Don't Turn Away Yet

Our blogfriend the Rude Pundit seems pretty sure that a lot of the hurricane flooding today in New Orleans could have been avoided if developers would stop draining the swamps to build suburbs. He's not that happy about it.

Steve Gilliard, another blogfriend, worries about the fact that many Louisiana and Mississippi National Guardspeople are in Iraq and can't help out rebuilding levies that hold back rivers, the way the National Guard used to do. He's also quite justifiably angry that the people who died in the Hurricane were the people who were too poor to get away.

All of this anger reminds us of an angry liberal lobbyist we used to know. He got angry one day and refused to help lobby against a bunch of nuclear waste being dumped north of Las Vegas. Why? In his approximate words, "They voted for Bush, and the knew he was going to do this. So forget them."

People could say the same thing about the Gulf Coast, which voted for Bush again. It is possible to say, You voted for Bush, knowing he would send your Guard to war, knowing he would allow developers to do whatever they want, knowing that he would keep you poor. Now you're suffering because of your choice. Forget you.

To this, we can only say, Bush won the Gulf Coast, but it's not like he got everyone's vote. He didn't even get seventy percent. Thirty-some percent of that population is still a lot of people.

Lots of our frustrated liberal friends want to give up on the Southern States. We all need to remember that thirty percent of the population, though. The Southern liberals we know are some of the coolest people we have ever met. Let's not abandon them yet.

It wasn’t so long ago that Al Gore, Sr., thought that the South was going to end up the most liberal part of the country. He was proved wrong and unseated, but the seeds are still there. Juries in the South give plaintiffs huge cash awards against corporations; Southerners still stand up for the little guy, even when it’s trial lawyers asking them to do it.

It’s a region with many difficulties, not the least of which are biggies like crushing poverty, lingering racism, and high crime rates. But it’s also beautiful, and it will be worth Northern liberals’ while to think up new ways to help out our friends down there.

Now That's One Angry Texan

Our blogfriend Amanda Marcotte, because she is both liberal and Texan, is often angry, but over the weekend she got really angry:

"Casey Sheehan died because he's not a fortunate son. And Bush and his apologists are irritated that Cindy is refusing to simply understand that ordinary people are nothing but profit-generators for the rich. Out of all the pathetic attempts to discredit Cindy Sheehan, my absolute favorite is the people who whine that Bush met her once before, on the famous occasion where he didn't know her name or the name of her son and acted put out about having to pretend to care about the people he gets killed with his overseas adventuring. After all, if you believe that the not-fortunate exist for the disposal of the fortunate, then the not-fortunate asking for answers and respect makes as much sense as my trash can holding a strike to demand answers for why I toss used coffee grounds in it. This of course is known as "supporting the troops"."

This is some righteous vitriol. It's amazing how the simple fact of a mother's grief puts the lie to excuses for war. It's amazing how obvious the truth is: there would be no wars if rich men were the first to die in them.

The point of all this is not that the President should send his daughters off to die. How horrible would that be? How sad would we be if it happened? They seem to be generally nice, regular girls. We know about them, sort of, from having seen them on TV and if they were killed in war, it would be a tragedy, like when any famous person's kid dies.

The point of all this is that no one's sons or daughters should be sent off to die. That's what we're all talking about when we say, Mr. President, why aren't your daughters in the army? We're trying to make him imagine that grief, and realize that nothing is worth its cost.

He doesn't see it and he won't. He's heard all the arguments, and believes it is worth the cost. We know that.

The point is, having made the decision to go to war, he'll never again have to question whether it was worth the cost, because it costs him nothing now. No one he knows is likely to die over there; no one he cares about is going to die over there. He'll never have to think about the cost.

That's the point.

Why We Love This Country

Americans have a certain international reputation for rudeness. We're dubious ourselves exactly how much of this reputation is deserved, but we will admit, sometimes Americans do seem able to raise rudeness to the level of an art form.

Now, here at the Blasphemy Blog, our mother did not raise us to curse at people on national television. But there is something satisfying about a news anchor being told to mind his own business. It's nothing more, perhaps, than the pleasure of seeing the tall poppy cut down, but there you go.

You Are Watching the Frontier Justice Channel

We at the Blasphemy Blog do not currently have a TV. If we did, we sure would not watch Fox News. How much of a joke is this channel? We know from personal experience that prospective jurors try to get out of jury duty by volunteering on their jury questionnaires that they watch it regularly. They do this because they know defense attorneys will immediately reject them as potential jurors. You're not going to get your client off with Fox News viewers on your jury, that's for sure.

