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1. TheEngineer
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   Limited Government and Internet Freedom

   Rich Muny
   July 25, 2009

   The GOP has historically been the party of limited government and personal responsibility. President Ronald Reagan said it best in his frequent citations of Thomas Paine’s famous axiom – “the government governs best that governs least.” Unfortunately, the party moved away from the limited government conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan during the Bush Administration. In fact, the 2008 Republican Party Platform regrettably went so far as to advocate a federal prohibition of online poker. Fortunately, the party is now starting to rediscover limited government principles.

   During that failed era of big government “conservatism”, some big government social conservative groups like Focus on the Family wished to use the power of the federal government to stop Americans from playing online poker in their own homes. To bolster their position, some of these groups falsely reported the results of gaming studies, leading to Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) embarrassing himself on the House floor by erroneously claiming that one-third of college students who had tried online gaming had attempted suicide. Some of these groups also took polling data on brick-and-mortar casinos and misrepresented the data as evidence that voters felt the same way about online poker. They also took studies on video slot machines that display jackpot near-misses in excess of the actual frequency of near-misses (the "crack cocaine of gambling," according to FoF), falsely stated that the study results are applicable to all games on a video screen, then egregiously stated that online poker is included in the mix......

   Posted 10 months ago #

2. TheEngineer
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   Posted 10 months ago #

3. Big Jim Slade v2.0
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   It's a nice article overall. Two points stick out in my mind.

   1) you seem state the PPA was formed in response to the 2006 law. I seem to think the organization existed well before that. Under different leadership, and maybe the offices were in a different state, rather than in DC.

   2) The republican party has been known for a long time as the organizers of the nanny state in cyberspace. Legislation such as COPA - the Child Online Protection Act was passed back in 1998. COPA itself was a reaction to the Communications Decency Act passed back in 1996. Encryption legislation was debated back in 1999.

   To be honest, I don't recall the exact history of all these bills. I might be wrong about some of it, but I seem to recall the republicans consistently tried to control these aspects of out lives. I am sure it was republicans with the CDA, but some of the encryption issues are murky, the V-chip might not have been republicans.

   Posted 10 months ago #

4. TheEngineer
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   1) The PPA was formed from the old PPPA when the threat of the House passing a prohibition on online poker was imminent.

   2) Those could be interpreted as law-and-order type issues more than moral ones, but did show a trend toward what we saw in 2006 with UIGEA. By then, the GOP was all in favor of all sorts of big government legislation of morality.

   Posted 10 months ago #

5. Big Jim Slade v2.0
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   1) Somehow I thought the PPA had the same name continuously - not that I really paid attention. Thanks for clearing that up.

   2) And while my mind may slip on the details, I seem to recall in around 1995 Grassley waving a copy of Time magazine on the floor of the Senate expounding on the Carnegie-Mellon study on internet porn, which we all discovered a few weeks later to be a hoax created by a student named Marty Rimm. The big thing that came out of this was libraries installing web blocking software. Those of us dealing with Internet issues at the time all thought of this as Nanny-state issues.

   As new media has emerged, the internet has become the logical extension for the activities we have previously practiced in brick and mortar. The legacy companies have protested trying to protect their business models, and the lawmakers have cried they must protect the children. Online poker is just another in a long train of migrations to cyberspace. We see the same objections being raised here as well.

   Posted 10 months ago #

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