Saboteurs Against Free Enterprise : The Global Commie Unionist Corporate Criminal Regimes ;

The explosion of information online has
transformed the lives of everyone for the better.

But Now comes the latest
Federal Trade Commission "discussion draft paper"
suggesting that these advances must be hobbled,
taxed and maybe even reversed-because they
hurt the newspaper industry.

Dead-tree media's salvation, it seems,
lies in hobbling social media and making
search engines as user-unfriendly as possible.

Oh, and newspapers will need
one more thing : Government subsidies.

That's why we need the tax hikes-
especially on Internet and 3G phone users.

But newspapers
never made money on hard news.

Serious reporting, say from Afghanistan,
has simply never paid its way.

What paid for newspapers
were the automotive sections, real-estate,
home-and-garden, travel, or technology,
where advertisers could target their ads.

The Internet, has been one giant system
for stripping away such cross-subsidies.

Why look to the newspaper real-estate listings
when you can get more up-to-date, searchable
info on Zillow-or better travel deals on Orbitz,
or a broader range of movie showtimes on Yahoo?

Google has been the most
powerful unbundling agent of all.

It lets users find the one article
they are looking for, rather than
making them buy the entire paper
that paid the reporter.

It lets advertisers reach the one customer
who is searching for their product, rather than
making them advertise to an entire class of readers.

The FTC finds this pernicious.

It proposes more than a dozen remedies,
several of them silly, some outright dangerous.

Among the latter : a proposal to extend
the Copyright Act to make facts proprietary.

That's right, a paper would own the facts
it uncovered, not just the way it phrases them.

Why make facts proprietary?

The FTC paper notes that "the copyright act
allows parasitic aggregators to 'free ride' on
others' substantial journalistic investments, by
protecting only expression and not the underlying
facts, which are often gathered at great expense."

The silly proposals include these jewels :

Establish a "journalism" division
of AmeriCorps "to ensure that young
people who love journalism will stay in the field."

Increase funding
for PBS and NPR "to build and maintain
strong newsrooms at the state and local levels."

Establish a National Fund for Local News,
financed by current or new fees on "telecom
users, television and radio broadcast licensees,
or Internet service providers"- all to be
administered through state
Local News Fund Councils.

(Ah, new local bureaucracies with taxing
authority-what could possibly go wrong?)

Give news organizations
a tax credit for every journalist they employ.

This could help pay their salaries.

Do you sense a theme here?

Save "responsible" journalism
by having government subsidize it.

What better way to assure fierce journalistic
independence and watchdog vigilance?

The FTC rather spreads itself
on revenue-raising proposals :

Small Business Administration-insured
loans for new nonprofit journalism organizations.

Higher postal subsidies
for newspapers and periodicals.

A broadcast spectrum tax
(call it the "Tax on Rush") "which should
result in a fund of between $3 and $6 billion."

A tax on consumer electronics
(dubbed "the iPad Tax" by the New York Post)
worth "approximately $4 billion annually."

A Spectrum auction tax, "with the
proceeds going to the public-media fund."

Advertising taxes,
including a 2 percent sales tax on ads
that would generate "$5 to $6 billion annually."

An ISP-cell phone tax,
which at "3 percent on the monthly
fees would generate $6 billion annually."

You get the picture :

Soak a burgeoning and vital business
to keep a dying one on life-support.

The FTC is making several tragic mistakes.

The first is to confuse the delivery
method with the goods delivered.

To use the oft-repeated analogy,
they assume the horse and buggy is
essential to providing transportation.

The FTC says newspapers have not yet
found a new, sustainable business model,
and there is reason for concern that such
a business model may not emerge.

Here, they confuse journalism
with newspapers, and an informed
public with newspaper jobs.

In fact, Americans have never been
better informed or more engaged.

What needs to be saved
is not newspapers but content.

Companies such as Google,
which realize that they depend
on content, are busy coming up
with 21st century ways to create
new models-rather than using the
state's power of taxation to keep
a 17th century industry on life support.

Why does the FTC want to do any of this?

I am not a mind reader,
but the FTC is an "independent"
agency run by people appointed
by the Obama Administration, which
has been antagonistic to an Internet it
cannot control and nostalgic for the good
old days when the news was controlled
by a handful of mostly liberal newsmen
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/07/the-ftc-confuses-newspapers-with-journalism-as-it-seeks-new-media-tax/

In total the U.S. economy has now lost a net
of 2.2 million jobs since President Barack Obama
signed his stimulus bill, and his administration is now
7.2 million jobs short of what he promised his $862
billion stimulus would help create by 2010.

Former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL)
pressed prominent Keynesian economist
and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University Jeffrey Sachs on whether it was too
early to declare President Obama's stimulus
a failure.

Scarborough
had to ask the question twice,
but Sachs finally relented: "It did fail."

Massive government deficit
spending does not stimulate job creation.

President Obama does not have a secret vault
of money he can just throw at the American people.

The resources the government
spends come from the economy.

When the government increases spending,
it crowds out the resources that business
owners could have invested in their enterprises.

Private investment falls
sharply when government spending rises.

Annual private fixed nonresidential investment
has fallen by $327 billion since the recession
started- a 19 percent drop.

Less private investment means less hiring.

And then there is the rest
of the Obama agenda that has created,
and is creating, significant economic uncertainty :

Obamacare, EPA carbon regulations,
financial regulations and impending tax hikes.

Renouncing these policies,
and canceling the rest of the
stimulus, would do more to spur
private sector job creation than
anything this White House has done so far
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/07/morning-bell-why-obamas-stimulus-failed/

The Commie Federal Cloakroom
http://blog.heritage.org/tag/cloakroom/

The Commie Coups Against
Domestic Free Enterprise
http://blog.heritage.org/category/enterprise-and-free-markets/

The Communist Hell Care Coup
http://blog.heritage.org/category/health-care/

The Commie Energy and Environment Coup
http://blog.heritage.org/category/energy-and-environment/

Opposing The Commie
Coup Against The U.S.A.
http://blog.heritage.org/

Exposing
The Satanic Commie World Order
http://sovereigntysrealms.blogspot.com/

Expose Oppose Protest Resist Defy & Defeat :

The Anti Constitutional Anti Republic
Anti Capitalistic Unconstitutional Treasonous
Criminal Satanic Commie Hell Care Whores
& Satanic Globalist Commie Liberal Progressive
Stateist Corporate Unionist Ponzi Schemes,
Lies, Liars & Frauds