I went for its own post, because my response to James was very long.
in reality [Gore] hadn't said anything outrageous and had qualified his claim pretty clearly to only mean that he had led the effort in government to create an environment where advances like the internet could flourish.
I actually think it was more than that. I think it was incredibly outrageous. It wasn't a claim of invention, not in any kind of engineering initiative way, but the idea that the Senate did anything other than make the internet more difficult to navigate, less free and less useful is crazy. It's much less than it could have been because of regulation. Here is the semi-full quote, and even if you don't accept my premise, it's still a bizarrely, enormously huge reach to make say this first sentence in any context at all:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
And again, I'm sure McCain meant his thing in just the same way, but I think saying these things says something basic in the character of people who legislate for a living--they lose a fundamental and important perspective on human behavior. They forget that absence of legislation in most cases doesn't spell doom to humanity, society, or in fact even the participants in that single transaction.
This is why no matter how many times I vote Democrat, I can't be one. The Democratic philosophy is too wrapped up in the idea that the correct response to most circumstances is legislation. Note that I didn't say "...the correct response to most problems..." because the entire Democratic (and legislative) mindset is that most human interaction produces problems that must be solved. This is why bailing people out of the mortgage crisis may not be the right thing to do. Is "someone losing their house" a problem? Well... to them it is. But to me? No. In fact it may be the exact right thing for me, you and society. Even in the huge aggregate, taking our lumps in the form of a recession or depression may ultimately lead to institutions being better at what they do. That is if you want a society that boasts a strong long-term economy. The Great Depression sucked, but it may have laid the groundwork for almost 100 years of wealth on a previously unimaginable scale. Note that Liam, a dedicated Democrat, couldn't even parse the phrase I used when I said, "the appropriate consequence to bad debt".
3 comments:
Couple of minor quibbles:
1. It was not McCain who claimed to have invented the Blackberry; it was his campaign chair, Doug Holz-Eakin (misspelled, I trust). I am sure that's why this story won't have legs.
2. Gore does deserve more credit for the internet than you imply. He was an advocate in creating the regulatory structure and funding to allow what was the very small ARPAnet to be expanded to include academic and civilian communications -- he advocated this starting in 1981 and took it through the 1991 passage of the "Gore Bill." Yeah, of course it sounds over-reaching to say that he "created" the internet, but he was a forceful advocate for it when Microsoft was a small start-up, and funding and regulations do matter.
Wiki here: http://tinyurl.com/6chahq
Damn. What Liam said, again.
Gore does deserve more credit for the internet than you imply. He was an advocate in creating the regulatory structure ...
No question the act was important in getting some things started--an incidental correction is that the genesis of the bill was 1988, not 1981. But I had an email address and was browsing a primitive web in 1989, before the 1991 bill was passed--it was the internet before 1991.
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