I meant what I said. The free market always works. It may not play "fair," and it may not take the obvious route, but it gets the job done and without forcing anyone to carry anyone else's load other than by free choice.

It's going to cost you more to get services in the middle of nowhere than close to where the services are provided. I'm sorry, but that's just physics. Like you say, "The Law." This is no more "unfair" than the fact that I have to use more gas to commute to the Sacramento Valley than I do to commute across the town. Or should the government fix it so that both trips cost exactly the same? Wouldn't that be more fair? Should I be penalized for living in a bedroom community far from my work?

Nobody has a "right" to electronic services, any more than I have a "right" to easy access to a McDonalds or a Wal-Mart if I live on the side of a mountain fifty miles from the nearest town. Maybe people should consider this sort of thing when selecting a place to live.

The government, in its great egalitarianism, will try to make these rules of physics not be true (most of its job in modern times is trying to rip a reality hole in the fabric of market forces.) What this means is that people who don't live in the sticks subsidize those who do. It also means that nobody will have any financial incentive to come up with innovative ways to provide such services. And yes, someone would have. And yes it would have started out expensive. That's how it works.

If analog phone lines had not been subsidized, maybe wireless technology would have arrived twenty years sooner. It's still easier to build a tower in the middle of the county than to run wires to every damn house. If power lines to rural areas had not been subsidized, maybe wind and solar power technology would be decades more advanced. Maybe small, locally-owned power cooperatives would be more numerous. Maybe rural life would be a lot more independent of those concentrated urban zones, making them a lot more secure than they are now.

Am I pulling these free-market scenarios out of my ass? Sure. But it's no more speculative than the assumption that after a hundred years rural people would still be without phone service if the government hadn't jammed a gun up the phone company's nose back then.

Most of the ways people communicate now hadn't even been THOUGHT of thirty years ago. Cell phones? Internet? E-mail? I-chat? The very words would have been meaningless.

Sure you can "force" the issues. You can "force" anything. You can force companies to build power lines to a farm, highways to a twenty-person town, and all the rest. After all, the Constitution guarantees the right to electricity and bandwidth. Right? The economic distortion and lost innovation that result are not something that's easily seen, but the cheers for the politician distributing someone else's property and wealth are loud and long.

If you really want to see the market work, get rid of the regulations that prevent new outfits from providing new services. The Post Office tried to kill e-mail. Most of the problems with getting DSL and cable services where I live was due to the two companies trying to "fix" the regulations to keep the other out of the business. If you knew how many utilities and services had to get permission to enter a market, with veto power often in the hands of competitors, it would curl your hair.

BTW, I'm under contract, and I get paid on a regular basis as long as the contract lasts. Yeah, technically it's not a salary...I pay my own Social Security and have to write checks for taxes, but it's a living.