I always enjoy reading about the rules for the presidential debates. For example sometimes they have a rule that the candidates may not point out audience members or bring props. The rule against props is presumably so they don’t start pulling documents out of their pocket and going “Right here it states, oh my most ‘honorable’ oponent, that …”; but the rule always gets me to imagining they are going to start juggling, set their hair on fire, break out in song, or something.

Presumably the only reason why the uTube debate stunt makes any sense at all is because these random uTube dudes can speak truth to power since unlike a full time journalist they have zero chance of every getting asked back again.  They can burn their bridges with every question; and use props!

If you have participated about in topic-free email lists for any period of time you’ll know that if a topic arises all possible positions on that topic  will, sooner or later, be trotted out. Ask about your crab grass problem and before long people will be suggest: gobal warming, ferrets, lack of good personal hygiene, while others will point out these suggestions are likely illegal or unethical. It’s part of the fun to try and predict which points that haven’t been made yet will be raised before the thread dies out.

So the whole uTube debate thing is totally bogus. They solicited questions from the masses; and presumably they got a reasonable sample of every question that could possibly be asked. Then somebody selects from the set of all possible questions the ones that actually get asked.

Who ever selected the question controlled the agenda. Pretending otherwise is just silly. The only question I have is exactly how big a Cheshire Cat smile they adopted each time one of their more edge selections was played. Pretending that this is somehow more democratic is either lying or naive.

There are about a 100 million households in the US.  The current estimate for the war’s cost is $12 Billion per month.    $120 dollars per household.  That cost will not be evenly distributed across the population.  What do you spend $120/month on?

The New York Times editorial about the Right’s successful take over of the supreme court is unique because it draws attention not to the social agenda shift but rather to the economic one, e.g. that most of courts decisions serve the well off at the expense of those less fortunate, the strong rather than the weak.

Cool, the Finns have progressive traffic fines; i.e. the fine is proportional to your income. I’d love to see more examples of that!

The Robinhood question has been the fundamental dialectic in politics. The power of government can be used to make the lives of small economic actors better, or it can be used to make life easier for large economic actors. There are of course plenty of other disputes going on at the same time, i.e. the power can take sides between subgroups of the large players or subpopulations of the small ones. Those disputes provide a bit of color to what is otherwise pretty black and white.

At the heart of the progressive movement was a choice to weigh in on the side of small economic actors. This was a direct fall out of the shocking discovery of just how much wealth and power the large actors had accumulated during the industrial revolution. Marx, in particular, was so shocked by the distribution of wealth that he presumed the small actors would rise up and institute forms of government to look out for their interests. That coordination problem is a lot harder than he thought.

The progressive project has lead to a vast array of programs that aid the small actors with funds taken from the large actors. We have a broad program of cutting the little guys some slack which unsurprisingly large actors sometimes abuse. What the Finns are doing is an example of how you can refine the system to work around that.

In the US in the late 1950 through about 1975 we had a strong consensus that the progressive movement had won. The political debate became much more colorful, less black and white. That’s over. In the last few decades the economic right has broken away from that consensus. They can’t win elections without votes so they formed an alliance with a TV watching evangelical segment of the population. These alliances are all fake, since the right’s actual allegiance is to large economic actors. The so-called rightwing cabal hides behind propaganda necessary to keep their voting electorate polarized. This is populism of the worst kind.

Taking for granted that there is a consensus around the progressive movement is now dangerous. One of the two parties no longer accepts that consensus. A friend pointed out how Lawrence Lessing has decided that his time would spent to the issue of corruption in politics rather than IP rights and their relationship to the commons. I don’t disagree in that switch of emphisis, but I think he somewhat misunderstands what the problem is; what he has been working on is a natural subplot of the progressive movement. I.e. the presumption that giving the vast population of smaller economic actors access to ideas is a good thing. What he has discovered is that there ain’t any consensus about the advantages of that sharing in our political house at this point. Large economic actors want their property rights.

This entire rant was triggered by this posting by Chandler Howell musing about how these issues arise around the management of security and risk; with his particular examples being the Finnish parking tickets and an emerging trend that allows prisoners to purchase better accommodations. Talk about a throw back to pre-progressive times! He starts out by mentioning a principle, i.e. equality before the law. My reaction to that was, no. No, governments work by deciding how to balance the inequality that exists. That’s what politics is about. The default state is extremely unequal and you can assemble governments that accelerate or temper that.

During the Civil War, before the progressive era, it was common for well-off young men who were drafted to hire somebody else to fill their place in the Army.  It’s delightful that the Finnish system creates an incentive for the wealthy to hire somebody else to drive for them.

Mr. Rytsola, who was issued the $71,400 speeding ticket in October and another $44,100 ticket in August for zigzagging in downtown Helsinki, says he supports income-based penalties, but with a cap on traffic fines. Under the present system, he says, “if you earn enough you shouldn’t even touch a car,” noting that accidentally driving too fast could cost the richest Finns hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While it is a fascinating political science question exactly how the Democratic Congress should deploy their resources over the comming months, here is an idea that’s close to my own trade.

One of the first things I’d like to see would be hearings on the Hill about Japan and Korea and Finland and who knows what other countries being 10 times as fast in broadband as the U.S., with far more uptake. Who? How fast? How did they do it? What of that can the U.S. apply? What advantages does the U.S. have that those countries don’t?

Great idea John!

update:

If you’re looking for the future of telecom, don’t search within the US telecom industry. It’s not hidden here anywhere. I’ve looked. –via Martin