Twenty six hundred Vermonters think someone forced to care for something will do a better more conscientious job than a willing party. They think Verizon, which doesn’t want to operate the land lines in Vermont anymore, will do a better job of operating the network than FairPoint, a willing buyer. The tag line of their protests is “High Speed Internet for all.” The inference being that Verizon, the unwilling owner, will assuredly provide fiber optic lines to every household while the willing buyer, FairPoint, will not give us these things.
The fact that so many Vermonters think its OK to have the government force private companies to provide services irrespective of financial feasibility might have something to do with why Verizon wants out to begin with. A spokesman for the protesters outright admits they don’t care if giving high-speed internet connections to everybody bankrupts the company.
"If they have not met their (obligations) we will restrict funds flowing up to even meet corporate debt obligations," O'Brien said. "We would rather see the corporate organization face bankruptcy to make sure the financial resources stay in Vermont."
Here’s something for the protesters to chew on – Verizon and FairPoint are not public property. They’re privately owned, (publicly traded), institutions operated for-profit. The idea that the government can force conditions on these companies irrespective of their financial feasibility is ridiculous. If the world really worked this way governments could go around decreeing everything for everybody – it has been tried before with astonishingly bad results. But it’s not the way the world works. Private capital will only invest where it believes there is a realistic potential for a return. While governments are mostly limited to making promises they can’t keep.
The way I see it, the protesters are only looking to get something for themselves out of the deal. It’s the “what’s in it for me” attitude. Jonah Goldberg said it eloquently in his recent Townhall.com post, "it’s unhealthy for a democracy when the majority of citizens don’t see government as a service they’re reluctantly paying for but as an extortionist that cuts them in for a share of the loot."
Here’s a suggestion: rather than trying to strong arm FairPoint into making promises that may be financially impossible to keep, why not talk with the Public Service Board about what they could do to insure the financial feasibility of high speed internet for all? Perhaps they could start by negotiating with the eighteen hundred Vermonters who filed suit against VELCO to stop them from running fiber optic cables along their electric power right-of-way. More precisely, the group that wants a cut of the action because VELCO plans to lease access to internet service providers. (In case you’re wondering, internet service providers are the companies that provide high speed internet access.)
I wonder how many people involved in these two groups consider themselves Progressive? Standing up to big business is a Progressive ideal after all. A more interesting question is why do people who advocate stopping progress call themselves progressive when it’s really just the opposite?
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