How are these prospective jurors so confident that they'll be able to avoid jury duty just because they watch a certain channel? Consider the recent John Loftus incident. This Fox News analyst goes on TV and gives out the address of some guy in California he's heard is a terrorist. The address in question is subsequently vandalized, and its residents are harassed.

All well and good, no? It serves those terrorists right, and if they can't take a little vandalism of their personal property, they should stop being terrorists, those wimps.

Only one problem: the dude in question moved away years ago. Now it's just some regular Californian family living there, having to put up with this harassment.

And this alleged terrorist? Well, he did used to belong to an organization that has some links to terrorism, but he quit in 1997 because, apparently, it got too radical for him. I wonder what's on his mind these days. Hopefully, even though people are giving out what they think is his home address on national television and calling him a terrorist, he still feels the way he did in 1997.

The Orange County family whose house used to belong to this former sorta-terrorist sympathizer, meanwhile, has asked Fox News to apologize, but Fox hasn't done so yet. They probably will eventually, because an apology costs nothing. Then they'll do the same sort of thing again.

And those people who want to avoid jury duty? They're going to keep writing down that they watch Fox News. Because they know: if they can make the defense attorneys think they watch Fox News all day, the defense attorneys are going to assume they're the kind of people who will watch a news report that claims to reveal the location of a terrorist, and then go out and lay down some vigilante justice on that alleged terrorist's heiny.

That's not the sort of person you want making rational justice decisions. But apparently, it is the kind of person Fox News wants as an audience.

One Last Time

We at the Blasphemy Blog need to get over this thing with the Reverend Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. We've been going on about this for three days now, and we need to get on to other topics.

But we can't, we just can't...the Reverend will not allow us. Here he goes, apologizing again, which is nice, but also in the same breath comparing himself to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is...well, a statement of obscene self-importance.

Bonhoeffer, a theologian, was executed by the Nazis because of his connection to the July 20 Plot, an unsuccessful attempt by German Wehrmacht officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Bonhoeffer was already in jail by 1944 and didn't set off any of the bombs, but he was a well-known political and ideological opponent of Naziism, and had associated with plots to overthrow or assassinate Hitler in the past. For the Nazis, who were not big on due process, that was enough to hang him, and they did so in October 1945.

Robertson is calling on people to "consider" the example of Bonhoeffer, and to consider that political assassinations are not always immoral. After all, it wasn't immoral for Bonhoeffer to try and kill Hitler, was it? He was a minister, and tried to assassinate someone! Just like the Reverend wants to kill Hugo Chavez! See?

Well, let's just assume for a moment that, left unchecked, Hugo Chavez, the elected President of Venezuela, will someday become an evil as great as Hitler. (Hitler was elected, too, after all.) It seems like a stretch, but, for the sake of Robertson's argument, we'll allow it.

What would Dietrich Bonhoeffer do, in this situation? Well, he would create a church dedicated to non-violently resisting this evil. He would persist with this dissident church, even after Hugo Chavez forcibly closed all of its seminaries. He would be willing to go to jail for his acts of civil disobedience. And he would work as best he could to aid the innocent victims of Hugo Chavez' monstrous reign.

Pat Robertson went on TV and called for Hugo Chavez' assassination. It just doesn't seem like he's put quite as much work into his resistance as Bonhoeffer did, you know?

Now, we at the Blasphemy Blog didn't know Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But it doesn't seem like Robertson is anything like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It'll Have to Do

So, the Reverend Pat Robertson apologized for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Well, sort of. He says that he was "misinterpreted" because he didn't say "assassinate," he said, "take him out." Which, Robertson says, doesn't necessarily mean death. "Take him out" could mean kidnapping, says Robertson. The President of Venezuela, if he was sitting in his house one day, could be removed from his house by U.S. special forces, at gunpoint. I.e., he could be "taken out" of his house. Oh.

It still doesn't sound very Christian to us.

Who Would Jesus Assassinate?

We at the Blasphemy Blog are not afraid of Pat Robertson. He just doesn't seem that scary to us, and never has. This is because, we recently realized, when we first saw Pat Robertson on television, he wasn't himself...literally. He was being portrayed by Al Franken in a Saturday Night Live parody, and portrayed very well. Now, whenever we see or hear the Reverend Robertson, we just think of Saturday Night Live, one of our favorite shows, and smile.

We hope that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has a good sense of humor himself, because the Reverend recently went on TV and called for Chavez' assassination. That's the kind of thing a President might take personally.

