[LINK] The heights of hubris

[Jim Birch]

This takes the old charades of turning the first sod, donning the
firefighter/hardhat/service uniform to a new level of surreality (is that a
word) doesn't it?  Now you are the investigative reporter reporter on
government policy.

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Turnbull is also running a fallacy when he claims that the estimates of the
value of the NBN were too high.  The dollars that can be extracted from the
punters is not logically or practically equivalent to the value of
something to its users.  This is particularly true of shared public
resources (how much would you pay to breathe air?) for some fairly simple
reasons.   The actual value of the NBN - what economists call utility -  is
very difficult to estimate because it there are so many potential future
uses that cannot be reliable estimated, valued or even known.  If the value
of the NBN is the total dollars that that people are willing to pay to swap
from ADSL right now, it is not worth doing.  The job of government is to
look intelligently at utility and risk in "big picture" ways that the
average person can't or won't.  Otherwise, why have one.

- Jim