I’m a week in to using an iPad. And I find that my relationship with this new device is complicated.

Take last night. I got home from work, and said to myself: “I’m going to use nothing but my iPad for the next 24 hours. No laptop.” That lasted for about 15 minutes; I was trying to write a business e-mail, and got so frustrated I gave up and grabbed my laptop. A minute later I was browsing the web with the iPad, and wanted to share a link with a colleague; it took me literally 10 times longer to accomplish that simple action. As I wrote last weekend, I remain convinced the iPad is not a machine for doing things.

But an hour after that, I had a completely different experience. I had played around with the Netflix app, but not yet watched a movie on it. So I crawled into bed, launched Netflix, and watched a movie. What a revelation! It was awesome (my ergonomic issues watching video solved by getting a case which you can turn into a stand).

This is really what the iPad is good for; at its essence, it’s a lightweight, portable, digitally connected screen.  It’s a passive device, one that gets better with less interaction. It’s not a computing device. Watching movies. Casually flipping through photos (or a simple magazine like publication).  Light browsing of the web. The best applications are those like Netflix (NPR is also good) that require the minimal interaction to set up a mostly-passive experience. And games — it’s a good gaming device.

With that insight, my reaction was: “The iPad is the future of entertainment, not computing.” But then I thought about it a minute longer. And realized that the tablet is the future of entertainment, not the iPad.

My experience with Netflix on the iPad will be available on a wide range of Android and Windows-powered tablets later this year. If I mainly want to browse the web, or watch movies, do I really need a $500 iPad, or will a $200-300 Android tablet do just fine? Is the AppStore really going to be full of one-of-a-kind applications I won’t be able to get on the Android? No.

This is where the decision to kill Abode and boot Flash is really likely to hurt Apple. With an Android tablet, I’ll be able not only to use Netflix, I’ll be able to watch all of the video out there on the Web.

Say I stumble upon a great SNL clip on the Huffington Post or a funny Daily Show clip on Talking Points Memo.  With the iPad, I’ll see a big blank space where the video is supposed to be (because, trust me, Hulu and Viacom won’t be supporting HTML5 embeds anytime soon). Maybe I’ll be curious enough to see if there is a Hulu app; install it (assuming Hulu builds such an app); launch it; search for that SNL video; and, finally, watch it. But really — look at the hurdles you’ll have to go through. Think about how you discover content — through blogs (Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous), links on Twitter to those blog posts, things embedded on sites you like and visit frequently, stuff in your Facebook feed or even on Vodpod.

Think about that experience on the Android tablet. I’ll come across the embedded Flash clip on the Huffington Post and guess what — it’ll play back just fine. Full screen, even. The video quality will be just as good.  This will happen on Android phones, too.

As a consumer, this is just better. And if the video is available in HTML5, that’s great too — the Android will handle that every bit as well as the iPad. The world will move to HTML5 video over the next 2-3 years; but it will take that long. The fact that that universe of programming will work just fine on an Android tablet, and won’t on an iPad, creates an interesting dynamic.

I’m convinced now that the tablet form factor will be increasingly important for the entertainment world. But I’m now much less convinced Apple will dominate that world, despite their head start.

UPDATE: I’m looking back at this post some 20 months later, and most of it holds up. But the big things I got wrong were (a) my view that the lack of Flash support would cripple the iPad and (b) that Android would seize on that missing thing and deliver a better tablet. Whoops! Jobs and crew were totally right to boot Flash, and my ranting about that was, in retrospect, well, stupid.

The first of a new series from Mr. Malik. Looks interesting.

Like so many entrepreneurs, I pretty much worship Steve Jobs. As a 40-something entrepreneur in a world of startups run by kids who can’t even grow facial hair, he’s the holy patron saint of the Second Chance and the still-getting-it-on-when-you’re-over-50-CEO.

And most important of all — the Grand God of Great Product Design.

But I gotta say, I just hate what Apple has been doing these past few months.

