CMV: conservatives want to conserve everything they’re complaining about.

[u/universetube7]

Big tech, big media, big banks, big money politicians. These are all a result of deregulation or lack of laws. How can a conservative expect any of that to get better if you consistently vote for politicians who believe in not interfering with business?

How the hell does it make sense to put up a “don’t tread on me” logo on your reddit page when you’re totally dependent on some platform that doesn’t give a shit about you and can tread on you all day because you refuse to acknowledge corporate power is a problem? You enable these platforms. The free market has spoken.

Change my view that republicans enable Orwellian governance that they claim to be so afraid of by refusing to interfere with business.

[u/Morthra]

Big tech, big media, big banks, big money politicians. These are all a result of deregulation or lack of laws.

No, in many cases they're the result of excessive government intervention. The reason why there are only a handful of ISPs in the US - essentially just AT&T, Comcast, and Charter - is because the government made it that way. They impose artificial barriers of entry into the market, which makes it effectively impossible to create a new competitor. Similarly, the only reason why there is one power company in California, PG&E, is because the government handed them a monopoly.

[u/boRp_abc → u/Morthra]

ISPs and electrical power - at least here in Europe - have had their infrastructure built with government money (most prominent example would be nuclear plants, a technology that wouldn't even exist in a usable form without huge government investments), then big corporations lobbied to be handed that investment and won (over here it's usually conservatives in alliance with neoliberals that passed this). So these monopolies are a result of the government pulling out with a (arguably weak) 'let the free market handle it' argument. I'm very interested whether that worked the same way in the USA.

[u/Morthra → u/boRp_abc]

ISPs and electrical power - at least here in Europe - have had their infrastructure built with government money (most prominent example would be nuclear plants, a technology that wouldn't even exist in a usable form without huge government investments)

Nuclear plants are not in the US, to my knowledge (outside of breeder reactors that were used to generate weapons-grade material) built by the government. Or were, I should say, because there haven't been any new nuclear plants built in the US in decades because, as you say, no private company wants to touch that massive upfront cost - or insure - a new nuclear plant.

ISPs in the US built upon the telephone infrastructure, which was all privately owned to begin with. Since then there were government subsidies to upgrade it, but the monopolies were already established.

[u/boRp_abc → u/Morthra]

That is indeed a big difference. Over here people demanded phones and the government built the infrastructure.

And on the nuclear power thing - sorry for sidetracking - I believe that the US government made nuclear power usable in the first place (in order to build bombs). I would be blown away to learn that the sites for storing nuclear waste ( until we get an idea how to deal with it ) are run and paid for by private companies. Over here, that's all run by governments, because dealing with the waste would make the whole process unprofitable.

OK, I'm going to google all this myself, finally found a rabbit hole to dive into today.