Bernie Finds New “Basic Human Right”: government-run high-speed internet access

Bernie Finds New “Basic Human Right”: government-run high-speed internet access

Thursday’s stunning landslide victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is seen by many to be, at least in part, a sharp rebuke of the radical socialism of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his circle.

Granted, Brexit and Corbyn’s well-known anti-Semitism also played a role.  But his open borders, free everything for everyone platform left many former Labour voters cold, particularly the forgotten ones who were expected to form Labour’s “red wall.”

Part of Corbyn’s hodge-podge of promised goodies was announced just last month:  free broadband for everyone. British voters were clearly not sold on the idea.

The party was also unable to win over new supporters. Its manifesto, which promises to provide free broadband service, to institute a four-day workweek, and abolish college tuition fees—reliably described as “radical” in the Tory-dominated press—failed to “cut through,” as the Brits like to say. The less well-off saw those policies as too good to be true, and more economically secure voters worried that they would end up paying for them.

In an interesting coincidence, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently added an “affordable” internet-for-all plank to his own radical socialist presidential agenda.  In fact, he’s found a new “basic human right”:  high-speed internet access.

Today, high-speed internet is central to the basic functions of families, students, and businesses. Small businesses often cannot exist without it. Access to health care often depends on it. Yet across the country, huge swaths of the population lack access to an internet connection or cannot afford the options available. Millions lack any internet provider in their area and tens of millions are trapped with only one option. High prices keep internet out of reach for working families in both rural and urban areas.

High-speed internet service must be treated as the new electricity — a public utility that everyone deserves as a basic human right.

Like Corbyn, Sanders promises to nationalize the internet and make it a government-run utility.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Bernie Sanders isn’t exactly shy about his socialist ambitions. But even by the Vermont senator’s far-left standards, his latest proposal is a doozy.

The 2020 presidential candidate now wants to nationalize the internet. At least, that seems the inevitable result of his newly released campaign plan idealistically dubbed “High-Speed Internet for All.” As is so often the case, Sanders identifies a real problem — in this case, it’s the fact that 1 in 4 people living in rural areas of the United States still lack access to broadband internet — and immediately jumps to full government control as the only solution. This is where he gets things completely wrong.

The senator’s proposal would essentially have the federal government take control of the internet in almost Orwellian fashion. It explicitly calls for $150 billion in spending on a “publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband network.”

So in short, Sanders wants to spend hundreds of billions creating government-run internet service providers, and put the same government bureaucrats and officials who waste our tax money on Serbian cheese and nicotine-addicted fish, lie to us about foreign wars, and are immune from consequences for violating our constitutional rights, in charge of providing our internet services.

He also wants to treat the internet as “a public utility that everyone deserves as a basic human right.” Under Sanders’s plan, the FCC would also break internet service providers he deems “monopolies,” regardless of whether consumers are being harmed or not, and set price controls on what currently existing private providers can charge consumers, likely pushing many of them out of the market in short order. This would leave his government-run providers as the only remaining option.

The UK election already has Democrats engaged in a circular firing squad as they bicker over their decision to lunge to the fringe left.  It will be interesting to see if they heed Obama’s advice and avoid nominating a far-left socialist bent on “revolution.”

It’s also possible they will finally see why American voters cheered President Trump’s SOTU statement that “America will never be a socialist country.”  I wouldn’t bet on it, though.

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