The genius, the real absolute genius, of the digital age the past 10 years, has been the “small pieces, loosely joined” nature of it. People got out from under the Microsoft and AOL soviet stores of the 1990s and cobbled together cool services that we all (mostly) love and take for granted now (YouTube, flickr, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and on and on). Most of these services are built on a hodge-podge of open source software, with a thousand lightweight things like Flash thrown in.

Apple (mostly) participated in and benefited from this. Just to give one example: the embrace of MP3 in the iPod. Apple could have taken the purist route and only allowed AAC. They could have made a zillion arguments why it was the right thing to do, and could have bashed MP3 as a bloated, lossy, aged format.

But they didn’t because they were a different company then. A more desperate company. A lot of us had music on our PCs (the Mac hadn’t yet been revived) in the MP3 format. Apple didn’t and couldn’t control the format, but they needed to embrace it for the iPod to win. It made the iPod a better product — no, an awesome product — and made all of us a lot happier.

Starting with the iPod Apple got on a streak of awesomeness, with a great MacBook line powered by OSX, then the iPhone.  With all three of those products, one got the sense that crafting a great user experience was (mostly) paramount. The AT&T lock-in on the iPhone being the most glaringly awful counter-point.

It feels like that has changed over the past months, as Apple has put it’s rediscovered brawn and power on full display. It feels like their focus is changing, from “create a great product” to “dominate the world with Grand Strategy.”

Nothing illustrates this better than Apple’s announcement yesterday about the change in their SDK, and the coverage of that move.  Just look at John Gruber’s defense of Apple’s move on Daring Fireball if you want a taste. The conversation has moved from “Oh. My. God. What an incredible product” to “Well, of course they’re F^$*ng Adobe, here are all the reasons why this is so smart.”

If Apple wanted to make a truly great product, they would have embraced Adobe. Not because Adobe is awesome, but because they’re a part of the fabric of the digital age, a part of the web.  There are tens of thousands of sites out there that found Flash a simple, reliable way to distribute their videos. And hundreds of services (ad serving, statistical tracking, security) that got baked in over time to allow this to flourish.

Apple just changed that, by fiat. Not because it makes their product so much better, but because it fits their new Grand Strategy. Big sites like YouTube, Hulu, blip or even our site Vodpod will make the transition to HTML5 support rapidly. But making that transition is a real pain (if you dare leave a comment telling me how trivial HTML5 is, or that people “should just make an app” I’ll come track you down and punch you in the nose for being a moron) and will be much tougher for  thousands of smaller sites — TeacherTube for fora.tv, for example. Those sites, and their viewers, lose out with Apple’s new strategy.

Brian Lam, in a really terrific review of the iPad, captures this dynamic so well here:

I check my surf and snow sites and most of them work fine. Once, I see a video from some no-name site of the big storm that hit Tahoe with 50 inches of snow last week while covering the iPad launch in NY. It doesn’t work. I am too stoned and cozy in my fuzzy blanket to get up and walk to the office. I bet that video was really good. Every time this happens, I get a little upset, which eats away at my affection for the iPad. This happened 3 times today, and will happen many more times before mom and pop websites get rid of Flash.

It didn’t have to be like that. But sometimes, companies just get too big for their own good, get too caught up playing Grand Strategy, and forget they got there by just making freakin’ great products. Tragic.

It’s one of the joys of getting older.

All this talk of stands and external keyboards for the iPad reminds me of this. I remember folks coming to meetings circa 1999, at the height of the bubble, with their Palm V and an external keyboard.

They always looked kind of silly.

As I just wrote in my last post, I don’t really think the iPad is a revolutionary device itself.

But I do get why people think it provides a glimpse of the future. In this way, it’s a little like the iPod, which basically showed the way to the iPhone (except the iPod was so new and so fresh and so powerful, it qualified as a truly revolutionary device in it’s own right).

As I’ve used the iPad the last day, it’s got me dreaming of the device that I think Apple will most surely build that will revolutionize computing: an extremely lightweight, thin MacBook that supports touch and runs OSX.

Microsoft tried to do something like this with their first tablets but they ran, well, Windows. And were the opposite of elegant.

