Comments on: Tech at Night: FCC Budget battle ahead, Marketplace Fairness sales tax compact, Boo on Rick Santorum’s censorship

By: acat

acat — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 06:43:43 +0000

Well .. technically Neil, but .. well..

But regulating vice is not a Constitutional role of the national government needs to be followed by “and it’s failed every time it’s been tried”.

Prohibition was a failure, the war on drugs doesn’t seem to be working .. support for legalizing pot seems to be slowly rising. Heck, just the idea that Islamic states have a “virtues and vices” department should convince us that it’s a dubious idea.

I’m not saying there are things that “government” shouldn’t legislate .. but the majority of vice issues belong at the local level, not the Federal.

Mew

By: Finrod

Finrod — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 06:21:03 +0000

But regulating vice is not a Constitutional role of the national government.

I agree with this one hundred million percent.

By: GregInFla

GregInFla — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:32:10 +0000

he’d likely give an answer similar to Santorum’s. So I’ll wait and see if he gets asked about it. Can you imagine President Obama saying “Hey, porn’s great. I got two girls, and it’s great for opportunities for women in a down economy.” I don’t think so.

By: acat

acat — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 02:32:29 +0000

Imagine a government agency whose jobs consist of nothing but watching every single video uploaded to YouTube and deciding if it’s porn …

Mew

By: Neil Stevens

Neil Stevens — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 02:19:13 +0000

He’d shut down the internet. It’s non-union and non-manufacturing, anyway. He only cares about union manufacturing jobs.

By: sulmak

sulmak — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:01:12 +0000

aka Golden Shield, only bigger and with tighter controls.

Something not found outside police states.

Perhaps Santorum is thinks it will be easier, in which case he shows he is part of the 90% of our politicians who don’t understand the internet.

And this is regardless of the merits of banning porn in the first place.

By: CarolT

CarolT — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:35:50 +0000

Santorum is going to try to ban porn? I don’t look at those sites but if people want to they should be able to. I knew he was starting to be too extreme when the Satan speech from a few yeats ago came out.
Come on, we have to do better than Romney or Santorum. If we work hard enough nothing is impossible.

By: synergist777

synergist777 — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:05:27 +0000

And we KNOW that there won’t be a single central place where internet sellers can send all the collected sales tax. They are going to have to send out up to 50 separate forms every single month. And what to charge sales tax on? In New York, the sales tax is so complicated that a lot of stores just collect tax on a lot of things which are not taxable just to make sure (for example, marshmallows are taxable; marshmallow fluff is not). And what about sales taxes on services?

As with many regulations, this might as well be designed to toss small business out of the marketplace, as it adds a relative fixed cost which is miniscule for big business, and possibly ruinous to smaller businesses.

By: drfredc

drfredc — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:06:29 +0000

Come on folks, the marketplace will adjust to an internet sales tax amongst the States by moving internet business overseas out of the country — and killing more jobs in the process.

Sure, initially some additional revenue might come into States, but that will just have to be spent on increased unemployment and welfare support for internet businesses that lose market share out of the country and have to either close or scale back their operations (lay off workers, close stores, and more).

The answer to weak government revenue isn’t more taxes, it’s promoting less centralization of the social marketplaces in government. It’s government run social marketplaces that are driving out of control spending that is leading the push for more taxes…

The solution isn’t squeezing the market with more taxes, rather it’s opening up the social marketplace so it’s more individually driven rather than politically driven.

Politically driven social marketplaces are inherently inefficient, costly, and insensitive to normal marketplace evolution — good or bad, programs grow and grow. Individually driven social marketplaces are inherently efficient, cost effective, and very sensitive to normal marketplace evolution — good ones prosper, bad ones fade.

By: synergist777

synergist777 — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:52:47 +0000

…years ago when Grolier was given a patent for multimedia. Did the U.S. Patent Office (or foreign patent offices) ever consider maybe hiring someone who knows what is obvious or a trivial improvement on current technology? And, while we’re on patents, isn’t there some rule that you can’t patent something whose sole purpose is to be patented (the printer industry seems to be based on such a rule not existing)?

By: renl57

renl57 — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 12:14:05 +0000

…(not just child pornography) would be difficult, given its worldwide availability and distribution over the Internet.

To block out porn sites located in foreign countries would require a Government-mandated filter be installed at every ISP to which an American could subscribe. I guess that’s a job for the National Security Agency.

But do true conservatives really want to give the Government the power to filter our access to worldwide Internet information?

I know I don’t.
Such Government-mandated filtering starts to be too reminiscent of China.

Maybe Santorum should just cut to the chase and admit that China’s social model–a nominally private sector backed up by an authoritarian government that enforces traditional Chinese values–intrigues him.