then.

For landlines I agree there is a huge problem with LECs, but as you mentioned that's already regulated. Honestly I'm fine with the PSTN just being a legacy system rotting over the next generation. It simply lacks far too many capabilities.

Landlines aren't going away. Businesses will continue to use them, and people in rural areas need them for their modems, if nothing else.

For data service, wireless just can't compete with landlines. Voice services may be on their way out, but data service is booming, and will only get bigger.

Under the system I describe, the physical lines would be operated and maintained by one organization, be it a private company, cooperative, or local government utility. They wouldn't offer any service direct to the consumer, other than wiring and maintenance (interior wiring, for instance). Customers would sign up with whatever services they required, which would be provided over that line. The owner of the line would have to offer the same services and pricing to any service company that requests it. Service companies could offer any service they liked, as long as it would fit within the capabilities of the line service.

This allows more competition. You have to regulate the line owners, but the service companies can operate under free market rules. You might even be able to get around the whole net neutrality argument with it.

Right now, land line owners are required to allow "fair" access to other service providers, but the problem is that it's not in their best interest to do so, and they know it.

I had more points, but my truck just got loaded, so I gotta go.

Seriously?

OK, slavery as a system requires some sort of legal structure. I'll grant you that. Slavery itself doesn't. You think a government is required to go kidnap some attractive girl and force her to be your wife, or just your sex puppet?

The opression of women is an even more stupid argument. It's cultural. Honor killings aren't legal pretty much anywhere, but they happen. The concept of "women's work" and "a woman's place" isn't a legal one. Laws may codify such behavior, but they don't cause it, except in a few rare exceptions like the Taliban's government in Afghanistan.

Discrimination against women is illegal in the U.S. except in a few certain areas, like the military. Why do women still get on average $.75 to every dollar a man makes? Hint: The government isn't causing it.

Sure. Not all government is good. I never said it was. My point is that governments prevent the guy on the corner from ganging up with his neighbors and conquering your street.

Face it. You're going to have a government, because if there isn't one, someone's going to make one, and he's going to make you subject to it. You can be a U.S. citizen, or a subject of King Bob's Pine Street Mauraders.

How do you solve large problems without government? It's not laziness.

How about governments saving people from each other? When was the last time you were stabbed for your wallet? When was the last time a group of armed men came into your house and shot you to take over your land? There are no numbers for these things, because the government prevents them from happening.

How about governments saving helpless people? How many people were rescued by the Coast Guard, or averted death because of the lighthouses, communicatoin, and weather services it provides? How many people were found alive under the rubble by the Oklahoma National Guard the last time a tornado ripped Oklahoma City a new one? How many orphaned children were given shelter, food, and an education? How many suddenly homeless people did FEMA shelter and feed when they lost their homes on the gulf coast after Katrina? How many children have survived to adulthood because the government requires you to innoculate them for polio? There are numbers for some of these, but these are just a few examples and looking up the number of people the government has actively saved would be quite task.

Yeah, governments kill people sometimes. The solution is better government, not no government.

That article states that anarchy is better than the government Somalia has had in the past. Show me one that says Somalia as it is now is better than Somaia with a good government.

Darfur is wracked by roving gangs who have pretty much nothing to do with either the rebels or the government anymore. It might have started as a revolt, but now it's just anarchy, where the strong take what they want from the weak.

I'll pass, thank you very much. I've met people. I don't have your faith that people can work together without coercion. Not all coercion is bad.

OK, first off, $50? Yeah right. But let's go ahead and assume that $50 per lot would be enough to rebrick the street.

If I were to go to all my neighbors to collect $50 from each of them to improve the street, I'd probably end up with about $150. Some of them couldn't pay, and others won't want to. Some will want asphalt (it's cheap and smooth!). Some will want concrete (trucks won't wear ruts in the road!). Some, like myself, will want to keep the brick (it's attractive and historical!). Not enough funds will be raised, and even if they were, no one would agree on the materials to use.

We could form a neighborhood association and vote... but that'd be government, now wouldn't it? I wonder how long it would take until we decided to kill people.

So the situation isn't different at all, really. Either way, the street goes unpaved. My situation, in regards to my street, stays the same. My situation in regards to non-brick streets in my town is better, because under city governments, they'll be maintained, while under your system they'd suffer the same problems I laid out above.

When people talk about "private ownership" they mean leasing from the government. No one is suggesting outright permanent ownership because regulation is still needed to get the systems to work together.

Ah, from the tone of other comments, I was assuming actual permanant assignments sans oversight. My bad.

By and large what you are asking for is the current system.

Not really. Under the system I describe, you can't both be a service provider and a tower operator. Service providers would be largely unregulated. Tower operators would be heavily regulated to require open access and equal pricing.

