t’s a picture that captures the essence of Barack Obama’s presidency. On a day of historic democratic events in Egypt as President-for-life Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Obama was en route on Air Force One to Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula to get the federal government involved in the minutiae of WiFi Internet delivery.<\/p>\n
Why was the Obama government caught off guard as Egypt’s streets exploded in a fury of democratic demands two weeks ago? The president’s travel itinerary today provides a clue.<\/p>\n
Voters may have sent a message in November slapping Democrats for their spendaholic over-reach, but Obama is undeterred as he used the small college town of Marquette to advocate more federal over-reach into national wireless infrastructure.<\/p>\n
“If you can do this in the snowy U.P.,” he said. “we can do this all across America.”<\/p>\n
Northern Michigan University is doing just fine, thank you very much, in extending a WiFi network across campus and the surrounding college town of Marquette where many of its 6,500 students reside. With local municipal help and grants from tech giants Intel, Motorola, Cisco, and Lenovo (whose products augment NMU’s so-called WiMAX broadband technology), the university is a model for extending Internet service to rural Yoopers.<\/p>\n
And with ZERO federal money.<\/p>\n
Yet, Obama wants to use NMU as a model for federal WiFi spending. Stuck in the economics of the 1930s, Obama harkened back to FDR’s Rural Electrification Administration in advancing a new federal infrastructure program (even as the rural, 21st century town in front of him already has privately-financed WiFi). Obama has already been “investing” millions in rural WiFi as part of his mammoth stimulus bill. The deceptively-titled Recovery Act – actually a front for an Obama New Deal to spend on self-indulgent, “transformative” tech – provided some $7 billion for broadband toys, including $2.5 billion for the Rural Utility Service (yet another federal bureaucracy tucked away in the rolls of federal budget fat) at the Agriculture Dept. for rural areas<\/p>\n
Michigan’s Oakland County, for example – the 4th richest county in America – has received $32 million in stimulus welfare for its “rural” population.<\/p>\n
This kind of largesse has attracted the attention of incoming Republicans who have scheduled oversight hearings on how this money is being spent. “Before we target any more of our scarce taxpayer dollars for broadband,” Michigan Rep. and House Energy Committee Chair Fred Upton said in response to Obama’s remarks, “let’s ensure our resources are being used wisely. After all, even without these billions in taxpayer subsidies, the private sector has already deployed broadband to 95 percent of the country.”<\/p>\n
At least his National Wireless Initiative (NWI) piggybacks on proven technologies like laptops and PDAs that have spawned vast, privately-funded 4G and cellular networks. And his NWI is progressive in that it will auction off more spectrum so that these networks can grow (though, as Heritage Foundation regulatory expert Diane Katz points out, the FCC has been a bureaucratic hindrance in recognizing market advances).<\/p>\n
By contrast, his ambitious, transformative agenda to transform America to a Green economy depends on government not only funding an entire national grid of alternative wind and solar power, but creating the products dependent on it – electric vehicles – via massive federal battery expenditure and consumer tax credits.<\/p>\n
The mind boggles at this kind of central planning in 21st century America.<\/p>\n
Like kids in a candy store – “God, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Why don’t we invest $100 billion? Let’s just go build it!” Veep Biden told TIME magazine – the Obama administration is spending one-sixth of the stimulus bill, an estimated $130 billon, on this folly.<\/p>\n
Where the consumer marketplace has established gasoline-powered cars as its preferred mode of transportation with a vast private network of gas sations to support it, the Obama Administration is trying to force an alternative government solution with electric cars powered by windmills. To use the WiFi analogy, it’s as if Obama decided that Blackberrys and laptops were immoral technologies dependent on foreign lithium (80 percent of the world’s lithium resources are in South America) and decided that the “digital devices of the future” should be steam-powered laptops connected by cable lines.<\/p>\n
Rather than the grand, market socialist vision of a new green economy, Obama’s merely wasteful rural WiFi expenditure (of the $28 billion in auction monies, $15 billion will be distributed as federal WiFi pork) looks modest by comparison.<\/p>\n
Still, the idea that rural WiFi is an essential federal service proves Washington has lost perspective on economic priorities. When asked why Marquette’s private-local model should be hijacked as a model for federal expenditures, an NMU spokesman says that tapping private capital was “hard.”<\/p>\n
Well, yes, it’s so much easier to have government just “give “it to you. NMU’s WiMAX solution fits its campus and community. It may not fit others. But consolidate the model under a clumsy, one-size-fits-all federal program, and it becomes another inflexible, expensive federal program.<\/p>\n
And that’s precisely what voters rejected last November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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