I’d love a device that combines my Macbook and my iPad. Where I can toggle between a touch-driven app and regular, keyboard laptop functionality. With their new A4 chip and Jony Ive and Steve Job’s vision, Apple can and surely will make this device. Can’t wait. When they do, that will be the revolutionary device, and the iPad will have paved the way.

The iPad has been in our house for twenty-four hours now, and I’ll start with the obvious and not-very-original praise — it’s a beautifully engineered device.

But with that out of the way, let’s dive in and get to the heart of the matter — the iPad will be about as revolutionary to the computing business as the Delorean was to the car industry. Meaning, not all all.

Dave Winer was perhaps a tad too harsh yesterday calling the iPad a toy, but I think the essence of his argument is about right.

Here are the key things I’ve noticed in playing with the device the last day and trying out twenty to thirty different apps:

• My kids (14 and 11) love it. Why do they love it? For one reason only — the games.
• Touch gestures are awesome for browsing photos, and some specifically designed apps (Time magazine and the Guardian had the best photo-oriented apps)
• That said, there is no way I’m ever going to pay $4.99 a week for a magazine on this device (and I am your target market); Kevin Anderson has a great post on this
• It is definitely not a production device; every time I wanted to do something, I reached for my laptop (typing this post on my laptop now — the keyboard on the iPad is not a serious tool)
• I found the ergonomics of the device more awkward than I expected; I’m surprised so few people have written about this. There is a reason you see people propping their legs up tent-like to support the device in all those ads.
• It’s a horrible daylight device — hard to hold it in a position to avoid screen glare
• It’s far less useful for video than I would have imagined; not because of lack of Flash, but because of the ergonomics. You really want a fixed screen position to watch video. And you often want to multi-task. Laptops are perfect, really, for video
• I used the iBook app, and again I found the weight and heft of the device less friendly for book reading than a Kindle
• Touch gestures are elegant and lovely and efficient for some applications, they’re awful for others. In many ways, touch is much more important and critical on the iPhone than the iPad.

In short, I think this is an awesome game device, and a very, very good browsing device for photos and specifically-built content applications. But it is most definitely not a computer. If I had to make a Sophie’s choice decision, choosing between my MacBook and the iPad, it would not be a close call at all. Whereas, if I had to choose between my iPhone and my MacBook, that would be a very, very hard decision.

To claim this device is as important and revolutionary as the iPhone is just delusional. And anyone who thinks it is a potential replacement for a real computer smoked too much Steve Jobs PR crack. In my life, using computers intensively the past twenty years and building applications and services designed for them, there have been four truly huge developments:

• The web browser and Internet
• The lightweight laptop with built-in wifi — this revolutionized mobile computing, and was a huge leap forward (very under-hyped at the time, giant in retrospect)
• The iPod — the ability to take 1000 songs and put them in your pocket, what an incredible thrill, and introduced the world of digital mobile devices
• The iPhone — the first truly great mobile phone & computing device, and the single best and most revolutionary communication device made in my lifetime

The iPad isn’t anywhere near as important as any of these things, elegant as it is. It’s essentially a nice to have device, not a must have.

And in many ways, I find it a big step backwards. It’s an incredibly infantilizing device. On my MacBook (favorite computer ever) I love being able to write a blog post and listen to music and toggle over to my Twitter feed and my e-mail while sitting on my couch. My computer makes me feel faster, more productive, more engaged. It helps me to do more things.

Whereas my iPad reduces me to poking my finger at the screen, one application at a time. I found myself getting bored, and reaching for my MacBook.

So why all the praise? It’s interesting, when you start to break it down. So much of it comes from people who want you, reader, to go back to being a consumer. If you make your living as a writer or a maker of content, say, the thought of having someone drinking in your words in an elegantly designed app without the distraction of a Facebook alert or e-mail or music or web-browsing or other multi-tasking madness is unbelievably seductive. It provides them the illusion that we can go back to the world pre-web, where content creators were few and ruled the Earth. I think a lot of folks hope Steve Jobs have given them back that world with the iPad, a world where they’re in control again.