Now, we don't think Pat Robertson really meant it. He sometimes gets carried away, saying things like judges are worse than terrorists and gay people caused 9/11, but he usually takes it back. Sometimes you get caught up in the moment when you're on camera; we know we have.

The main thing we hope, though, is that when and if Robertson does apologize, he apologizes as a Christian. That is to say, we hope he condemns his own remarks because no Christian would ever call for the assassination of another human being. It's simply not something Jesus' teachings countenance, and for any church leader to let people think otherwise is an obscenity.

So we hope the Reverend will do that. Because even preachers make mistakes, and all he has to do is say he's sorry. It's not like we expect him to be infallible or anything.

Time to Raise the Draft Age Limit

We at the Blasphemy Blog once heard an interview on National Public Radio with an elderly woman who had served as a translator for the U.S. Army in World War II, and who, through a series of coincidences, had ended up writing a lot of the Japanese constitution in 1945. She seemd like a nice old lady. We wonder if she's busy.

The Beautiful Struggle

Via our blogfriend the Rude Pundit, we see that the Vice President addressed the military order of the Purple Heart yesterday.

We are definitely Democrats at the Blasphemy Blog, but we try to refrain from ad hominem personal criticism, even of public figures. We make an exception, however, for the Vice President, because we think he is a human being completely devoid of a moral core.

In his speech, the Vice President compared the current fiasco in Iraq to the American Revolutionary War, and suggested that, just as then, the odds are long against our success, but, then as now, we need to tough it out.

This is a ridiculous argument. After Mussolini invaded Greece, and it wasn’t going so well, he could also have said, Well, you know, when the United States was fighting its war for independence from Great Britain, things were hard then, too, and things are also hard for us, but they stuck it out, so we should, too.

Not all wars are created equal, you see. (They’re all awful, but some are less awful than others.) We are sure that the Vice President knows this, but he pretends not to, because the lie is in his political interest.

He also reminded the crowd that, after 9/11, the President’s speechwriters warned us all that the war against terrorism would be a long and difficult campaign. The Vice President has never stopped saying that the war in Iraq was a way of protecting our country from more 9/11-type terrorism. He doesn’t actually believe this, either, but once again the lie is in his political interest.

Politicians tell many lies for political reasons. Most of these we can forgive, because politics is a difficult business, and when things get difficult human beings tend to start lying. We understand that.

However, we at the Blasphemy Blog hate lies about why we need to keep fighting wars. Dishonest justification of wars results in unnecessary suffering and death, and is inexcusable.

The depth of our disdain for the Vice President’s words descends still lower, however, because we know our cultural fascism at the Blasphemy Blog. By telling us, with his serious grown-up face, over and over again, that we need to buckle down for this annihilating struggle against an abstract concept, the Vice President is just priming the pump for continual war. By comparing an invasion to a revolutionary struggle, he's married himself to the idea that Yeats' Terrible Beauty can be born and reborn under any circumstances, never mind that in 1776 we were the underdogs and today we are the most powerful nation on earth.

Does he really love war so much? We think he really, truly does. We think that the Vice President of the United States believes the violence and carnage will purify us as a nation, as a people, as a world. He wants us to be killed.

This is not to say that he wants any individual person to die; he just thinks that a little war-fighting will straighten us all out. He believes that 9/11 was our finest hour, not because we “came together as a nation” or any of that touchy-feely horse manure, but because we resolved as a nation there to kill and be killed as much as was necessary.

And, for the Vice President, the necessary amount of killing and being killed is a very large amount.

We don’t think this has anything to do with the well-documented and commented-upon fact that the Vice President has never served in the military. We believe that he’d be the same way if he were a gunnery sergeant in Tikrit or a Vietnam Veteran Centcom general. We think that he loves war and wants lots more of it.

We can’t forgive him for that.

Free People, not Free Markets

One of our favorite movies here at the Blasphemy Blog is Black Hawk Down, which is about the rocky, maligned 1993 United Nations mission in Somalia. At the beginning of the movie, a truck full of UN grain is accosted by a mob of starving Somalis, who take away whatever they can get their hands on. It’s a disturbing scene that displays the unhappy sight of the strong pushing aside the weak in order to satisfy their most desperate, basic human needs.

Suddenly a flutter of automatic rifle fire disperses the crowd, and a man approaches the vehicle, firing his gun in the air. Finally, the viewer thinks. Order will be restored. But this feeling quickly dissipates, because the man shouts out, “This food belongs to Mohamed Farrah Aidid!” Aidid was the most notorious Somali warlord of the time, and the message of the scene could not be clearer: order may be restored, but the same rules apply.

