Abolish the FCC

LET THE INVISIBLE HAND REGULATE THE INVISIBLE RESOURCE.

- THOMAS W. HAZLETT

ON FEBRUARY 23, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge on the advice of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, America's first regulator of radio-signed the Radio Act. In policy folklore, this law salvaged the rational use of frequencies according to "public interest, convenience or necessity."

As the U.S. Supreme Court later summarized it: "Before 1927, the allocation of frequencies was left entirely to the private sector, and the result was chaos. It quickly became apparent that...without government control, the medium would be of little use because of the cacaphony [sic] of competing voices." Misspelling cacophony was not the only grievous error in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969). 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 (DWash.), 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." Not due to "chaos," but due to "orderly development." The aim was to keep authority centralized and political, sidestepping the free speech protections of the First Amendment.