alt Hacker NewsYou don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.
The fact is, we have tried exactly what you’re suggesting. We don’t even need to get to the brutal communism of China or the Soviet Union. The “social democracy” of India and Bangladesh (where I’m from) left those countries’ economies in the toilet.
The best case scenario for social democracy was the DDR. My wife lived for a year in former eastern germany—in 2001, when the socialist government was as far back in time as Obama’s first term is to today—and folks recall being reasonably happy under socialism. But western germany was still much more prosperous, and it took huge solidarity payments to help the former east germany catch up.
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The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased.
Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originated on Chinese social media. But that's how deep the anti-China propaganda goes in the US. The transformation Chinese people have seen in their daily lives in their lifetimes is something undeniable [5], liting ~800M people out of extreme poverty. What has the West done in that time? Does it seem like things are going well?
So all I did was point out how people like municipal broadband and you went straight to the slippery slope fallacy "but that's communism!" without actually knowing what communism actually is it seems.
The idea is pretty simple. The people should have a stake in the value they create. You know who else believes that? The US Department of Defense [6]. Is the Defense Department "Communist" too?
[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/china
[2]: https://ash.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/final_pol...
[3]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/business/china-american-p...
[5]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstrea...
[6]: https://investorplace.com/dailylive/2026/06/the-pentagon-is-...
>I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig service.
Pay up. Municipal broadband is objectively better than the other options pretty much everywhere it hasn't been banned.
Municipal broadbands were laying 1 gig fiber service while Spectrum and Comcast were still selling 10mb/s as standard.