Mayor John Street of Philadelphia recently proposed providing the entire city with free, or at least extremely cheap, wireless service. As a resident of Philadelphia, I think this is a great idea, not only because it would provide me with free wireless service, but also because it is exactly the sort of thing a city needs to do in order to help attract the new creative class. Like much of the northeast, Philadelphia hemorrhaged nearly its entire manufacturing base decades before it happened to the entire country, and those industries are not coming back. Tolerance and creativity are two of the keys in rebuilding local enterprise.

Unfortunately, the Pennsylvania state legislature values propping up aristocratic, corporate oligarchies instead of the possibilities of creativity, innovation and new enterprise:

The latest evidence lies hidden within a Bill en route to the desk of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. House Bill 30 -- an industry-drafted and inspired sprawl of corporate concessions -- has tucked within its more than 70 pages an amendment that effectively kills efforts in Philadelphia to provide citywide wireless access at little or no charge.

The bill cleared both Pennsylvania's House and Senate on Friday. A signature from Governor Rendell would scuttle "Philadelphia Wireless" -- an ambitious plan to build a Wi-Fi network to serve the city's working-class communities -- before the project could begin.

The problem, according to the Bill's principal sponsor, Verizon Communications, Inc., is that community-supported wireless poses a "significant threat" to the multi-billion dollar company's near monopoly hold on wireless access across the city. Why allow for local competition and innovation in Philadelphia when you can shut it down via well-funded connections in the capitol?

Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street's spokeswoman Barbara Grant told MediaChannel that the bill was "terrible for cities around the country, because if the telecommunications companies can stop it here in Pennsylvania, they'll probably be able to stop it anywhere."

Through initiative and innovation, entrepreneurship is a liberal value. Through intolerance and aristocracy, entrepreneurship is not a conservative value.