Personally I'd rather see the federal government overrule states which have made laws against municipal ownership of the last mile. And to start handing out small seed grants to get more places to install fiber everywhere and lease it to whatever company cares to re-sell it.
For example I live in Houston where there utility company only owns the power distribution infrastructure. There are 100 (or so) companies that sell power at retail after buying it wholesale. http://www.powertochoose.org/
I consider that to be excellent competition. Getting to choose between two power companies, however, I would not consider competition.
Hah!
- Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner is not real/enough competition, more like a monopoly
This problem could be solved with the antitrust laws already in place. Despite being a libertarian I'm not opposed to breaking up these private monopolies that government policies have made possible.
- Being private hasn't protected them against federal intrusion
Being private citizens has also not protected us against the NSA spying on us. That does not mean the solution is more government intrusion to offset the existing one.
I oppose the federal government overruling state laws in any sense (so I'd rather the laws against municipal ownership of the last mile be abolished by market forces) as that obviously stifles competition between states.
For a self-proclaimed libertarian, you're ignoring a very basic tendency of market systems. Natural monopolies are Econ 100 level stuff, and utilities are the textbook example.
Murray Rothbard once said:
"In general, I urge everybody to look at a government measure [...] not in terms of a tragic failure to achieve the common good, public interest, or general welfare, but [rather] as a conscious agency for doing all sorts of monopolizing, cartelizing, and other restrictive things. In other words, the government is not that dumb!"
If you read about how the FCC came to be and how they were politically set on displacing competitors, you will change your mind.
Free markets can't generate monopolies because they can't use the threat of force by hooking up with the government. If you disagree, all you need to do is come forward with a single example of a monopoly that exists without any government backing (regulations, cronyism, etc).
And if I were you I'd drop this cliche of "oh this is Econ 101". It doesn't help the conversation and is just a veiled attack. In this case though, since the government influences what gets taught in universities, even Econ 400 isn't enough to understand free markets, and most Econ graduates come out of university with little to no understanding of the Austrian school.
* Tell them the government should abolish all regulation which interferes with "the free market".
* Then remind them that this would be an action taken by a government, and thus by definition the incorrect thing to do.
How to keep a State-Church Separation believer busy:
* Tell them the government should abolish all regulation which interferes with "freedom of religion"
* Then remind them that this would be an action taken by a government, and thus by definition the incorrect thing to do.
You believe in separation of church and state, right? I believe in separation of market and state. Before you post another childish remark, remember you can always make that comparison yourself to see if your remark has any weight.
Other people start from a principle of "if a government did it, it was wrong". Which places all government actions off-limits.
Of course. Think of it this way:
- I don't have the right to take your money.
- My friends and I voting unanimously to take your money still doesn't give us the right to take your money.
- No matter how many friends I vote with, we as a group never have the right to take your money, or anyone else's.
- Then how did government get the right to take my money and yours?
You may say because it owns the land and if we don't like it we can leave. But think of it this way:
- I don't have the right to keep others from using unused land that even I am not using.
- And so on, same as above.
- Then how did government get the right to keep others from using unused land that even itself isn't using?
The problem here is that no one can grant another person or group with rights that they themselves don't possess.
It follows that the governemnt has no way to acquire this right, and so it does those things illegitimately (not authorized by any person or group of persons, since no person or group of persons has those rights to give up to the government). That's why anything a government does with tax money is wrong, because that revenue is ill-gotten.
That's why the excuse is usually "oh, there's a social contract"; this is a red herring. Even if the people had actually read and signed such a contract, they still don't possess those rights in order to be able to give them up to another party.
We allow ourselves to be taxed and to pay the government for land not by consent [1] but by threat of force, since if we disagree, we are fined, and if we don't pay we eventually go to jail.
[1] consent means voluntarily agreeing to do something. voluntarily means without coercion or threat of violence.
Absent the threat of violent force against anyone who does not obey conventions with respect to ownership, there is no such thing as ownership. So in order to have even the concept of private property and "rights" thereto you must postulate some entity which recognizes those "rights" and will enact violence on your behalf against certain classes of others who would "violate" them.
We really don't want ISPs to be common carriers. Keep them private and competitive.