Eric Reasons

I recently had dinner with a good friend, who, as it happens, is a fairly staunch liberal. He made a joke at some point in the evening about me being "a conservative." Of course, my political leanings are towards libertarian more than anything else, so to highlight the difference, I explained that he and I shared the same end goals, politically: I'm pro-choice, egalitarian, and against corporatism. I dislike military adventurism. I support equal work for equal pay. So on and so forth. "The only difference between us", I went on, "is that you think the way to achieve all of these goals, is through government". In the minds of my more progressive friends, their default instinct to solve any problem is a simple three step process: 1) Voting your conscience is just as good as acting upon it. 2) Tax "the rich" 3) Government will handle the rest. They're happy to let government act as a proxy for them, allowing someone else to do the w...

Looks like there's a new set of proposals coming regarding Net Neutrality from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. Some details have been leaked, but we'll have to wait until May 15th to see everything . More than a few people have been asking my opinion, so I'm going to dump everything here, and refer back to it. 1) Net Neutrality is a loaded term. On the surface, I'm a huge proponent of Net Neutrality. But when I say that, I want to see exactly what the TCPIP protocol was built for: best-effort per-packet delivery, end to end. However, I can promise you that if you put any two people in a room, you're going to come up with two different definitions of Net Neutrality. My idea of Net Neutrality, for example, is much different than Netflix's. ( Netflix reluctantly signed an agreement this year where they had to pay Comcast to connect to their network in order to get the speeds necessary to make sure your House of Cards marathon didn't stutter . ) [1] In many cases,...