Another View of the FCC and Spectrum Scarcity

Bob_Robertson writes "Tim Swanson on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site is asking, has the FCC put itself out of a job by allowing the 47-49 MHz, 2.4 GHZ and other "open spectrum" frequencies, thus focusing innovation and development into making fantastic use of limited resources? The basis of the FCC's existence is "scarcity", so what happens when there isn't any scarcity any more? LVMI has looked into the FCC before."

Comments

Federal Censorship Committee

[bigwavejas]

We can only hope those nutcases are putting themselves out of jobs. They've already forced radio talk show host Howard Stern to move to Satellite radio. The FCC are a bunch of spineless pansies who bow down to ultra-paranoid religious whack-jobs, who get their panties all bunched up every time someone say's a bad word (cover your kids ears) or flashes a boob (cover your kids eyes, lord knows they'll never recover). I say good riddance! This country wasn't founded on censorship; it was founded on Freedom of Speech.

Support your local pirate radio, much like http://www.freakradio.org/

Re:Federal Censorship Committee

[mmell]

An unfortunate truth of human affairs in general and politics in particular is that once power is granted, it is nearly impossible to rescind.

The FCC will never go away, so long as the United States government exists - our government will never cede any power it has back to the populace it governs. The effect is similar to entropy - our government will grow progressively more and more powerful, more and more intrusive, until the day somebody is inspired by the phrase "When in the course of human events . . ."

Then again, so many of us want the kind of "cradle-to-grave" care our government has evolved into providing. "Let them continue to regulate radio communications" the people will say, "just keep my television spewing out mountains of mindless pap, keep the radio airwaves full of the musical tripe which the music industry has decreed I should find entertaining."

I guess we'll get what we desserve.

Re:Federal Censorship Committee

[smooth wombat]

Freedom of Speech != Freedom to be Vulgar

Yes, it does. Freedom of Speech means just that. You are free to say anything you want excluding the proverbial 'Fire!' in a crowded theater (or any other place) or if you slander someone (though you can actually slander someone you will probably go to court for saying it).

You apparently consider the saying of the words 'ass' and 'tit' to be vulgar. I don't. So what's vulgar to you is not the same as what's vulgar to me.

Do you consider someone from the KKK saying that blacks are nothing but monkeys or that hispanics are nothing but lazy, job-stealing wetbacks?* Too bad. Those comments are protected by the First Amendment.

No, I don't have kids but protecting kids from what you consider to be unsavory isn't the way to go. Exposing kids to everything allows them to become well-rounded adults who are aware of everything. It is up to you to instill upon them your own values and explain to them why you consider pornography bad. Simply saying 'Don't watch/look at that stuff. It's bad.' isn't a good enough reason for kids.

Freedom of Speech means anyone can say what they want (minus the exceptions I listed). It means the freedom to say the good, the bad and the ugly.

* The above comments are not meant to be representative of my views on the aformentioned groups. I was merely using examples to illustrate my point. Any person who was offended by my comments should feel free to find the nearest attractive person and make mad monkey-love to that person in an attempt to vent their frustrations at my comments. I take no responsibility for any unforseen outcomes of such encounters.

"Regulation" of bandwidth

[GlL]

So far it looks like the FCC's current regulation of radio frequencies is: 1) Make it impossible for small radio stations to exist on the FM band. 2) Make it easy for Mega-conglomerates to control all broadcasts on the FM band. 3) See above rules and swap FM for whatever band you are talking about. The reality is a pretty grim one. The FCC hasn't opened the small footprint radio station applications in many years, so smaller voices are not being given the opportunity to speak. I do not however think that the FCC should be shut down. The FCC needs to be about seeing that access to means of communication is not monopolized by a few commercial interests. What the FCC, and their "sponsors" don't seem to understand is that competition really is good for everybody.

This is what makes Libertarians look bad

[sheldon]

Seriously, it's a bad article that is not well thought out.

Considering if I pick up my 2.4Ghz telephone to take a call, it completely whacks out my 802.11 wireless internet signal... It doesn't seem at all clear to me that scarcity of the frequency was created by the FCC. Rather it was the FCC which was created to manage the already existing reality.

Now it's true that the FCC has gone beyond the boundaries of what otherwise rationale people would consider prudent. But that's not the focal point of this article.