And so the people go hungry, unless they can afford to pay whatever Mohamed Farrah Aidid is charging for whatever is left after he gorges himself and his cronies.

We thought of this movie when reading about the starvation in Niger. As it turns out, there is actually plenty of food in the country right now, and there is plenty more just over the border in the new West African capitalist powerhouse of Nigeria. However, it is the cruel reality of capitalism, rather than the power of warlords, that is preventing people from getting the food they need this time.

That is because, quite simply, Niger’s farmers can make more money selling their food to the relatively wealthy Nigerians than they can selling it to their countrymen. So they get their best price in Nigeria, and in Niger, people starve.

Free market ideals are admirable, because entrepreneurship is a worthwhile human endeavor, overall. It sparks innovation, forces us to adapt, and prevents boredom. But free markets are not an absolute good; after all, the thing that is being “freed” in laissez-faire economics is the money, not necessarily the people.

Sometimes you have to break the rules of the market in order to accomplish a human good. We must always remember that the market should be our tool, and not the other way around.

A Retraction

We admit it. We were wrong.

Many months ago, we at the Blasphemy Blog came out in favor of teaching intelligent design in biology class alongside evolution. We did this even though we ourselves are quite sure that we are descended from chimpanzees, and even though we considered intelligent design to be a load of horse manure. But now we recant our stance, and say, No, it would be a bad idea to teach this crackpot theory in high school biology classes.

Our reason for favoring the crackpot theory, originally, was that it would inspire spirited debate in biology classes, which might thereby promote learning. We had one good biology teacher our senior year of high school, but before him we had pretty shoddy science instruction all the way through, and it seemed to us when we wrote our pro-intelligent design post that a little debate on the merits of evolution might shake things up a little and prevent high school science classes from becoming boring note-taking exercises.

But we’ve had it pretty well explained to us by a lot of people that any debate between the two “theories” is a waste of time.

Why? Well, intelligent design is just not science. It’s not a scientific theory because there are no circumstances under which it could be disproved.

One of the hallmarks of a scientific theory is that there is always some imaginable data you could discover that would disprove it. Evolution, for example, could be disproved if we found fossilized rabbits from the Pre-Cambrian Era. (We haven’t, by the way.)

Intelligent design, on the other hand, can never be disproved, because the hypothetical designer, a.k.a. God, always has a good reason for creating whatever we discover. Even if it doesn’t make sense to us, we assume it makes sense to God, because God designed it that way.

So intelligent design is not science, and should not be taught in science classes. Simple.

Now, it might be okay to study it in philosophy and literature classes, where it can be fun to debate these questions with no answers.

The universe must have come from somewhere, so God must exist. We don’t really know for sure what God really is, though, and we see no evidence that God designed anything.

We are not deists at the Blasphemy Blog, and believe that God is always with us. We just don’t think God is an architect, genetic engineer, or telekinetic manipulator of atoms. God is present with all of Creation, and always has been. God does not now, and never has needed to tweak Creation like some mad scientist. God designed nothing; design implies thought and the force that created the universe, whatever it is, is certainly beyond thought.

Regulation, Delicious Regulation!

As we mentioned yesterday, we at the Blasphemy Blog are former residents of the city of Boston, and proud of it. Boston is a unique, wonderful American city, with many singular aspects to its character. One of these aspects that we never quite figured out was Dunkin’ Donuts, a beloved local institution whose deep-fried-dough-and-well-sweetened-coffee format was founded and perfected down the road from Boston, in Quincy, Mass.

Don’t get us wrong: we enjoyed a Boston Cream Donut regularly, but it was nothing to write home about, and by all accounts the coffee was terrible; we didn’t see the appeal. When we read in Boston magazine a few years ago that Krispy Kreme was planning to expand into the Boston area, we figured the Dunkin’ Donuts would soon fall away in favor of those delicious Krispy Kremes.

Well, it never worked out that way; Dunkin’ Donuts is still on just about every block in Boston, and if a Krispy Kreme shop ever opened there, we didn’t see it.

