Some issues with public religious practice cannot, of course, be resolved at the community level or between private individuals. But we are perilously close to a point at which no such issues will be resolved without ukases or adjudications from the state. It is precisely the business of the mature adult to recognize that there are whole realms of life in which government intervention is not necessary—in which, indeed, it is better in every way to work things out among ourselves directly—and that those realms are what we inhabit most of the time. Christians, in fact, are called to live by this precept, as Paul makes clear in I Corinthians 6:1-8.
The perfect coda to this meditation is the fact that net neutrality's shift in the basis for Internet service pricing is not proposed in response to an actual problem. Net neutrality is, rather, a set of measures taken in anticipation of potential problems—if service providers and Web-content managers begin "unfairly" to disadvantage some users. It is thus emblematic of a philosophical approach to regulating the people's interactions: it assumes the worst and leaves no room for either goodwill, honest service, or the impartial judgments of the free market. We can profitably learn from the expanding network of artificial problems net neutrality will create that this approach is a costly one. Rejecting it effectively will be more than a matter of intercepting one set of new regulations, however; it has to begin with the attitudes of our own hearts.
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