Diverging opinions on the iPad are reflective of a larger cultural war happening within the technology and media businesses. As I wrote from SXSW last month, there are a lot of folks in the media business who have never really liked the web. Including some folks, ironically, who now make their living on the Web.

If you’re an entrepreneur, the iPad poses a huge dilemma. Anyone who makes games should be focused on this device straight away. But if you’re not in the game-making business, it’s not as clear. There will be hundreds of millions of people with smart-phones or super-phones the next two years. And hundreds of millions with a laptop or computer connected to broadband.  Maybe 20-30M at most in two years with an iPad?

But, fortunately for Apple, you can hedge your bets by thinking of the iPad as part of the iPhone family of devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). Taken together, that’s a huge addressable market. And a force to be reckoned with (bacause ot it, Flash for video will be largely gone from the Web within the next 12 months).

So, back to my new iPad. It’s sitting over on the bookshelf re-charging while I type this on my MacBook. I might grab it later to play with. Or I might not. It’s kind of like that.

AN UPDATE: I should note for the record that when the iPad was announced earlier in the year, I thought not including support for Flash was a big mistake. I was totally wrong about that. YouTube and and a few other services already work brilliantly on the device, and I think by year’s end we’ll see most mainstream video sites gravitate towards support for HTML5 standards as a result. That’ll be a good thing.

What’s the most contrarian thing one can do in the technology business? Take the long view.

Few actually do this.

Moore’s law, the steady (if not as fast as we’d like) march to ubiquitous and persistent broadband, the decrease in the cost of storage — all make for a world that seems to move at hyper-speed.  Journalists and bloggers like to focus on news; it can get boring (for the journalist, for the reader) watching some five or ten year old company relentlessly march toward some distant goal. Yawn. It all conspires to create a world where we gravitate from one shiny shiny to the next, an entire herd of geeks afflicted with ADD. And it makes it very hard — indeed, unfashionable — to take the long term view and plow ahead.

I was thinking about all this over the weekend after reading the latest breathless piece about Foursquare or Gowalla or some other geo-location service (definitely the new hotness category).

And I had this thought: what companies, from the first decade of the public Internet era (say, 1994-2004) have really made a major impact? Because I’m hardly an expert on all Internet companies, I narrowed my focus further and asked: “What consumer Internet companies launched between 1994 and 2004 have had a lasting impact?”

It’s a pretty damned short list. Here’s mine:

• Amazon
• Google
• Netflix
• Craigslist
• eBay
• Yahoo!

These are the first generation Internet companies that continue to make a difference to millions of people online, nearly every day.

There are of course others from that generation still in existence — AOL, CNet, RealNetworks (Yahoo! and eBay are on the bubble and might join this second tier soon) — but their impact is diminished. And there are hundreds of companies — thousands, even — just gone altogether. Broadcast.com. The Globe. Pets.com. And on and on. It’s a good reminder that so many of the companies that get hyped today will be gone in 10 — or, 5 — years.

Looking at that small first list — Amazon, Google, Netflix, Craigslist in particular — one thing that’s clear is that (a) the founder(s) stayed on board, and (b) had incredibly long range vision. Think about Amazon, mocked so ruthlessly in 2000, 2001, and 2002, their stock plummeting, and being called “Amazon dot toast” and “Amazon dot Con.”

Jeff Bezos — who had a vision and an amazing amount of tenacity –  ignored the haters and doubters, had the last laugh.

There are similar stories for Google (think how “search” was ridiculed 1998-2000) and Netflix. And Craigslist was simply ignored, never made it to the “shiny shiny” stage, seen as a quirky hobby and not a real business. Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster kept building, launching in new cities, sticking to their knitting and their very basic and simple UI. And giving people a service they now can’t live without.

It’s interesting to think about the companies from the second generation of the Internet — founded, say, 2004 onwards — and to wonder which of them will be around in 2020. Facebook? Twitter? Gowalla?

I love that Ev Williams and Biz Stone seem determined to hang in for the long haul, not flip, and build something lasting. But Pandora, the streaming radio service (disclosure, I tend to use competitor last.fm) has the best and most inspiring story going. They’ve been at it for over 10 years now, went two years where they were out of money altogether, and  dodged a bullet only last year, when they got an initial, adverse music royalty ruling reversed.

