DISQUS

It seems to me that cellular providers, who are too few, too big, and too opaque* for anyone to realistically assert that true competition exists, brought this on themselves by imposing long-term contracts on a "take it or leave it" basis even to customers whose instrument has already been paid for, and by making the fees unreasonable (for example, a Sprint customer who cancels one month early had to pay the same $200+ as one who canceled in his first month).

* By opaque I mean that facts about the service which are important to gauging its worth (such as specific details of coverage locations, signal quality, roaming charges, and how well customer support does its job) are intentionally kept inaccessible to consumers until after they've committed to a contract.

This is an industry that needs a lot more competition. I hope that when the digital TV switch frees up more spectrum for cellular use, the FCC ensures it goes to new providers, not the same ones we have now.

That this would even be attempted shows that the GOP isn't even trying. Why on earth, during 4 years that we had both a Republican president and a Republican Congress, didn't Bush even try to enact legislation to enforce Beck v. Communications Workers of America?

We need a Supreme Court that will restore the individual right of contract. But to get it, we probably first need a constitutional amendment to prevent any future president from threatening to "pack" the Court, which is how FDR took this right away in the first place.

This is only novel to someone unfamiliar with the trucking industry. Most truck drivers carry Qualcomm satellite radios to communicate with their dispatchers, and the Qualcomm system keeps track of the truck's location very accurately. The company (based in San Diego) has been having its records subpoenaed in speeding-ticket cases similar to this one for at least three decades.

IP owners have no more business performing prior restraint of speech than does government. Therefore, all take-down notices should be banned. Let the IP owner go to court and prove infringement, and only THEN let the judge order the material to be taken down. The mere prospect of infringement does not justify violating the presumption of innocence which is what makes America America.

Similarly, the law has no business banning circumvention of "DRM" systems which impose restrictions far beyond what the content producer's IP rights entitle him to impose. Disney has no business telling a buyer of its DVDs he can't skip commericals.

Why isn't this idiot Congresscritter behind bars yet?

Jim Harper asked me:
JDG, do you realize that you're talking about limiting the freedom of the employer and the landlord to deal with whom they choose? Why should one "side" in any transaction enjoy legal rules giving them superior information to the other?

Two reasons. Employment (for everyone not already rich) and rental homes (for everyone who doesn't own one) are necessities. There are also horrendous, ongoing shortages of both employment (due to overregulation) and housing (due to the scam known as urban planning).

As a result, an employer or landlord can put whatever terms he likes in a contract, and 99 percent of us have no recourse but to sign it. After all, the next employer or landlord might not even decide to make you an offer -- and good luck finding out why.

So if employers and landlords are not restricted this way, they can and will impose all sorts of rules on areas of your private life that are absolutely none of their business. For proof of this read just about any employment contract or lease.

Remember when Adolph Coors Co. was known for subjecting all its job applicants to lie-detector exams about their entire past including their sex lives? It took a federal law to make them stop the practice. Every time I see one of their "Love Train" TV ads I still want to throw a few of their own bottles at their CEO's head. But without privacy protection laws, companies will soon be able to buy that same data from commercial database operators. The record may even be full of lies about you, but it'll render you homeless just the same, and you'll never know why or who's to blame.

Anyone who says the solution is just to negotiate better is out of touch with reality -- and is probably one of those Washington insiders who has never had to work for a living in his life.

What both privacy laws and privacy opponents fail to address is that a substantial part of your everyday freedom relies absolutely on facts such as: your boss can't find out that you support political causes he opposes, follow a religion he dislikes, or have friends he hates; your landlord can't find out that you engage in sex practices he thinks are sinful.

As new technology removes these inabilities, it becomes imperative that the law either put them back in place, or introduce new laws to prevent employers and landlords from discriminating based on information of the types in my examples. Otherwise you are no longer free to have a private life that your boss or landlord doesn't approve.

And discrimination about those things is going to be impossible to prove. That is why gathering the info needs to be banned.

Toll roads, especially as they are (badly) done now, only seem bad until you consider the alternative.

The state DOTs that are supposed to be using our fuel taxes to build and maintain roads have stopped doing their jobs - usually quite deliberately. Depending on your state, most or all fuel tax money is being wasted on rail systems and other phony congestion solutions. Sometimes this is quite deliberate. The Sacramento Bee recently published a piece bragging about how area planners (SACOG) are deliberately creating congestion, especially downtown, to try to force drivers out of our cars.

Somehow the Environmental Impact Reports for these groups' grandiose plans never reflect all the extra pollution from cars that are forced to sit idling or take less direct routes -- let alone the road rage deaths caused by all that deliberate congestion. The planners should all be in jail.

Privatizing the road business is the only way to take matters out of the planners' untrustworthy hands and get road building going again.

All the problems cited in the article that started this thread are problems of not enough privatization, not of too much.

In my view the worst road users (and I use that phrase rather than "driver" because many bicycle and motorcycle riders are in this category) are those who insist on getting in front of you even though they know they're going to be holding you back as soon as it becomes (otherwise) possible to go the speed limit. Sometimes these people just don't notice you; other times their notion of "sharing the road" doesn't include recognition of the duty to let faster drivers pass them.

I'm not saying safety isn't important too -- but the law has no business protecting these needless slowpokes from their just deserts when they insist on holding others back. The right to use the road, like all other rights, is conditional on respecting that same right in other people. The road is for all of us, so it must not be wasted.