Today, we see why. Our blogfriend Michelle Leder, who makes it her business to peruse corporate filings long past the point where most people give up, reveals today that Krispy Kreme is in deep doo-doo with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What happened? Well, greed happened, says Michelle. Basically, the guys in charge at Krispy Kreme took their company public, became obsessed with projected earnings, misstated their accounts, all the while giving sweetheart deals to personal friends. We’ve heard this story before, haven’t we? Anyway, none of the guys who did this to Krispy Kreme work there any more (although we bet they got nice severance packages); we feel sorry for whoever is working there right now, especially the legal interns who are going to have to lug the several tons of financial restatements to the SEC.

The lesson we take away from all of this is the importance of business regulations. After all, if you’re lying about how much money you make, and you’re using sham sales to give extra money to yourself or your friends, it’s not really free enterprise, is it?

Some people like to talk about how we need to get rid of business regulations, because they discourage the ingenuity of the American businessperson.

We at the Blasphemy Blog say, loudly and proudly, Let Them Eat Regulations. Regulations are not just protection for consumers; they are the means by which commerce happens. Without the assurance of fair play, no one would trust each other enough to make an honest deal. And when every company feels the need to lie to every other company, we all suffer, because all that lying just drives up the cost of…well, everything.

Look, everyone wants to get ahead. Everyone wants their life to work out just a little bit better than they’re willing to work toward. What we need to realize, as human beings, is that the fantasy of getting ahead through means other people don’t know about is just that, a fantasy. Regulations are the way we remind ourselves that the rules are the same for everyone; we’re not special.

Time to Cut and Run

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we really wanted John Kerry to be president. It’s not just that we’re partisan Democrats, bleeding-heart liberals, former residents of Massachusetts, and lovers of Heinz ketchup; it’s that we really thought he would make a good president. He struck us, much like Al Gore did, as the boring, cool-headed but way-unhip sort of fellow our country needs in charge.

But he lost, and everyone says it was because he was a terrible candidate. Maybe so, maybe not. We are no judge of this sort of thing at the Blasphemy Blog, as evidenced by the fact that we still think Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were terrible candidates.

One thing we do remember from the campaign, though, is that John Kerry, in the first nationally-televised debate, called the President on the “base” issue. That is, he said something like, “It looks like we’re building permanent bases in Iraq, and that’s a bad idea. We shouldn’t have permanent bases.” The rationale for this being, if you build permanent military installations in a country you just liberated, it seems more like all you really want to do is colonize.

Our current President, who is one of the most talented scoffers we’ve ever seen, scoffed at this sort of talk. But really, truly, he was lying. We are building permanent bases in Iraq.

Look, no one, not even namby-pamby pacifists like us here at the Blasphemy Blog, ever wants to cut and run like a loser. But the U.S. military should really just get out of Iraq. We as a nation are just screwing up too much over there.

The occupation was corrupt from the beginning, and the hapless soldiers over there have as their main priorities keeping themselves and their supplies safe, not doing anything positive for the Iraq or its people.

It’s not going to be nice when we leave, no matter when we leave, so we should just get out now. We should admit that we were wrong and just go.

It’s the least terrible course of action. We had our chance to be honorable about this deadly enterprise, but we voted the current President back into office instead.

All Our Mythologies

We are Christians here at the Blasphemy Blog, but we believe that the Bible is mostly made up. However, we also believe that the Bible speaks the truth.

How’s that, you ask? Made up, but also true? Have the denizens of the Blasphemy Blog been altering their substance abuse policy?

No, the policy remains in effect. And yes, we believe that the Bible is made up, but also true.

We believe this because we hold dear a conception of Truth that is different from the Whole Truth and Nothing But that you’ll encounter in a courtroom. Truth, we believe, is not the historical record.

Truth is nothing less than a shared comprehension of the human condition. It’s not complicated, and though it is contemplated by philosophers, it’s available to all of us, and is all around us. “What goes around comes around.” “Every nation has the government it deserves.” “Love is all you need.” We’ve all said things like this, in conversation and perhaps to the annoyance of our friends; it’s our way of attempting to describe something universally…true.

It’s important to separate this idea, Truth, from the idea of history. An accurate historical record may be truthful, but it is not the Truth.

We wish, oh how we wish, that more of our fellow Christians could realize this. It would ease their suffering and insecurity to no end. Those poor folks at the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS), for example, could really help themselves out of years of litigation hell if they’d just accept that the Bible is wonderful even though it’s made up.

The NCBCPS is pushing for all kinds of Bible study in public schools, and they’re going to get the pants sued off them because of it. They’ve been sending their curricula all over the country, which just means that they’re going to put food on the table in the households of many ACLU lawyers.