As an entrepreneur, their story is awe-inspiring and humbling. You’d have to be a real contrarian to follow in their footsteps.

more about “Health Care Passes“, posted with vodpod

Over the past five-seven years, my interest in health care reform moved from the abstract to the personal, and I thought it was worth jotting down the reasons I personally am thrilled by the passage of this first effort at health insurance reform on Sunday:

1. My Family Was Denied Coverage

In 2005, after moving back to the United States from London, England, my family looked to buy a health insurance policy. I had left my previous job, and was getting ready to launch my own startup. But there was going to be a year or so where we needed to buy private insurance.

We applied to three different insurance companies, with help from a good college friend who is an insurance broker and knows how to work the system. But we were nevertheless denied coverage because my then 7 year old daughter had a pre-existing condition (a microscopic hole in her heart called a “VSD” which thankfully has had no effect on her life, or life expectancy, or is ever likely to require medical care — she’s a completely normal kid).

It’s a real moment of anguish and anger when, as a parent, you feel you can’t get health coverage for a child. Total helplessness.  In our case we were lucky — we were able to extend insurance from my previous job (albeit at ridiculously high rates) and my new start-up was able to offer health insurance more quickly than I’d expected.

But I’ve often thought about the many, many people who just don’t have those options available to them. With the bill signed today by President Obama, families like ours won’t have to face those kinds of horrible choices going forward.

2. We Used the NHS in England and Loved It

A common argument — no, stratagem — of those opposed to Health Insurance reform is to stoke the fears about “nationalized” health care and how awful it is. First off, as I’ll detail in a moment, that argument is misplaced anyway as the bill signed into law today does not — repeat, does not — create a nationalized health care system like those in Canada or the UK.

But for fun let’s stipulate that it does. My experience in London, where the NHS was our family’s primary health care provider for three years (2002-05), suggests that it’s every bit as good as the US system. Our doctors were terrific, every bit as good as any doctor we had in Seattle or San Francisco. When our kids got sick, they got in to see their pediatrician immediately, just as fast as in the States and sometimes faster. And it cost us… nothing. It was covered through taxes we paid while living in the UK, which were about the same level as in the US.

Some argue “Yeah, but the system sucks for more complex or critical care.” We personally did not have to use the NHS for any major surgeries or critical medical care; but friends did (heart attacks, hip replacements, cancer treatments) and reports from them were nothing but positive.

The way you know that this is just fear mongering by opponents of health insurance reform is to consider this question: exactly how many politicians in the UK, Europe, Japan, and Canada of the left, right or center have been elected to office on a platform to replace their countries’ health care systems with one similar to the system we’ve had in the US the last 40 years? I’m not sure there are any names on that list.

The truth is, people in the Canada or the UK have no desire to get rid of their nationalized health care system and replace it with a private insurance market like ours. They just want to improve what they have.

Last, as I noted, the argument is specious anyway, because the law passed this weekend does not created a nationalized health care system (to the disappointment of many liberals). Rather, it reforms how health insurance works in this country, makes it impossible for insurers to deny (or drop you from) coverage based on pre-existing illnesses, helps the poor pay for private insurance if they don’t have it through their employers, and requires everyone to buy insurance (just like we do already for the privilege of driving a car) to spread the risks and keep the costs contained.

If you’re going to fear monger on this bill, you’ll have to cite examples of how horrible the health care systems are in Switzerland and Japan (which are closest to the type of system we’ll have with the new bill). My personal view, based on personal experience, is that having a comprehensive government option similar to those offered in other countries will improve our health care system overall. This bill didn’t provide this; but maybe it’ll tamp down the irrational fears people are peddling, and we can get there someday.

