Episode 190: How Subverting the Free Market Brings Us Corporate Behemoths

While I highlight your feedback to me on this show, this time I’m highlighting my feedback to another podcast.

This is my feedback to an episode of Congressional Dish, hosted by Jennifer Briney. Jennifer does the work of finding out what bills are going through Congress and brings you the “in a nutshell” versions of them to you, so you can find out what they’re doing for you, or to you. Her recent episode was about a project called FirstNet, a program designed to create a new nationwide wireless network just for first responders, so they aren’t blocked during emergencies because of everyone using their phones to find out if loved ones are OK.

This project was started in the wake of 9/11, and may come to fruition soon. She was glad to hear this was happening, but was concerned over the corruption that was part of the beginning of this process, and that the for-profit corporation AT&T; was getting the contract, because, as she put it, AT&T; puts profit first, and customers (in this case first responders) down on the list.

This is my response, mostly to the economic aspects of her concern, and how the free market has not been allowed to work properly, and the result is that we’re in monopolistic mess. I greatly encourage you to listen to her episode for the context of this feedback, and subscribe to her podcast.

(Jennifer never guarantees that she’ll use feedback that she gets in her show, and this bit of audio is 7 minutes 38 seconds, quite an imposition to her and her audience. So if she doesn’t use it, I’d absolutely understand.

Also, below is an extended transcript, more than what I said in my audio feedback. I got on a roll and couldn’t stop writing. I pared it back for the audio feedback, but this is everything I wanted to say.)

Mentioned links:

Congressional Dish, episode 155: FirstNet Empowers AT&T;

Why Can’t The Market for Medical Care Work Like Cosmetic Surgery?

Show transcript

Hello there Jennifer, I’m Doug Payton, another podcaster. Mine is called “Consider This!” and it’s my 10-minute-or-less conservative commentary. As a conservative, I wanted to give my feedback on your recent episode about FirstNet.

First of all, thank you so much for bringing this topic to our attention. I, for one, had no idea that this was even a thing. Like you, I like the fact that this is happening, and also like you, I’m concerned about how it’s happening.

Right off the bat, even though I’m a small-government conservative, I want to say that it makes sense for the government to do this. There are many things that the feds especially have taken upon themselves that I think should be state functions, but coordinating interstate emergency services seems very reasonable. That aspect I agree with.

As a conservative, I also want to bring up a couple side points. First, you seem to think that Republicans and/or conservatives (though the two aren’t always the same thing) believe that private enterprise is always good and government is always evil. Not really. Here’s the deal. Both private companies and government are populated by are people. People in private enterprise and government can get greedy, both for money and for power. There can be checks on that greed, but we have virtually neutered them. For private companies, the market can put a check on greed. A vibrant free market, where there are many companies competing for your dollar, forces prices down and quality up. Don’t like the store you’re buying your widgets from? Pick a new one. It’s when those companies influence government to, for example, add regulations to make getting into the widget making business prohibitively expensive, that we wind up with less competition, and the prices go up.