What\u2019s old is somehow new again on the political left.<\/p>\n
Desperate for what they perceive as street cred, leftists continue to repackage failed policies as somehow novel, in a destructive race to claim the most extreme realms of the political continuum.<\/p>\n
Merely three decades after it was consigned to the dustbin of failed ideas, socialism actually maintains renewed popularity on the left.\u00a0 According to Gallup<\/a>, a majority of Democrats no longer view capitalism favorably, but almost 60% view socialism positively.<\/p>\n People like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D \u2013 New York) advocate a return to income tax rates not seen since President John F. Kennedy began cutting them.\u00a0 Thirty-five years after Jeane Kirkpatrick delivered her famous 1984 Republican convention speech<\/a> castigating those who \u201cblame America first,\u201d people like Representative Ilhan Omar (D \u2013 Minnesota) tweet, \u201cWe must confront that our nation was founded by genocide and we maintain global power through neocolonialism.\u201d<\/p>\n Not to be outdone, Democrats in the House of Representatives have joined the fray by attempting to resuscitate one of the Obama Administration\u2019s most foolish and demonstrably destructive agenda items \u2013 to begin regulating the internet as a public utility.<\/p>\n Think of it as socialism for the internet.\u00a0 What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n Plenty, it turns out.<\/p>\n From 1996 through 2015, the internet flourished like no other innovation in human history, precisely because the federal government from the Clinton Administration forward employed a \u201clight-touch\u201d regulatory approach. \u00a0Just ask yourself what was \u201cbroken\u201d about the internet that somehow cried out for a federal bureaucratic \u201cfix\u201d during that two-decade stretch of unprecedented innovation and transformation of our lives.<\/p>\n But like so many other realms of American economic and civic life, the Obama Administration decided in 2015 that the internet merited its trademark brand of hyper-regulation.\u00a0 Specifically, its Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suddenly decided to regulate internet service as a \u201cpublic utility\u201d under statutes enacted in the 1930s for copper-wire telephone service.\u00a0 In Orwellian fashion, the Obama Administration and its apologists throughout the media and entertainment industries labeled it \u201cNet Neutrality,\u201d when by definition federal commandeering of an entire industry and picking winners and losers via the business model it imposes is anything but \u201cneutral.\u201d<\/p>\n So how did the Obama FCC’s scheme work out?<\/p>\n Disastrously.\u00a0 For the first time in history outside of a recession, private investment in network infrastructure by service providers actually declined.\u00a0 \u00a0By way of comparison, investment in wireless alone had increased almost 33% – from $25 billion to $33 billion – between 2010 and 2013, even amid the most sluggish cyclical economic \u201crecovery\u201d in history under the Obama Administration.\u00a0 But in the first year alone following the Obama FCC\u2019s bright idea to regulate the internet, investment declined by an astonishing $5.6 billion.<\/p>\n In other words, investment declined in just one year by almost the entire amount that wireless investment had increased from 2010 to 2013.<\/p>\n When the Trump Administration arrived, one of its first priorities under new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was to reverse that destructive Obama Administration boondoggle.<\/p>\n Latenight comedians and leftists in media and politics attempted to convince Americans that the sky was falling, and that this would \u201cbreak the internet.\u201d\u00a0 But as noted above, it was the Obama Administration\u2019s 2015 effort that was breaking the internet, while the Trump FCC under Ajit Pai was merely restoring the light-touch regulatory approach that had allowed the internet to evolve and flourish from 1996 to 2015.<\/p>\n