3.  Health Insurance is the #1 Problem for Small Businesses and Startups

Every year, the #1 cost issue my business — and most startups — face is rising health insurance costs. For the past three years we’ve provided insurance, we’ve seen annual increases of over 10%. Rapidly increasing health insurance costs are the #1 reason wages have stagnated for over a decade. We’ve paid more money to employ people each year, but those increased expenditures didn’t go to my employees; they went to Anthem Blue Cross. I know this bill won’t fix cost issues, at least not right away. But as many independent health care experts and economists have pointed out, there are more initiatives in this bill aimed reducing health care costs than any other in the past 40 years.

This bill will also help people who want to take some risk, and start their own business, to do just that without the fear of not having health care coverage for themselves or their families. Think of how many people have stayed in their jobs just because, or mainly because, they wanted to keep their employer-provided insurance coverage? That kind of indentured servitude can come to an end, now, and our economy will be more vibrant because of it.

Finally, there is this simple argument. Our system costs twice as much as a percentage of GDP compared to other industrialized countries, with no — that is, zero — proof that the care we get is any better. Why would anyone continue with that kind of bloated, expensive, unproductive system that benefits the big health insurance companies most of all? This new law won’t be a panacea, but it will be a start.

I had a simple epiphany at a conference in Austin this weekend, in this session on Sunday morning: After Magazines: Wired’s Digital Rebirth.

The epiphany was this: that the tablet device, in particular the iPad, may be the first good digital device for storytelling (yeah, I hate that word too — but I’m not sure there is a better one for my purposes here).

Thea talk was by the Creative Director of Wired, Scott Dadich, who focuses mainly on their print magazine. And it was about their development of a digital version of the magazine for tablet devices including the iPad. You can see a sneak peek of what they’re building in this video:

more about “Adobe & Wired Create a Digital Magazine“, posted with vodpod

What struck me about Dadich’s talk was his complete enthusiasm for the tablet, and his total disdain for the web. He proudly noted that a hallway divides the Wired print and interactive teams (the “Hall of China” he called it); showed example after example of beautiful print designs contrasted with ugly interactive counterparts from their website; and noted their were over a dozen people on the design and art stuff of the magazine and just two for the website.

Dadich’s attitude is illustrative of a larger if demoralizing truth: that many creative people do not feel the Web is a particularly friendly place for stories and narrative, and that we’ve seen few (maybe no?) truly compelling and engrossing narrative works built for the Web.

So the enthusiasm of a old media print designer like Dadich was telling. He and his team at Wired can now make a digital version of their magazine that stays true to the artistry, layout, and narrative flow of their print product. One that still affords interactivity for the consumer — simple “flipping” of pages with the swipe of a finger — but that allows the creative maker to stay in control of the narrative, and to some extent the experience.

And this is the key. Whether making of art, or writing, or film, people are drawn those creative acts by the compulsion to tell a story. To be an author, to hold the attention of an audience, and to move them or affect them in some way. Looking at the Wired demo, and hearing Dadich speak, it’s not hard to imagine a whole class of creative people turning their energies towards making something for the iPad or tablets more generally.

Indeed, I found my own creative interests and instincts being aroused by dreams of the iPad. Fifteen years ago I was making CD-ROM based documentaries that were all about a blend of storytelling and interactivity. They were critically acclaimed, but sold pitifully few copies and the experience just didn’t provide what people wanted from their computer. What they wanted, it turns out, was the web.

Perhaps — perhaps — what people will want from the tablet are the kinds of stories and experiences we were trying to provide with those old CD-ROMs, or what Wired is trying to do with their digital magazine. My pal Om Malik suggested something like this — that the tablet is about consumption:

When I walked out of the Apple event, in an on-camera interview, I told David Carr, media critic for The New York Times, that this device is first and foremost about media consumption. Our world, as I have outlined in many previous writings, is overrun with information. For the past 15 years we have perfected tools for creating information (or content). From camera phones to cheap laptops to open-source blogging platforms, the world of the web has been about creating a tidal wave of media/information/data. What we have used to consume this information is a 30-year-old technology, the personal computer and lately, the cell phone.

While the PC was created for personal computing, it never really became personal enough. The mobile phones weren’t quite cut out to consume content beyond phone calls, some text messages and maybe emails. Today’s smart phones are proving that when done right, they can become great tools for consuming information — from little tweets to Yelp reviews to blog posts to Tom Friedman’s latest rant. The explosive and unstoppable growth of mobile data traffic only reinforces the fact that if you give people a better way to consume information, they will use it!

