So, if government takes from the rich to give to the poor, how is that "serving" the rich?
It provides the poor with money to spend on goods and services from which the rich make further profit. Any economics professor would tell you that. By contrast, taking from the poor to give to the rich, as you're suggesting, serves to make people desperate to the point they are significantly more likely to get involved in crime, costing more in taxes due to costs of incarceration. (Along with other negative externalities, such as decreased spending power, which will serve to ultimately shrink the economy and hurt everyone.)
If government takes from city people to give to country people, how is that "serving" city people?
Well, city people get their food from somewhere, and it's not Manhattan. If nobody lived in the country, there would be nobody growing the food you eat, nobody staffing the national parks you visit, and nobody to serve the truck drivers who stop along the way to their destinations with your goods and services.
Talk about hypocrisy! You want government to serve the people YOU deem worthy!
I want government to serve ALL the people, as it should have and does. I deem ALL the people worthy.
And no, they did not tell you in civics class that government is supposed to serve "all of the people." It is supposed to provide "the greatest good for the greatest number."
Um, no, sorry. The post office (in the constitution itself) is required to serve first class mail to all people in the United States at an equal price. The government was heavily involved in ensuring that electricity reached all people, and that wired telephone service reached all people. I'm not sure why Internet access, the modern equivalent to the letter or the telephone, should be any different.
People choose to live in remote areas - the bush, the sticks, the boonies - whatever you want to call it. The cost of real estate is less. The cost of car insurance is less. But they don't have the benefits of city life - museums, large libraries, symphony orchestras, legitimate theater, Michelin rated restaurants, major league sports, multiplex cinemas, shopping malls, major educational institutions .... and maybe high-speed Internet. Their choice.
And if they can't afford to move to the city, screw 'em, right? That's what you're suggesting here. I've made that move. I now pay as much in my mortgage each month now as I made in an entire month (before taxes!). Unless you have a good job waiting for you or a large savings account, people can't afford to just uproot their lives and move to the city just because you think they should.
Internet access is no longer a luxury like the other items you lump in with it. It is required by schools, by employers, and by government, much as electricity and the telephone are.
Maybe if rusty towers TV stations weren't hogging bandwidth, wireless service would be better.
Showing you know nothing at all about the situation. In the rural area I come from, there is exactly 22 MHz of spectrum in use by the cell phone company out of some 300+ MHz actually licensed. I own a spectrum analyzer; I looked. The other companies have no interest in operating there but were glad to do a game of keep-away to keep it out of the hands of the much smaller company that does want to serve the area. Killing the free TV service in the area would not do one single thing to improve Internet availability in rural areas.
By the way, there are areas of the U-P where you can't get OTA TV at all, or need a big roof-top antenna plus mast.
So? The vast majority can. That's the point. After your plan to kill all OTA, much larger areas won't have any kind of video service than do now.
No, government does NOT serve ALL the people. There are whole states, and large portions of others, which get far less from the government than they pay in.
Those people still get roads, security, schools, post office service, etc. They do get government services. I'm really not sure why you're arguing that they don't when they very obviously do.
And your FCC demands so-called "affirmative action" (aka reverse discrimination). Again, not serving all the people, just those some bureaucrats deem worthy.
Not entirely sure what this has to do with anything we're discussing here.
- Trip