The FCC puts broadband under political control

I thought there tended to be monopolies on wires/fiber granted by local governments (supposedly to limit the number of companies tearing up roads and the like to install new infrastructure, but more likely to create a scarce privilege they can sell)?

Radio tends to be much lower bandwidth, and can be susceptible to bad weather.

Let's be serious about what the FCC could do when regulating the internet. Anything they try to do will have to pass 1st amendment muster.

But the bottom line is how this is going to play out the in long term. It's way too early to declare success, let's see if Government Motors really recovers or instead will need more cash bailouts. If Obama's actions were a bad bet he's only delayed and worsened the pain.

On health care "at least he did something" just doesn't cut it as an argument, not with the dog's breakfast the Congress passed. And death panels are inherent in government takeovers of health care. Somebody, some mechanism is going to determine who gets treatments and who doesn't. The U.K. has it's NICE plus the various units of the NHS make their own resource allocations.

My bottom line is that we're rich enough that the obsession with decreasing our health care outlays ("bending the cost curve") to European levels is not an imperative. We pay a lot more and we get a lot more (like clean hospital wards).

And then there's all the knock on effects, like the inevitable suppression of new drugs and therapies. But at least here there's some justice in the world, for a whole bunch of ObamaCare supporters will some day needlessly die because the program they support will abort something that would have saved them.

Anyway, again we'll see; assuming it isn't repealed wholesale in 2013 or defunded before then by a Republican Congress we'll find out if it makes things better soon enough.

As for oil and gas, when left along (i.e. not in the '70s) the market does it's thing by signaling the relative current scarcity of oil, which prompts all the players concerned to automatically adjust. And I'm much less concerned about the recent gyrations, for you can't expect to add 2.5 billion or so people to free market (PRC and India) without short and medium term discontinuities. Also don't forget about how many of those price shocks were prompted by devaluations of the US dollar, in which oil is denominated. Nixon's closing of the gold window in 1971 was after all what started the mess.

I.e. it's an issue, even a problem, but not a crisis.

And I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on "startups as a vehicle for IPOs". If you think the VC game is legitimate, if you think there are ventures that can't organically grow from an angel start (e.g. serious hardware ones), then IPO exits are necessary for healthy VC investing.

Just think of all the companies we probably wouldn't have with out VCs: Apple, Sun, any number of chip and hard disk vendors. Some worthwhile things require a lot of upfront money.

Pointing out the one post SARBOX blockbuster high tech successful IPO isn't germane; I'm more concerned that there will be no future Googles because the money to build such capital expensive ventures is gone due to the termination with extreme prejudice of the potential of a high payoff at the end of private financing. VCs aren't charities.

WRT to Ailes, if you can point out how Murdoch is warping the Journal's editorial board then maybe he's relevant, alhtough I gather he has bigger fish to fry, like the massive growth of Fox News. I just don't see Murdoch doing that, in practice (I read the editorial page every day) or in theory, since his objective is to have the Journal muscle in on the NYT, which is much more of a front page thing.

Much (possibly most) regulation is harmful, but some is good or even necessary.

Given that ISPs tend to have local monopolies, they need to be prevented from abusing those monopolies like they've started trying to do.

If the having local monopolies is not taken as a given, and the local governments don't hand out monopoly powers... well you still have to deal with how the high up-front costs of laying new wires makes various anti-competitive tactics more effective, and how the already meager competition seems to be merging into fewer and fewer competitors.

So in this case, you can either regulate to try to preserve a mostly-free market (lots of antitrust investigations and suits) in last-mile connectivity, or assume a monopoly and regulate to minimize the damage it can cause. The first probably minimizes harm to the regulated industry, the second minimizes harm to industries damaged by monopolistic actions in the regulated industry. I expect that the last-mile industry itself is relatively low value compared to the industries it can damage (much like water, electricity, and phone service), so the second option would be preferable.