With that as context, you start to see the implications of the iPad and get excited.

I intially didn’t get Om’s point — or more precisely, I disagreed with it –because he talked about the the “consumption of information.” I think the PC is a perfectly fine — and perhaps ideal — device for that.

But the tablet as a device for consumption of narratives — well, then I think Om’s argument is dead-on. It’s possible to imagine sitting on a couch or comfy chair or your bed consuming a great story, whether told with pictures, words, or video. The creative class is coming, without a doubt, to the device in a big way. The open question at this point is whether the audience will follow.

One last, tangential note about SXSW this year. I really abhor conferences. And I usually don’t go to them.

And though much, much bigger than the last time I went (and arguably too big now) SXSW was actually more useful than I expected.  Good sessions on topics like iPhone development and design, a fine talk by Tom Conrad of Pandora about their work on mobile platforms, some nice HTML5 workshops. And, as always, the serendipitous meetings in hallways, or at the start of a session.

The focus on partying is a little off-putting, though, to a stodgy old guy like me. It’s fine to play and all, but I found myself wishing people took their work a little more seriously, and their play a little less.

David Brooks, more than almost any other conservative pundit, does the best job of putting a congenial face on Republican dogma, turning it into rational-sounding, no-brainer soundbites. Smart people of many stripes read him and think: “Yeah, of course that’s right, it all sounds so reasonable.”

But then you read a column like the one for tomorrow’s NY Times. And you’re reminded of the one-dimensionality — the stunning naivete — of his thinking. Take this paragraph from near the very end:

Both parties see the same problem. The current system is a mess, with opaque prices and perverse incentives that mostly favor the insurance companies. But, as Yuval Levin has pointed out in National Review, the Democrats believe the answer is to create a highly regulated insurance system with inefficiencies eliminated through rational rules. The Republicans believe that the answer is to create a genuine market with clear price signals, empowered consumers and an evolving process.

The emphasis added in mine. This last sentence is the perfect encapsulation of almost every argument we’ve heard from Republicans, on almost every possible issue. More freedom! Let the market forces work their magic!

Brooks rarely questions the argument — indeed, he offers no challenge to the Republican position in his piece for tomorrow’s Times — and often advances it with his warm of embrace for folks like Paul Ryan.  And you wonder if he learned anything over the past 30 years.

Thirty years of Republican economic rule (Reaganism, essentially) with unchecked de-regulation and the neutering of government oversight in so many arenas of economic life. You’d think we’d be in some kind of free market nirvana by now. But I think we’ve all learned the past couple of years just how far from nirvana we are.

Take the telecommunications business. I spent yesterday morning at Gigaom‘s offices in San Francisco with sixty other entrepreneurs and Internet infrastructure executives who spent 2 hours bemoaning the state of US broadband and wireless networks, and how quickly and far we’ve fallen behind other countries in Asia and Europe. Not one person blamed the government for this state of affairs — indeed, there has been massive deregulation in the telecoms space over the past 15 years.

Instead, nearly everyone focused on the large carriers — their bureaucracy, lack of vision, their focus on short term margins and pure defensive behavior. (This hilarious Fake Steve Jobs rant about Randall Stephenson might give you a taste of the venom in the room).

And this is the big lie of the libertarian, Ayn Rand-loving, government-suspecting free market acolytes like David Brooks and Paul Ryan. Deregulation and less government doesn’t lead to free markets — not in telecommunication, not in finance, not in health care, not in energy.  Because it turns out that corporations and corporatists abhor free markets more than Communists. And will do everything in their powers to stymie competition, and to maintain their advantages.

You never hear Republicans or conservatives or libertarians make this argument. And it makes you wonder: are these folks just naive dupes? Or are they so passionate in their anti-government ideology that they’re blinded by this larger truth.

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan loved getting a laugh with this quip: “The nine most terrifying words are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Too many people believed him, and AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Well Point, and Enron laughed all the way to the bank.