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I read a rumor today that some commercial agency who provides weather information wishes for the NOAA website to stop distributing weather for free. The reason of course is simple, it's because having a commercial agency providing weather information is difficult if people can get comparable quality information easily from a free source. And in some ways the request seems reasonable, for if the government trampled on every commercial venture in existence, then there would be only the government and there would be no commerce. Sounds like communism to me, and despite some of the idealistic goals of communism I think we've proven fairly convincingly that cumminsim doesn't usually lead to great value for the people. We frown on communism because it fails to help the people it governs, and tends to produce a separation of leadership from the people, and thus decreased productivity and quality of life for all. So of course, the government should allow a commercial entity to provide a service and make a buck or two. That's capitalism. Great. But that's the thing: they already are. The government is totally allowing commercial agencies to redundantly provide weather information. Some people even tune their TV's to such stuff and watch it like it's a feature film. What's actually being requested is terrible and awful and disgusts me so deeply that I must rant here about it and shake my tiny fist. Honestly, I feel ill when I think about it. The commercial entity is asking for the government to completely lift the entire capitalist economy and force people to use a service that is already provided without the waste of a commercial entity with all of their departments, PR campaigns, employees spending their lives providing negligible value to the world. They don't want to be capitalist, they are looking for a government handout. Corporate welfare. They're all out of good ideas that add value and could be profitable, so they're asking to be made perpetually profitable without the need to provide value. Yuck. The government has good reasons to be interested in the weather. Failing to provide this already expertly assessed information to the public (American public if not the entire world) is a waste. If someone else can provide more useful information and people are willing to put money toward it, then so be it. That's the joy of capitalism. You're allowed to try crazy and seemingly redundant things, and sometimes they're good enough to work, and sometimes not. But capitalism only works if you have honesty, and companies are allowed to succeed or fail based on the market. if you remove the possibilities of success and failure, you have killed capitalism. The government has a lot of big jobs to do. But first and foremost, its job is to improve the lives of those who it governs. If it increases waste and decreases productivity overall so that a company unable to provide value can thrive, then the government has utterly failed to do its job. I like the NOAA, and their website is one of the few things that a government agency has done on the internet that I think is of tremendous value right now (and on a regular basis) to ordinary people. I know that at least some of my tax dollars aren't being wasted on making old men argue with each other. This reminds me of an argument a high-school friend of mine made. He tossed a cigarette butt out of the car window, and when asked he said that it was necessary to litter so that the people who picked up litter kept their jobs. The reason that doesn't make sense is that it means those people aren't making food, or building homes, are making people happier or healthier. Rather than dealing with his own trash in a way that would have been efficient, he chose to create gross inefficiency, drawing people away from productive actions to clean up his mess. That's exactly what's going on here. The government (I feel) has an obligation to provide cost effective services to its people. Should something better come about by capitalism then so be it. If not, then the natural monopoly of a central governemtn can provide its benefit the way no commercial agency can. We shouldn't do something twice if it offers no benefit. We shouldn't allow companies to linger on if they are keeping potenitally useful people from doing useful things. More jobs... pssht. How about more vacation days, cleaner air, healthier and happier people? Those are the things that I actually want. I'll give up half of my job for someone else if that means we both get health care and housing at half cost. And if we could magically maximize efficiency of everything we are doing today, I think that's exactly what we'd have. More vacation, more time, better health. And anyone who tries to hide their promotion of inefficient practices behind the guise of creating jobs is keeping us from getting these things. Let the government compete as yet another commercial agency. If you can't provide something materially better, then you should be supporting them in providing it properly to begin with. |