Creative class

One of my favorite non-political blogs is The Future of News. Steve Boriss wrote a fantastic piece titled The Fight for Free Speech: Will We Be the Greatest Generation? about the idea of net neutrality. Referring to a NYT editorial, he says:

The Times ignores the fact that the First Amendment is designed to protect us against suppression of ideas by the government, not the private sector, which has neither the power nor the motive to suppress ideas.

This mistake that Boriss points out is, I think, the liberaltarian fallacy. It assumes that government action is going to protect you from business, rather than get coopted by business. Libertarians intituitively understand that this is absurd, but conservatives and, recently, Republicans, have been unable to make that argument. I suspect that we will not be able to achieve a majority until we have both an intellectually and politically serious critique of both government and big business. Read on.