I believe the government should provide the following services:
1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."
2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.
The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.
3) Public trusts. This has no real economic value, but I don't really trust Haliburton with proper management of parkland or the like. Things with both a very high monetary value and societal value should not be trusted to an enterprise with a profit motive.
> Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point.
What's the incentive for them to provide more, particularly since fiber lines usually cut across constituent boundaries, yet don't cut far enough to make a majority in Congress?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'provide more'. The entire idea behind the government owning the infrastructure and not the services that run on them is to stimulate fair competition between private enterprises. I wouldn't really want the government to do more than provide a usable signal to my jack.
Since I'm not a USian, I don't know what to make of your arguments about congress and the like, but it worked out fine here in the past.
I live in Alberta and up until a few years ago the telecom was owned and operated by the provincial government. It dropped copper to every house. I don't see why fiber would be any different. Some provinces still run their own telecoms.
Bandwidth consumption tends to grow, right? So eventually you fill the existing capacity. Somebody's then gotta build more, or the system becomes overloaded. I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.
One of the reasons we've got YouTube was that private fiberoptic companies (stupidly) overinvested in laying new fiber cables during the dot-com boom. When the crash came, the price of bandwidth fell through the floor. Then it became economical to build video-sharing services and AJAX webapps and other high-bandwidth apps.
In the U.S, our electrical grid is a regulated monopoly - not quite government owned, but it functions effectively like it is. A couple years ago we had a huge problem with blackouts and brownouts and a general lack of electrical power. All the spare capacity in the grid had been used up, and nobody had an incentive to build more. I worry that government-owned bandwidth will result in the same problem.
> I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.
But shouldn't the government only be concerned with providing a usable signal? If you want a fast signal, then leave that to private enterprise. You can pay them for a faster connection, and they can pay the government to upgrade the infrastructure in a particular area.
1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."
2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.
The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.
3) Public trusts. This has no real economic value, but I don't really trust Haliburton with proper management of parkland or the like. Things with both a very high monetary value and societal value should not be trusted to an enterprise with a profit motive.