These are precisely the areas where government has a role to play but more often than not, this is precisely where FTC, FCC and rest of the alphabet soup seems to fail.
The demand for subsidization of college education is coming from very woke academics who want more taxpayer money for their "woke programs".
College education in USA is ridiculously cheap if you are not looking at top colleges. Plenty of universities in silicon valley which can give you a wide array of useful degrees for very affordable price. Affordable = You can pay your student loans within 2 years of gainful employment post degree.
There are some very good arguments as to why government should not be paying for college education:
- Loosely speaking K-12 can be seen as a public good because of which it may make sense for the society to pay for other people's education. College education is not a public good in the same way because at any rate only few folks will go to college and it is immoral for the other people being forced to pay for college education of those kids. If college educated kids earn even more then it is even more immoral for poor people to pay for rich.
- Unlike K-12, college education involves specialization. A gender studies degree is worthless compared to say a nurse. But because education is free a lot of students might enroll in more and more worthless degrees. This will have great negative impact on productivity of US society. A lot of folks who do not have any productive skills, a lot of folks staying out of labour market in their crucial years. I will work at a local farm for a year rather than pursue some of the college degrees any days.
- When government pays for education it distorts the market. You can see it as a subsidy. But then it also means more and more worthless colleges which have more and more worthless degree programs that focus on "good life" for kids.
That argument would've had a lot of weight in 1940, when only 5% or so of folks went to college, but today nearly 2/3 of high school graduates immediately enroll in some form of college. It seems reasonable to assume that, if college were free, that figure would substantially rise.
The opposite of your specialization argument also applies. It costs $20,000-$40,000 to go through nursing school. It's hugely beneficial for society to have nurses, and we have a nursing shortage. Paying for nursing school means more nurses. On the other side, personally I'm in favor of there being a lot more people who have expertise in advanced non-STEM topics. The benefits are less obvious, but a well educated populace is far more desirable than a pile of folks educated just well enough to be useful as well.
Distorting the market is a problem, but just as high schools are public, I think increasing the number of public universities and public community colleges helps that problem. If there is enough high quality public education available, there's no need to subsidize private education.
> a lot of folks staying out of labour market in their crucial years
I think companies will live if people take a little longer to enter the workforce. If the tradeoff is a more educated populace and people spending less of their life toiling away vs. corporate profits maybe having a tiny decline then it's definitely worth it.
> Data residency gives a government willing to bully companies a lot of power. It's simply a lot harder to access information stored abroad and you have a lot less leverage.
This argument is tenuous at most. Just because some companies are setting up data centers does not mean that Govt is deliberately forcing data residency to aid them.
It is ok for Europeans to insist on data residency within their shores but not for India? It is ok for Americans to insist on no data to be hosted in Chinese servers but not India?
I have been a party to some discussion around the laws with mid level government officials and this was a bit like an episode of Yes Minister.
One of the government consultants spoke about "Data sovereignty". When someone asked what it meant he spoke for like 10 minutes without actually answering the question. "Data of Indians must belong to Indians", "Data is the gold of modern world" he then referred to various international reports without actually telling what those reports say.
"We must protect our citizens data" one official said as others nodded in agreement. What they imagined here (I think) was data sitting on a hard drive and protected by people with guns creating a parameter around it.
The files of these regulations moved across many tables and many offices. I am told the real estate companies in India had a big role and influence on these regulations.
Yes, ultimately it is a ridiculous law that does not help anyone. It does not protect anything.
American telecom industry has done much better after US government ended government granted monopoly to bell labs. Plenty of literature on that topic actually. Same for aviation.
Whatever bad things you see with ATT and Comcast are actually a direct result of city granted monopolies which will likely be ended by Musk's Starlink sooner or later.
How have they done better? Prices have risen substantially as quality of service stagnates or deteriorates unless the companies are given grants and subsidies by governments to compel them to upgrade infrastructure at the taxpayer's expense. All the while they reap ever growing profits and lobby to get their employees onto regulatory boards to prevent any pro-consumer regulation.
"city-granted monopolies", are you kidding? The monopolies exist because of non-competition arrangements between companies. A city can't have anything but a monopoly when only one company willing to run cable because they've made everybody else agree to keep off their turf.
And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.
I get that you're just reciting the propaganda talking points that you've heard from news organizations and media properties (which are all now owned by telecom monopolies thanks to all the cash they have to spare from the extremely profitable telecom business, funny how that works), but a person can hope.
> And starlink won't save anybody. For one thing, satellite internet already exists, you can buy it from providers like Viasat, DirecTV, and Hughesnet: it's expensive and the latency is outrageous because of the speed-of-light distance to satellites.
Starlink latency is materially improved from traditional satellite internet providers. 20ms vs 500ms. Conflating them borders on equivocation.
> I think the should literally be nationalized and have their tax software platforms absorbed into the IRS.
This is an extremist view and basically advocating theft. I do not think IRS has competence to build and run a complex software system.
> Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country
That is debatable.
> There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen
They have not inserted themselves anywhere. You are free to use CPA or do all the paperwork yourself and save yourself $70 bucks.
