Comment by palmotea

5 days ago

> Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?

Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.

5 comments

palmotea

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999900000999  5 days ago

Alright cool.

Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.

Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.

  • xmprt  5 days ago

    Forgive me for assuming that the government owned service would be more transparent/serve the people better than a privately owned, closed source, platform that's explicitly funded by ads and so is transparently corrupt. Even your worst case scenario for this would be equivalent to what we already have.

  • palmotea  5 days ago

    > Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.

    Oh my! Mic drop! You got me! Corporate owned sites would have to be unbiased, right? It's not like a business would ever do something as disreputable favoring a restaurant that paid for the favored treatment, or try to steer you to affiliated businesses. Inconceivable!

    But seriously now: a government-run site would be way better and have less biases. In the US, there's a good chance it'd be run by civically-minded people, and there's about zero chance that conflict of interest would be baked into its "business" model.