Republican State Lawmakers Want to Spend YOUR Money to Provide Internet to Other People

RALEIGH – North Carolina Sen. Harry Brown (R-Onslow) and Rep. Dean Arp (R-Union) held a press conference Thursday to announce a $10 million broadband initiative in which the state would offer grants to private companies to extend broadband internet services to unserved communities across the state.

“What were focused on is the outer reaches,” said Arp to reporters.

For years now the Republicans in the N.C. House and Senate have taken up the cause of using state taxpayers’ money to grease the skids for private companies to build out internet services.

North Carolina has plenty of rural areas that lack broadband services, and the reason is that building the infrastructure to provide service to those areas is just not cost effective or beneficial to those companies’ bottom lines. Lawmakers view this as a problem, and, unfortunately, Republican lawmakers have again demonstrated the limitations of their ‘limited government’ principles that they often espouse on the campaign trail.

Their solution is to take your money, and give it to private companies, so other people can have broadband services.

In fact, they now view broadband as a utility –  as fundamental and as deserving of taxpayer funding as roads. Seriously.

“Broadband is as crucial as roads,” said Arp about broadband internet services during the presser.

Since when is it the state government’s role to make sure people have an internet connection? Rather, since when is it state TAXPAYERS’ role to help provide internet for the unserved masses?

It’s usually the political Left that likes to subsidize all sorts of industries they view as integral to society, but far too often Republicans play that game as well.

This is one of those times. With this $10 million line item in the budget Republican lawmakers are cracking the door open for larger and larger taxpayer funded programs in areas the government has no business meddling in.

Living without an internet connection would be tough, but tough is completely subjective and there are plenty of services and goodies that could construed the same way. The more comfortable lawmakers become with the idea of spending taxpayers’ cash on such schemes, the further eroded your freedoms become.