Why let private enterprise solve a problem when there's a perfectly good pool of taxpayers to fleece?

Starlink

Maine is pushing ahead with its government internet program that will bring high-speed internet to rural communities. And of course, though the spending has been going on for several years, now they have COVID to add urgency to their spending.

“Internet access is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity,” [Governor] Mills said. The need for expanded access is even greater during the pandemic, when many students are learning from home because of schools being closed to limit the spread of the virus, she said.

In the meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service went beta last month and is expected to be worldwide by the end of 2021.

And not surprisingly, other competitors are rushing in (or up).

The fly in the ointment there is that Starlink and other satellite systems will break the monopolies held by existing providers. And that explains why Maine’s and other rural states’ similar programs that provide taxpayer-funded subsidies to cable companies are being run as a consortium of government and the cable companies that have paid them for so long. Even if these state projects prove useless, unnecessary, or futile in the long run, I’m unfamiliar with any government program that’s ever been canceled on those grounds; witness, e.g., the ethanol mandate, or the Democrats’ and their military-industrial friends’ newfound affection for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We will stop no project before its time, and that time will never come.