This is an instance of capitalism taking the blame for the evils of its enemies.
The chaos of the airways was an example, not of free enterprise, but of anarchy. It was caused, not by private property rights, but by their absence. It demonstrated why capitalism is incompatible with anarchism, why men do need a government and what is a government’s proper function. What was needed was legality, not controls.
What was imposed was worse than controls: outright nationalization. By a gradual, uncontested process—by ideological default—it was taken for granted that the airways belong to “the people” and are “public property.”
If you want to know the intellectual state of the time, I will ask you to guess the political ideology of the author of the following quotation:
Radio communication is not to be considered as merely a business carried on for private gain, for private advertisement, or for entertainment of the curious. It is a public concern impressed with the public trust and to be considered primarily from the standpoint of public interest in the same extent and upon the basis of the same general principles as our other public utilities.
No, this was not said by a business-hating collectivist eager to establish the supremacy of the “public interest” over “private gain”; it was not said by a socialist planner nor by a
communist conspirator; it was said by Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, in 1924.
It was Hoover who fought for government control of radio and, as Secretary of Commerce, made repeated attempts to extend government power beyond the limits set by the legislation of the time, attempts to attach detailed conditions to radio licenses, which he had no legal authority to do and which were repeatedly negated by the courts. It was Hoover’s influence that was largely responsible for that tombstone of the radio (and the then unborn television) industry known as the Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission with all of its autocratic, discretionary, undefined, and undefinable powers. (That Act—with minor revisions and amendments, including the Act of 1934 that changed the Federal Radio Commission into the Federal Communications Commission—is still, in all essential respects, the basic legal document ruling the broadcasting industry today.)
“What we are doing,” said F.C.C. Chairman Newton N. Minow in 1962, “did not begin with the New Frontier.” He was right.
The Act of 1927 did not confine the government to the role of a traffic policeman of the air who protects the rights of broadcasters from technical interference (which is all that was needed and all that a government should properly do). It established service to the “public interest, convenience, or necessity” as the criterion by which the Federal Radio Commission was to judge applicants for broadcasting licenses and accept or reject them. Since there is no such thing as the “public interest” (other than the sum of the individual interests of individual citizens), since that collectivist catch-phrase has never been and can never be defined, it amounted to a blank check on totalitarian power over the broadcasting industry, granted to whatever bureaucrats happened to be appointed to the Commission.
“The public interest”—that intellectual knife of collec-tivism’s sacrificial guillotine, which the operators of broadcasting stations have to test by placing their heads on the block every three years—was not raised over their heads by capitalism’s enemies, but by their own leaders.
It was the so-called “conservatives”—including some of the pioneers, some of the broadcasting industry’s executives who, today, are complaining and protesting—who ran to the government for regulations and controls, who cheered the notion of “public property” and service to the “public interest,” and thus planted the seeds of which Mr. Minow and Mr. Henry are merely the logical, consistent flowers. The broadcasting
industry was enslaved with the sanction of the victims—but they were not fully innocent victims.
Many businessmen, of the mixed-economy persuasion, resent the actual nature of capitalism; they believe that it is safer to hold a position, not by right, but by favor; they dread the competition of a free market and they feel that a bureaucrat’s friendship is much easier to win. Pull, not merit, is their form of “social security.” They believe that they will always succeed at courting, pressuring, or bribing a bureaucrat, who is “a good fellow” they can “get along with” and who will protect them from that merciless stranger: the abler competitor.
Consider the special privileges to be found in the status of a certified servant of the “public interest” and a licensed user of “public property.” Not only does it place a man outside the reach of economic competition, but it also spares him the responsibility and the costs entailed in private property. It grants him gratuitously the use of a broadcasting frequency for which he would have had to pay an enormous price on a free market and would not have been able to keep for long, if he sent forth through the air the kind of unconscionable trash he is sending forth today.
Such are the vested interests made possible by the doctrine of the “public interest”—and such are the beneficiaries of any form, version, or degree of the doctrine of “public property.”
Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in radio and television.
The Act of 1927 granted to a government Commission total power over the professional fate of broadcasters, with the “public interest” as the criterion of judgment—and, simultaneously, forbade the Commission to censor radio programs. From the start, and progressively louder through the years, many voices have been pointing out that this is a contradiction impossible to practice. If a commissioner has to judge which applicant for a broadcastng license will best serve the “public interest,” how can he judge it without judging the content, nature, and value of the programs the applicants have offered or will offer?
If capitalism had had any proper intellectual defenders, it is they who should have been loudest in opposing a contradiction of that kind. But such was not the case: it was the statists who seized upon it, not in defense of free speech, but
in support of the Commission’s “righf to censor programs. And, so long as the criterion of the “public interest” stood unchallenged, logic was on the side of the statists.
The result was what it had to be (illustrating once more the power of basic principles): by gradual, unobtrusive, progressively accelerating steps, the Commission enlarged its control over the content of radio and television programs— leading to the open threats and ultimatums of Mr. Minow, who merely made explicit what had been known implicitly for many years. No, the Commission did not censor specific programs: it merely took cognizance of program content at license-renewal time. What was established was worse than open censorship (which could be knocked out in a court of law): it was the unprovable, intangible, insidious censorship-by-displeasure—the usual, and only, result of any non-objective legislation.1
All media of communication influence one another. It is impossible to compute the extent to which the gray, docile, fear-ridden, appeasement-minded mediocrity of so powerful a medium as television has contributed to the demoralization of our culture.
Nor can the freedom of one medium of communication be destroyed without affecting all the others. When censorship of radio and television becomes fully accepted, as a fait accompli, it will not be long before all the other media—books, magazines, newspapers, lectures—follow suit, unobtrusively, unofficially, and by the same method: overtly, in the name of the “public interest”; covertly, for fear of government reprisals. (This process is taking place already.)
So much for the relationship of “human” rights to property rights.
Since “public property” is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its “property,” that “property” will always be taken over by some political “elite,” by a small clique which will then rule the public—a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians.
If you want to gauge a collectivist theory’s distance from reality, ask yourself: by what inconceivable standard can it be claimed that the broadcasting airways are the property of some illiterate sharecropper who will never be able to grasp the concept of electronics, or of some hillbilly whose engi-
1 See my articles “Have Gun, Will Nudge” and “Vast Quicksands” in The Objectivist Newsletter, March 1962 and July 1963. For a graphic report on the state of the television industry, see Edith Efron’s articles “TV: The Timid Giant” and “Why the Timid Giant Treads Softly” in TV Guide, May 18 and August 10, 1963.
neering capacity is not quite sufficient to cope with a corn-liquor still—and that broadcasting, the product of an incalculable amount of scientific genius, is to be ruled by the will of such owners?
Remember that this literally is the alleged principle at the base of the entire legal structure of our broadcasting industry.