Infrastructure (i.e. land lines) would be similar, with lines being owned by a utility company and bandwidth sold to anyone who wants it. You sign up with any service provider you like, and they buy the bandwidth and features directly from the utility company.

It's not my idea, nor a new idea. This seperates out the natural monopolies from the parts of the system which can operate as a free market. It's not as much a problem with cell towers (although it does create an extremely high barrier to entry), but it's good for land line systems - most places only have one choice for phone and data service (maybe two, if there's a cable company).

We've got some open access laws on the books already, which is why you have the carriers you describe. What I'm arguing for would be the natural extension of that.

As an aside on IPV4. There really isn't that much "class A" space being wasted by private entities. It is a few month's expansion at this point. Most of the waste was absorbed long ago.

There's a good chunk of it, but I didn't mean to suggest that freeing up class A space (and class B - some of those are still out there too) would solve the IP crunch - merely that it's a similar problem, where single companies hold large amounts of the usable resources.

I think we'll eventually be dual-stack with private IPv4 addresses. AT&T is already moving towards that with their new DSL service - while you do get a public IPv4 address, it's taken by your router, unless you explicitly tell your router to assign it to a computer. They're handing out IPv6 blocks in some if not all areas now.

I don't see how private ownership of spectrum is the best way at all. It's a non-renewable public resource. It's similar to how many organizations still have class A networks eating up IP space unnecessarily.

What's wrong with the old scheme, where you license spectrum for a fee, and the FCC has regulatory control over where and how spectrum is used? It worked well enough for years. You want to transmit on such and such frequency at such and such power in a certain region of the country, you pay the fee to license it, and then you use it as long as you pay the fee. Commercial radio and TV work like this, as does (I'm pretty sure) most HAM radio and private two-way radio.

For applications like cell phones, this would also allow the FCC to encourage standardization on certain frequencies. CDMA on these frequencies, GSM on these, etc. Companies could license spectrum for experimental purposes (new protocols, etc.). It'd work best with a bill that seperated regulated infrastructure ownership (cell towers, fibre and copper lines, etc.) from unregulated service providers, but yeah, I'm dreaming there.

Pretty much, in the sense that slavery and female oppression are symptoms of human behavor - just like establishing governments. There's always going to be a bully and people who follow him, and then BAM! Instant dictator.

How many did governments save? There's a few places in the world that don't have government in any meaningful sense. Lessee... Darfur, Somalia...

Besides, who works the problems out? Everyone just magically agrees to the obvious solutions?

Yep, that I am. My city maintains asphalt and concrete streets in poor neighborhoods. It doesn't maintain brick streets (even ones in upper middle class neighborhoods). I don't know why - I suspect they can't rebrick them because brick streets no longer meet roadway standards. I do know any time they try to asphalt a brick street the city historical society throws a fit.

I don't really care that much about my street; it was built well, and while there's a few potholes, it's not too bad - pretty much like a concrete street with more road noise. Some of the other brick streets in town are much worse, though, and those are the ones I'd like to see repaved.

He claims to be a member of the NH congress. That's not the same view of government a middle level government employee would have, but it is part of the government, yes.

There is a Seth Cohn listed on the Wikipedia page for the New Hampshire House of Representatives. I'm assuming this is the same guy (otherwise it'd be pretty bizarre). In another post he said he was Libertarian, although Wikipedia lists him as a Republican.

He doesn't have his own Wikipedia page, but you can google for him as easy as I can if you want more info.

Sorry to hear that. But what you are saying is that, given your limited resources, you'd prefer to spend money in things other than improving the quality of your street. That is totally reasonable.

My street doesn't get improved (it was a WPA project from the 1930s - the city won't rebrick it for some reason, and they can't pave over the bricks because the historical society won't let them), but that's besides the point. If I were to go out and rebrick the part of the street I own, it wouldn't do any good for the part of street in front of the vacant lot two houses down, or the part in front of the old woman down the street who gets $300/month on social security.

The city, on the streets that it actually does improve, improves streets all at once, to the same quality, with the same materials. And no, there's no way the people on my street would come together on this. The old woman can't pay, the drug dealer across the street wouldn't be interested, the drunk dude on the corner would just want to start a fight, etc.

Poorer areas don't have to be maintained. It would be nice if they were, but people might want to user their money for other things.

Thus increasing the class disparity in this country. Think about the consequences of that kind of thinking for a while. Look at countries where it prevails.

Places like India, where some people make good money and live in nice houses, while other people literally live in dumps, recycling garbage to buy enough rice to stay alive. Places like Nigeria, where the population lives in squalor, except for the people making money hand over fist in the oil trade.

A large class disparity makes for a dissatisfied, bitter populace. That breeds security problems. I don't know about you, but I like not living behind a barbed wire fence.

If you regard the company as violent for cutting your services, you'd have to regard your neighbors/friends/family/coworkers in the same way for not helping you pay the bill. Why are the gas company owners any more responsible for your wellbeing than your neighbor or your friend?

