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This is absolutely ridiculous and I must say I cannot be surprised coming from Labour. What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which

This is absolutely ridiculous and I must say I cannot be surprised coming from Labour. What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning. Nothing is stopping anyone from buying a cheap laptop, an external webcam if need be and a decent microphone and then to start streaming to youTube and other decentralised platforms if they want to do vlogging. Hell, nowadays even a cheap android phone will do to stream live to YouTube to get the message out. There are also cheaper solutions if they want to startup a blog and then syndicate via medium, wordpress, ghost, tumblr, guest blogs and rss channels. Bottom line, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing stopping anyone from providing their voice to the internet and crafting an audience. The government doesn't need to be involved and those who value a free press should tell him to butt out in the strongest terms. Except however and this is what we must be careful of. Is that Labour will want to impose restrictions on what is acceptable. There is a UK firewall coming and I'm sure some Labour and Conservative MPs are licking their lips for the day this comes. I'm too busy to provide citations but links are out there, go do your own research. Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks and also Elon Musk's global satellite network. In fact, I will go so far as to say. In the very near future, space-intranets will come into play. Where crowd-funded projects will elect to launch satellites that are outside of government control and mobile phones will have dual capabilities. The first to connect to the internet and the second to be on the space-internet with no government oversight.

comice 8y ago
"What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning." It might escape them, or it might not be universally true. You might not be from the UK but surely you're aware of the BBC, which provides extremely high quality media and raises the bar here for the "free market". Our media companies here are better because of the existence of the BBC.
- harel 8y ago
  That is true, but there has to be a balance between public and commercial, and "balance" is a lacking feature with most (if not all) political parties, and in particular with Labour at the moment (this idea beggars belief and is an example of that). Come to think of it, Balance is a lacking feature in the world right now in general.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
basch 8y ago
>Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks Do you have anything against governments developing and funding decentralized networks, as a push back against an oligopoly of messaging and distribution silos? To copy and paste my comment from elsewhere in this thread: I might be in the minority to think this is a great idea, if it were basically "pump government money into developing and hosting instances of the Fediverse (GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, or Pleroma) AND building those data centers in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (Facebook is publishing the blueprint on how to build a facebook datacenter, take advantage of it.)
conatus 8y ago
> "Which can and always does a better job than central planning." Does it though? At what? Resource allocation? It is hugely inefficient and wasteful. Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically? (and I am no fan of the state)
- antidesitter 8y ago
  > Does it though? At what? Resource allocation? Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem > It is hugely inefficient and wasteful. In comparison to what? > Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically? Government bailouts are the opposite of a free market.
  - conatus 8y ago
    With regard to the economic calculation problem. In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history. Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy. Worth saying that the other argument commonly made for market efficiency, general equilibrium theory, rests of strange and blatantly untrue assumptions when compared to the real economic system. At least as an Austrian economist Mises had the good grace to start with more realistic assumptions!
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      > In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history. As computers have gotten more complex, so has the economy. > Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy. Free markets don't negate the existence of large corporations which use central planning for internal operations. It is possible for such corporations to arise naturally due to economies of scale and other factors. But such structures are discovered and tuned by market mechanisms, not the state.

comice 8y ago

"What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning." It might escape them, or it might not be universally true. You might not be from the UK but surely you're aware of the BBC, which provides extremely high quality media and raises the bar here for the "free market". Our media companies here are better because of the existence of the BBC.

harel 8y ago
That is true, but there has to be a balance between public and commercial, and "balance" is a lacking feature with most (if not all) political parties, and in particular with Labour at the moment (this idea beggars belief and is an example of that). Come to think of it, Balance is a lacking feature in the world right now in general.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

basch 8y ago

>Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks Do you have anything against governments developing and funding decentralized networks, as a push back against an oligopoly of messaging and distribution silos? To copy and paste my comment from elsewhere in this thread: I might be in the minority to think this is a great idea, if it were basically "pump government money into developing and hosting instances of the Fediverse (GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, or Pleroma) AND building those data centers in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (Facebook is publishing the blueprint on how to build a facebook datacenter, take advantage of it.)

conatus 8y ago

> "Which can and always does a better job than central planning." Does it though? At what? Resource allocation? It is hugely inefficient and wasteful. Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically? (and I am no fan of the state)

antidesitter 8y ago
> Does it though? At what? Resource allocation? Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem > It is hugely inefficient and wasteful. In comparison to what? > Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically? Government bailouts are the opposite of a free market.
- conatus 8y ago
  With regard to the economic calculation problem. In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history. Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy. Worth saying that the other argument commonly made for market efficiency, general equilibrium theory, rests of strange and blatantly untrue assumptions when compared to the real economic system. At least as an Austrian economist Mises had the good grace to start with more realistic assumptions!
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    > In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history. As computers have gotten more complex, so has the economy. > Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy. Free markets don't negate the existence of large corporations which use central planning for internal operations. It is possible for such corporations to arise naturally due to economies of scale and other factors. But such structures are discovered and tuned by market mechanisms, not the state.