Best Business Commentary

Bailout backlash

Politicians are misreading our appetite for a subprime mortgage bailout, says Peter Viles in the Los Angeles Times. In one poll, 70 percent of respondents opposed a “taxpayer subprime bailout.” Yet “it’s striking how little attention the views of the anti-bailout bears have gotten.” Many people saw this housing deflation coming “years ago,” and “those patiently waiting out the bubble” to buy are downright angry to now “find themselves crashing a pity party for the very buyers who priced them out of the market.” We should listen to these people as we “deal with the remains of the housing bubble.”

No such thing as a free Internet

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The nation’s free wireless Internet initiatives “are dying one by one,” says John Dvorak in MarketWatch. Yes, "”ree universal access to the Internet would be of great benefit to society as a whole,” but the idea just “steps on too many powerful toes.” Notably those of AT&T and Comcast, whose “bags full of money” can pretty easily “derail any sort of free programs that would threaten their businesses.” But that’s par for the course in the U.S. When it comes to communications, we’re always “the last country you can expect to modernize in any meaningful way.”