< PREVIOUS ] [ 1999 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Hardly a day passes without some prominent mention of the glories of the Free Market, as with an article in last Thursday's Post about upgrading telephone service in rural areas.
At issue was a proposal to require all Colorado telephone lines to be capable of handling modern modems, and it was opposed by various telecommunications companies.
For many years I supported any proposal to upgrade rural telephone service, although recent developments have made me wonder if that was right.
The better the service gets, from the elimination of party lines to the arrival of cellular service, the more we get invaded by People of Money, who drive up property prices. However, they do not cause a corresponding increase in wages.
Colorado State University recently surveyed living costs and wages in the 56 Colorado counties where it has an extension agent. CSU set the median at 1.00; a ratio above that means that a county has low wages and high prices.
Near the top of the list were resort counties like Eagle (1.26) and Summit (1.22), well known for their expensive houses and rotten wages. But Chaffee scored 1.10, making it a harder place to get by than Boulder (1.08) and Frémont (0.82) counties.
It wasn't that way ten years ago, when our telephone service was primitive and we were trying to sell a two-bedroom house here for all of $28,500 and didn't get a single offer in the two years we had it listed.
Thus it seems that the alleged economic benefits of improved telephone service in this rural area may apply to landlords and real-estate developers, but not to working people.
So I am now agnostic on the question of whether the state should require improvements in rural service. I like good service for my enterprises, and I'm a landlord so I can squeeze tenants more with every uptick in the local real-estate market -- but it doesn't appear that there's much benefit to this community in general.
That said, let us move back to the Free Market. Diane
Roth, an AT&T official, said We really think the
best method to define what becomes the standard for basic
local service will be the competitors in the
marketplace.
But is there such a thing as a competitive market? We elect a lot of free-market Republicans in this country. Or at least, that's what they say they are.
However, have you noticed a free market in medicine? Shouldn't you or I be able to take our medical woes to any practioner we choose -- a regular physician, an acupuncturist, an herbalist, a Christian Science practioner, etc.? Shouldn't we be able to take any medication that might salve us, be it hemp or Viagra?
Note that cable-TV rates will soon be deregulated (fat lot of good that regulation did, since the rates have risen much faster than inflation in recent years, and further, TCI here arbitrarily removes informative channels like C-SPAN to replace them with garbage like UPN).
In theory, a competitive marketplace will set the service and rate levels.
But in practice, it's unlikely that a competitor will appear to start a new cable company. When there is a competing technology, like digital satellite transmission, does the local cable monopoly then compete on service and price?
Of course not. The cable companies try to force the satellites to quit transmitting the major broadcast networks, thereby forcing people to use cable if they want to see what's on NBC or Fox.
That's a free market?
The cable companies say they're acting at the behest of
local broadcasters to enforce a must carry
rule that
applies to cable and should apply to satellites.
And you see how broadcasters compete
-- not by
offering programming that you want, but by forcing their
signals onto your system.
In the print world, anybody can set up shop, get a mailing permit, and be a publisher. It's even simpler to publish on the World Wide Web.
But the National Association of Broadcasters is trying
to kill a proposal for low-power community radio now before
the Federal Communications Commission, even though
free-market
principles, along with the First
Amendment, should encourage as many broadcaster outlets as
technology permits.
At any rate, we get to hear and see a lot about the virtues of free and competitive markets. But when will we get to see one of those free and competitive markets, especially in telecommunications?
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1999 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >