In both 2013 and 2024, I made the shorthand observation that spending restraint is a good default answer for any question about fiscal policy.
Today, I’m going to expand upon that hypothesis by introducing by 22th Theorem of Government. Simply stated, you won’t be wrong very often if your knee-jerk response to any controversy is to think about making government smaller.
Think of this Theorem as the serious version of this meme.
My motivation is the current controversy over Charlie Kirk’s murder, free speech, and the role of the Federal Communications Commission.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal offers a good summary.
Regulatory power in the hands of a willful President can too easily become a weapon against political opponents, including the media. …Brendan Carr, President Trump’s man at the Federal Communications Commission, threatened Disney and its affiliates if they didn’t punish late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for comments about Charlie Kirk. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told a podcaster, in words that could have been uttered by a New Jersey mob boss. The FCC has power over broadcast licenses, so the threat had teeth. …Disney, which owns ABC, …suspended the Kimmel show “indefinitely.” As a private company, Disney has the right to run or cancel shows as it wishes. Perhaps in this case it saw pressure from government as an excuse to drop Mr. Kimmel, who had turned his show into a daily anti-Trump diatribe. But anyone who thinks this is the free market at work is ignoring the ways government can punish companies. …Mr. Kimmel’s comments Monday associating Charlie Kirk’s killer with the “MAGA gang” were false, callous and stupid. But they weren’t inciting violence, and in a free society they shouldn’t be cause for the government to push someone off the airwaves. …As victims of cancel culture for so long, conservatives more than anyone should oppose it. They will surely be the targets again when the left returns to power.
Writing for the Washington Post, Robert Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is very critical of the the FCC Chairman.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr chose Constitution Day to pressure ABC into removing late-night host Jimmy Kimmel from the air. …Many might find the host’s comments insensitive and inappropriate. Assassination has no place in a free society, and it is a fraught subject to work into a comedic monologue. But do you know what else has no place in a free society? A government official presuming he can police jokes told on late-night television based on his political preferences. …ABC received the not-so-subtle message and suspended Kimmel indefinitely. …But, of course, those decisions came after Carr issued his ultimatum, and, as it turns out, the station groups have pending matters before the commission. For example, Nexstar, the biggest owner of ABC-affiliate stations, announced a $6.2 billion merger agreement to acquire Tegna that requires FCC approval. And if you’re wondering whether the chairman might misuse his regulatory authority to punish broadcasters for content he doesn’t like, just ask CBS News owner Paramount, whose merger with Skydance was delayed while Trump pursued bogus litigation against “60 Minutes” for standard editorial choices.
So what’s the solution, at least for those of us who don’t like it when either Republicans or Democrats misuse the power of government?
Simple. Just get rid of the Federal Communications Commission.
In a column for National Review, Dominic Pino correctly explains why this should be the goal.
There are no doubt other reasons for Kimmel’s suspension from ABC’s late-night show. …the genre doesn’t really work anymore, and Kimmel’s show is a money-loser with more unamusing political commentary than genuine humor. But that doesn’t change the fact that Carr is a bully who at least attempted to use real government power to punish speech he did not like. Why does Carr have this power in the first place? …the FCC is in fact able to exert pressure over broadcasters by threatening to revoke their licenses. …The justification…that government officials in the 1920s used when setting up the Federal Radio Commission, one of the FCC’s predecessor agencies. They said that because the spectrum space for broadcasting is scarce, it must be nationalized. And since it’s nationalized, the government has greater power to dictate how it is used. …It doesn’t have to be this way. The scarcity-based justification for nationalizing the airwaves doesn’t hold up to basic logic. …there’s good precedent in American history for a better system to allocate this scarce resource: the Homestead Act of 1862. …the government should have promulgated the equivalent of a Homestead Act of the airways — an act defining private property rights in the new realm, establishing the rule that the user of a radio frequency would own it after he had operated a station for a certain number of years, and allocating all frequencies by the rule of priority, i.e., ‘first come, first served.’”
Pino concludes with a strong call for privatization.
So long as radio and TV stations are using public property, the government is going to have a say in how that property is used. If you want Brendan Carr to be less powerful, take away his agency’s unjust control over broadcasting by privatizing the airwaves and letting broadcasters buy and sell them like any other commodity.
Last year, well before the Jimmy Kimmel controversy began, Thomas Hazlitt authored a libertarian argument for spectrum privatization in Reason.
In 1927, mass-market electronic communications had already arisen under the common law rule of “first come, first served” and did not need federal micromanagement. What the new Federal Radio Commission later deemed “five years of orderly development” (1921–26) was disrupted by strategic regulatory dancing that preempted enforcement of such property rights. Sen. Clarence Dill (D–Wash.), author of the 1927 Radio Act, explained that the purpose “from the beginning…was to prevent private ownership of wave lengths or vested rights of any kind in the use of radio transmitting apparatus.” …The aim was to keep authority centralized and political, sidestepping the free speech protections of the First Amendment. After nearly a century, that ruse deserves to be ended. …It’s taken too long to grasp the marvel of spectrum markets. Another century for the brainchild of Herbert Hoover seems needlessly inert. Let the invisible hand regulate the invisible resource.
I’m not surprised Herbert Hoover played a destructive role, though I suppose Calvin Coolidge (usually very sensible) can’t escape blame since he approved the legislation.
But I’m more worried about today rather than the FCC’s creation nearly 100 years ago. More specifically, it would be wonderful if the bureaucracy could be abolished.
To its credit, the Trump Administration has shown it can successfully terminate a bureaucracy. Not it’s time to get another scalp (and then a third one!).