I never said I regarded the company as violent, or that the company was somehow responsible for my well-being. I was pointing out that I would suffer potentially fatal consequences if I failed to pay my bill. Not paying taxes is actually safer - the most they'll do is garnish my wages or put me in jail.

I don't think I'd like Somalia at all...

Somalia is what happens when you have an ineffectual government. People are people - regardless of religion, culture, whatever - we as a group are greedy bastards who look after ourselves and those we care about first. We don't organize well, and when we do, it's usually as a special interest group or a mob.

To keep a people calm and peaceful, they have to be satisfied with their situation (or at least satisfied enough that they won't risk losing what they have). First, you need security - you have to feel safe in your home and about on your business. The government provides that. Next you need a standard of living that isn't disgraceful. Most people here have that - including most poor people. That's provided either by the government or by the economic system it supports. Next you need the people to feel they have some control over their lives. We have democracy and the government prevents most monopolies from forcing themselves on the populace.

When you don't have these things, the people don't stay peaceful. Where do gangs form in this country? Places where the standard of living is the lowest and security is lax.

This is out of order, but it shouldn't hurt the context:

The government is a company who has a monopoly on violence against the populace.

Agreed. I believe this is the primary function of government, although I'd call it an enterprise instead of a company.

I believe the primary function of government is to fill in the spaces where capitalism fails. Capitalism doesn't stop crime. Capitalism doesn't stop companies from cheating the consumer or forming monopolies (quite the opposite, in fact). Capitalism doesn't provide health care to the poor. It doesn't control immigration. It doesn't ensure the safety of food and drugs. It doesn't offer high school education to everyone. It doesn't send probes into space or build particle accelerators to expand human knowledge. It doesn't make cars safe. I could go on, but you get the picture.

You may feel some or all of these things are unnecessary. Many people (including Ron Paul, with respect to the FDA, monopoly protection, and education) do. Many of us do not, and I feel we've got a pretty good argument to support our side. Unfortunately, I have to drive to Alabama, so I can't continue the discussion.

You fail to see the scale of the nation we live in.

Seriously. I'm a truck driver. This country is _big_. We have the third largest population of any country in the world. We have the largest economy in the world. Trillions are certainly appropriate.

Even if you were to cut government services to the bone (by anyone this side of Ron Paul's definition*), you'd still have a multitrillion dollar budget. It's a big number. This is a big country.

Personally, I think it's a (mostly) non-issue. We've been in deficits before. You get those when you have a recession. The people screaming about it now are the same people who had no problem deficit spending during the Bush era. It's a political pony show. If people weren't so up in arms about this, they'd be up in arms about something else (maybe something important, like Obama's refusal to do away with the PATRIOT ACT and other nonsense).

* Ron Paul wants to slash the responsibilities of the federal government. This doesn't mean you keep more of your paycheck. You don't get something for free. The states would have to raise taxes to compensate by paying their own way (an example is highway funding, which is part federal and part state responsibility). You'd have to pay for what services you want that aren't government supplied out of your pocket. Spending would still be in the trillions.

I agree with you. Checks and balances aren't perfect.

There is no perfect system, and I certainly don't claim government is perfect. My point is that I can't see a better system that wouldn't involve government.

You seem to be under the impression that if the government stops providing some services then those services won't be provided by other institutions. This is certainly _not_ true for all government activity.

Some services, yes. Not all. I'm well aware there are portions of the government that could be privatized successfully.

You seem to be under the impression that other institutions would provide all useful services provided by the government. That's certainly not true as well.

The idea that streets would not be built if it were not by the government is ridiculous.

Your street maybe. I'm probably the second wealthiest person on my street, only after a guy who inherited his mother's slumlord properties. I bring in around $2k/month. My street would be a loss.

Street maintenance could certainly be privatized, but someone has to hire and pay the company to do it, and someone has to make sure the poorer areas are maintained. Only a government is capable of this.

I'm not a hardcore socialist. I don't believe the government should own and control industry, outside of necessary regulatory duties (i.e. keep lead paint out of our food, make sure 1lb is really 1lb, etc.). I do believe the government is required to act in places where capitalism fails. Basic public infrastructure is one of those places.

The key difference between a government and a regular business is that a government extracts payment under the threat of violence, or in some cases, by using actual violence.

Companies would do the same if they were not prevented from doing so (by - you guessed it - the government). The government is a company who has a monopoly on violence against the populace.

I once lived somewhere where the electric and gas services were provided by a private company. If I didn't pay, I was under the threat of freezing to death in the winter. I don't see much difference.

Also, a share holder in a public company can trade his shares if he does not like how the company is run.

And you can squat in a shack in Idaho. Or you can move to somewhere where there is no government, like Somalia. Have fun with that.