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Americans Taxed $400 Billion For Fiber Optic Internet That Doesn’t Exist

posted by martyb on Monday December 04 2017, @08:24PM   
from the getting-shafted dept.

canopic jug writes:

For decades, people in the US have been given a song and dance by the telecoms about how tax cuts, surcharges, and a long list of other expenses are necessary for telecoms to "invest" in infrastructure. The concessions are granted again and again, but the investments are never actually made. In all, US taxpayers have paid $400 Billion in taxes and Internet surcharges for fiber optic upgrades that never happened.

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Original Submission

• What Heinlein's book really said (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @03:40PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @03:40PM (#607227)

  From your link [goodreads.com], the full quote referenced from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is:

  “Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.”

  Heinlein is describing a situation where effectively unlimited authority is being used with no matching voter responsibility. After reading the full quote and giving it some thought, I realized that Heinlein's statement is in agreement with my principle [soylentnews.org] that the maximum legitimate authority that can be wielded by a government whose powers are delegated to it by the governed is no greater than the authority of a lone, typical individual. Sure, Heinlein may have have been grasping about for a way to assign more responsibility to the voters, but my approach is in harmony with Heinlein's reasoning by "decreasing authority" rather than increasing responsibility to what he and I seem to think are impossible levels. Thanks for being the vehicle to bring this to my attention.

  Parent