What If the Government...?

On today's installment of "What If the Government...?" we ask the question "What if the government ran the telephone company?"

Answer: If the government had been in charge of the nation's telephone system since inception, all innovation would have slowed to a trickle. Say good-bye to cellular phones, fax machines, touch-tone and even dial phones. If you were even lucky enough to have a phone in your home in the first place, it would look like this one:

and all calls would still have to be completed by operators. Not least because the American Federation of Telephone Operators would have been the largest constituency in the Democratic party, ahead of even public school teachers, trial lawyers and welfare recipients. So naturally, the Donkey party would have enshrined their jobs into law too.

Please join us next time for another edition of "What If the Government..." and remember this thought experiment the next time somebody talks about expanding the role of government.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 08, 2003 06:19 PM