Libertarians are not capable of acting rationally because their ideology is a word soup of contradictory ideas and circular logic.
If you frame the net neutrality issue as a tax, then sure, set up some rules and make wealthy corps pay more. I can't believe you don't see it being abused by telecompanies within days though.
My comment was about how libertarians are never worried about such things -- that in fact the idea of a market player paying for a negative externality is explicitly against their convoluted philosophical perspective. I was arguing that it's wrong to have an expectation for a libertarian to behave rationally when a negative externality is involved.
Nothing about your comment seems to be related -- I'm gathering you are trying to use some kind of slippery slope analogy to show that my thinking when expanded to some imaginary limit actually yields some sort of undesirable result. Thanks I guess -- I suppose next time I make a comment about how environmental damage is mispriced by the market that I will consider the implications of my words when they are reinterpreted randomly as a somehow specific comment about net neutrality ...
On the other hand -- thank you for demonstrating very well the exact experience of having a discussion with a libertarian -- I often find it to be an exercise in being confronted with random analogies designed to separate the topic from any arena of specific facts.
If my internet was billed like my water bill then it would be something like
$20/month for access
$1/GB for first 50 GB download
$2/GB for any GB over 50 download
$5/GB for upload traffic
I for one am glad that internet is not billed like my water is.
This isn't always true in the UK.
Wealthy people can afford to pay by direct debit, which almost always carries some discounts. They can also shop around and change supplier. Poor people sometimes get locked into a more expensive supplier because they have to clear their bill before they change, and they can't afford to immediately pay that debt.
And some people are on prepayment meters which are usually more expensive than standard rates.
They're effectively another form of corporate pollution.
Not everybody gives them a pass of course, but many do.
I'm curious about something: were any of those bankers from the 2007/8 crisis and scandal booted out of their country clubs?
AGW is a terrific example of how political campaigns can go viral and become their own self-sustaining anti-fill-in-the-blank movements, given the right mix of ingredients.
I suppose it is the same mechanism in work as for religions in general.
Since climate is always changing, the effect of climate change cannot be, and will never be, fully realized.
The question then becomes "when will that retro-active action be allowed"? What triggers that certainty?
If this is going to be case, denial in the present times would be a malicious but winning strategy - as a matter of fact, some theorize that Trump's denial policy has a the core the belief that the planet is screwed up, but in the relatively distant future, therefore it's a better strategy to capitalize on the adequacy of the present condition.
[¹] of course, this is just a possibility.