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Originally posted by Spanky
????. Don't you agree that government rarely do better controlling a market than letting it operate to natural forces.
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Apart from FX markets, very few are unregulated.
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Those are not markets. Those are not consumer items. Those are things the government has to buy for society as a whole. When it comes to consumer products the government does not need to get involved. News and media are individual consumer products that the market takes care of.
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We do not leave the production of national security and primary education to the free market because we know that it will not produce the right outcome. A few posts ago, we were agreeing that the free market produces not enough news and too much cheap opinion. Now you've changed your tune and have decided that the market is taking care of us. So, never mind the rest of the discussion.
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Someone is going to have to pay for the production of news. It is going to be the taxpayers. You are going to force the taxpayers to pay for a good they don't want. If they wanted this type of news they would pay for it.
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I'm not forcing the taxpayers to do it if their democratically elected representatives vote for it. Taxpayers -- or citizens, as the Greeks called them before Howard Jarvis came along -- decide to purchase things through the government all the time. Is it beyond your comprehension that people might decide to purchase some goods and services (think: national defense) as citizens, through their government, rather than as individual consumers?
Apparently it is.
