More on the Scope of Government and Parental Responsibility

To add on to my missive from last night, Tim Phillips from Americans for Prosperity chimes in on recent developments regarding a la carte cable offerings :

Asking parents to supervise what their children watch is a conservative idea. Threats from Washington bureaucrats to regulate television are not. Proponents of a la carte sometimes represent themselves as advocates of free markets, but government-mandated, "managed competition" is the stuff of Hillary Clinton's health-care plan and the botched telephone unbundling fights of the 1990s, not of truly competitive free markets.

Such regulations are based on a government-knows-best mentality that is all too common on the left, but that conservatives have traditionally rejected. Such mandates would abrogate contracts between video service providers and programmers, imposing a complicated and expensive regulatory burden on these providers and decreasing consumer choice.

Read the whole thing. But this further illustrates the point I tried to make regarding the Republican Party embracing the concept of statism to promote an ostensibly conservative agenda.

Hey, I like the idea of offering cable channels on an a la carte basis. But if it was that profitable and people wanted it that much, somebody would already be doing it. Using the federal government to force cable companies to do this not only bad for the market, its bad for the upholding of principle.