Thread by @RonColeman

There's all kinds of regulation over commerce, and most of us conservatives are familiar with and can readily cite examples of where it has failed or even produced exactly the opposite result of what was purported to be intended, or worse. >

> OTOH we take a lot of regulation that almost certainly does increase welfare, arguably at a trivial cost in terms of economic liberty, for granted. You don't want to think of what you'd be eating every day if not for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, for example. >

> I'm sure there are papers that negate that assertion but go with me on this for purposes of this thread.

One area in which our government has treaded relatively lightly in regulation might seem to be expression and communication, because of the First Amendment.

Wrong! >

> This perception is incorrect. In fact for two centuries no one dreamt that the First Amendment prevented the government (let's abstract from the 14th Amendment here) from regulating a wide range of speech, especially obscenity. >

> Today there is essentially no "obscenity" in the law, but not so long ago fishing racey material out of the mail to prevent its distribution was the job of the US Post Office.

Such regulation is impossible now because there is no cultural consensus of what is indecent. >

> So how about regulating Twitter, Google and Facebook? Could the government do it to restore a semblance of accountability to public discourse?

Not in the traditional regulatory sense, no.

Let's consider the Federal Communications Act. >

> The FCC was founded on a silly fiction: That the broadcast spectrum, which was beginning to be exploited by radio, was a "finite resource" that only government could fairly allocate and manage.

The heart of this fiction was the premise of "scarcity." >

> That subject has been explored at length by economists and I'm not going to even going to try to summarize the work of Coase et al. here.

Notwithstanding this rationale, the FCC regulated *content* on the radio and TV for generations.

What was the effect? More later. >

> Obviously the FCC had a role in keeping US culture "decent" via its relatively soft regulation of content through most of the 20th century. The advent of increasingly affordable channels for distribution of entertainment content however rendered that endeavor obsolete. >

> But far more significantly, the FCC'S role in preventing true competition in broadcasting contributing to the emergence of the TV networks during the Golden Era of TV reinforced the overall consolidation in media that was well under way. >

> Newspapers, in fact, had in theory been subject to antitrust laws until 1970, when under the guise of concern for editorial diversity as consolidation's efficiencies took their toll, newspaper cartels were essentially legalized via a legislative antitrust exemption. >

> In both broadcasting and print media, the maintenance and growth of government-sanctioned concentration of ownership effectively homogenized cultural standards. Cultural conservatives, however, wisely did not rejoice, for a few reasons. >

> Unless under draconian censorship, all cultural expression - all art, all literature, even #journalism - has elements of subversion. Stalin micromanaged Soviet culture to meet the ends of the regime. There is no innocent humor, and every star is competition for the leader. >

> Over time even regulated broadcast content failed to maintain traditional middle class mores. Elvis and the Beatles got onto Ed Sullivan. Clever writers and "hosts" learned how to slolom around network "Standards" departments. And the need for new material pressed boundaries.>

> Meanwhile there was inevitable cultural leakage into broadcasting from other cultural sources. Hollywood, never under the FCC's jurisdiction, threw off the antique Hayes Office standards in favor of a voluntary movie rating system. >

> All this time, however, the official imprimatur of the state - FCC content regulation - remained (and remains) on broadcasted content. The result: endorsement by the supposed guardians of morality of both accelerating moral decay and a literal code of political correctness. >

> FCC content regulation thus approaches the situation posited by Justice Alito in Matal that if we deem an agency's "imprimatur" on content as government speech, surely the government is "babbling prodigiously and incoherently."

On TV and radio, it is. And it doesn't work. >

> Official content regulation - whether called "fairness" or a prohibition on "disparagement" - thus not only actively suppresses expression. It inappropriately establishes a canon of correct opinion and discourse that undermines freed thought and culture themselves.>

> This process is well under way in miniature in the universities, where the purported abandonment of in-loco-parentis responsibility for young minds and morals has come full circle, locking every student into a pricey Skinner Box of acceptable conduct and expression.>

> The result is not only a rigid campus regime of Right Think restricting academic and social interaction. This narrowing of mind has also enfeebled the academic enterprise itself to such a degree that scholarship outside STEM disciplines is widely seen as worthless. >

> Top-down content regulation - or even content endorsement - thus kills not only "culture" as we think of the term, meaning enrichment of human life through the arts - but the underlying culture of inquiry and achievement that is meant to be the purpose of the academy. >

> Free market advocates are often skeptical of another kind of regulation alluded to earlier in this thread: what we broadly call antitrust law. This 1982 article (excerpt below) encapsulates the argument well: cei.org/content/why-no… >

Far be it from me to endorse the way the Europeans do almost anything, but for better or worse they're not impressed with these arguments: reuters.com/article/us-eu-…