The NCBCPS claims that they’re just providing information for unbiased, critical study of the Bible. Their argument is pretty weak, though, because their material devotes a lot of effort to proving, scientifically, that the Bible is a literal history. Trying to prove the fantastical miracles of the Bible literally happened is a mug’s game, though, and the NCBCPS, which is probably made up of earnest people, merely embarrasses the idea of religion with its conflation of science and mythology.

For example, in the course of trying to prove that the events of the Bible literally happened, they rely upon dubious scholarship, including some writings by a guy who thinks the Egyptian Pyramids were giant radio antennae for sending messages to the Grand Canyon.

Friends, Christians, Brothers and Sisters: Christianity is not about proving itself. Christianity is about speaking the Truth. Back in the old days, when Ezekiel was seeing his wheel and Moses was talking to his burning bush, people understood that sometimes you could use mythology to speak important Truths.

But we should never, ever let mythology get in the way of Truth. Divorced from the lessons and messages of the Bible, the miracles depicted therein are nothing more than stage magic.

Preachers and Biblical scholars should not be turned into carnival barkers. The world we know is not a world where seas part at the whim of mystical forces. It’s stranger than that. Let’s keep it that way.

Nothing is Free (Unless You're Rich)

America’s phone companies, anticipating with glee further business-friendly rulings by the increasingly pro-corporate Supreme Court, have approached the Federal Communications Commission with palms outstretched. What do they want? Exclusive rights to provide wireless internet service. When do they want it?

Now.

The FCC requires phone companies to share the lines by which we get our internet service, on the grounds that if they have to share, they’ll have to compete with other companies, thereby keeping prices down and quality up, which is good for consumers.

The Supreme Court recently ruled, however, that cable companies that provide internet service don’t have to share with their competitors. So now we have the phone companies coming to the FCC, saying, Not Fair! Not Fair! We want exclusive rights, too!

And they’ll probably get them, if not now, then a few months from now, when the FCC becomes majority-Republican just like everything else in Washington.

We at the Blasphemy Blog have said it before, and we’ll say it again: this will be bad for America, because monopolies are bad for business.

Monopolies are bad for many reasons, but the main two are: they’re bad for consumers, and they’re bad for the economy as a whole.

For one, a monopolizing company can charge any price it wants. Now, if you’re selling milk, this isn’t so bad, because it’s not so hard for someone else to buy another cow and undersell you. Then, you try to undersell them, and the price goes down to the minimum level where you can still make a profit.

But if you’re selling wireless service, it’s more difficult than that. You can’t just wake up one morning and decide you want to start providing wireless internet; the costs of starting up that business are enormous. Moreover, when you apply for a loan to defray those costs, you might find out that the banks won’t lend to you because the monopolizing company has paid them off not to. Monopolies can do things like that.

Because of these “barriers to entry”, providing services like phone and cable naturally lends itself to monopolization, because there are only so many wires with which to transmit, and the company that laid them probably also owns them.

That’s why the government sometimes makes the companies share their wires. It is called the “essential facilities” doctrine, and it is a well-established principle of antitrust law. The classic example of this is the ski rental company that also owns lots of ski slopes; even though one company owns lots of slopes, they have to let skiers who rent from other companies ski their slopes, because otherwise they could charge monopoly prices, which would be bad for consumers.

In giving the cable companies, and likely now the phone companies, exclusive rights, the Supreme Court is telling them they can charge whatever they want. Don’t like it? Well, maybe you don’t need to ski the internet.

The other reason monopolies are bad, though, has less to do with consumers and more to do with the health of the economy. This is a complicated principle of economics called the monopoly deadweight loss. Basically, if the monopolizing company is enriching itself at the expense of consumers, it breaks the equilibrium of mutual benefit that keeps economies humming along efficiently. Think of it this way: the monopolizing company is charging more for its products than what they are worth, thereby taking money away from people who might want to invest in a new business or a college degree and keeping it for itself.

And where does that transferred money go? We’re glad you asked.

(There is a school of thought that argues that giving rich people more money is good for the economy, but this school of thought is a lie and makes us physically ill.)

The wires ought to belong to the people, anyway, like the roads. They’re an avenue of commerce and innovation and should not be privately owned. The political philosopher Michael Lind has suggested treating them like a natural resource and splitting up the proceeds from their use to give every American citizen a $20,000 check when they turn 18.

Lind’s idea is pie-in-the-sky, because our Congressmen are not about to give up the perks they get for giving away our natural resources to corporations for free. But, at the very least, we should make the corporations share them with each other, so that we don’t get fleeced.