From time to time (on this blog and in other places) I call for the abolition of the BBC. Often, someone smug and patronising in the comments will say something along the lines of “Only you heartless and uncultured libertarians would fail to realise that there are some worthwhile/needed/educational programs that will not be produced by the market.
My usual response to this is that we will never know, because the market has never been allowed to demonstrate what it might produce. I have written before about the weird history of British television and how owners of private television channels had little if any control of their own programming. But in some ways radio is even weirder. For one thing, there were no privately owned and/or commercially funded radio stations in the UK before 1973. There are many today, and some might argue that this proves some sort of market exists, but this is still a weird, weird world.
For instance, the highly self-important telecommunications regulator Ofcom, which helpfully “exists to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age”, made a particularly delightful ruling.
Ofcom staff listened to Bristol radio station GWR FM, and determined that 53% of the music it played was more than two years old. As a consequence, they threatened to take away the station’s licence and force it off the air. This is a commercial, privately owned radio station.
Really.
there were no privately owned and/or commercially funded radio stations in the UK before 1973
Well there were Caroline, London, City…
Remember the Pirates?
I surely do.
As a slight aside, how would a libertarian vision of radio work practically? I don’t mind the current transmission system as my (admittedly woefully incompetent) representatives are keeping an eye on it. But if it’s a purely private system I don’t want the radio waves passing through my provate property. What would be the resolution to such a situation?
Paul, you could construct a Faraday cage around your property. How you arranged for permitted radio waves to enter would be an exercise for the reader, however.
Paul, you’d already have radio waves from emergency services, military, TV, mobile phones, air traffic, marine, 2 way private, CB, hams, radars, satellites and even emissions from pulsars in deep space.
How one would make a case in a libertarian world for keeping out radio bands on the grounds that the stations were private as opposed to state controlled would be difficult to imagine.
Also, no coercion has been initiated, and no damage, physical or economic, has been caused. You would have to demonstrate that radio band electromagnetic radiation causes damage in some way.
Objections to infrastructure provided for the community is usually dealt with in a libertarian world by compensation – roads, airports etc. Which is interesting since such construction might well be more difficult in a libertarian society than in our own, as beyond a certain cost such projects might not be economically feasible.
Everyone would need to have insurance for this, and the insurers would probably negotiate their clients’ compensation. In the case of radio waves, no compensation would enable you to sell your house and move since near enough all areas are covered with radio waves. I would imagine that insurers would decline to intervene. It’s worth noting that if any grounds were found for any ill effects from radio waves, public and private bands would be equally concerned. In what way do you expect your representatives to “keep an eye” on things? If you are talking about content, then you can always turn your radio off or switch to a state controled station. It would be a free world.
RAB, the operative phrase is “in the UK”. Caroline was on a ship in the North Sea, outside the then, 3 mile limit, as I believe it was at the time.
There is a movie out now about Radio Caroline. There was an old lighthouse vessel off the Suffolk/Essex coast. DJs like the late, much missed Kenny Everett (“hullo darlings!”), Alan Freeman and all those others started out their careers on the Caroline station.
And nearby, on an old flak tower, there is Prince Roy of Sealand in his private nation. The idea has been seized upon by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman).
Michael is right that the sheer profusion of private radio stations and specialist channels does rather bugger the contention that if we scrap the BBC, it is the end of civilisation as we know it.
As a halfway house, public service broadcasting could be put out to tender- lowest price wins- but with say three licences so no one organisation had a monopoly on the provision of information. Re-tendering could be on the basis of audience share and contract compliance (i.e. the least popular station or the one with worst contract compliance every year has to re-bid). Not much need to regulate adherence to the contract (pretty well the same as the current BBC charter) as anyone falling out of line would be picked up by the others.
Of course that implies accepting that the public are capable of judging quality (and the truth) for themselves, without the great and the good telling them- so it’ll never happen
Worse still is that a quick scan of the ‘comments’ following the Register’s story reveals only a puerile debate over whether recent music is ‘any good.’ Lost in the debate is the utter foolishness of taxpayer money being spent to ‘regulate’ what a private citizen can hear on a private station. Sheep to the (Government) slaughter, no?
The best argument for the abolition of the licence fee is the BBC’s output. Why does guaranteed funding of billions per year result in a TV shedule rich in quizzes, so-called lifestyle programmes, soap operas and run of the mill doctor/nurse and cops/robbers dramas, and a radio schedule dominated by pop music?
The licence fee has failed. A small output of good quality BBC programming can’t hide that fact.
The licence fee is like spending £140 in a bookshop and being forced to buy £125 worth of Mills and Boon novels, airport blockbusters and footballers ghosted autobiographies before being allowed to spend £15 on good quality literature.
Come now, it has been well established by the example of Hillary Care & Massachusetts Cumpulsary Medical insurance; plus numerous examples in the U.K.:
Some pigs know better than other pigs.
Though, of course, those pigs who (think they) do, alaways tell the other pigs that all pigs are equal.
They just ride in different aircraft.
Having been stationed in Suffolk in the USAF at RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge 68-71 I well remember not only radio Caroline, but the Dutch Radio Veronica as well. I proved all those old stories about learning foreign languages in your sleep correct as, evidently from hours spent in a semi-sleep state late at night listening to Veronica and it’s Dutch language DJs, years later my new bride would complain I would talk/mumble in my sleep in Dutch! LOL! (Must have been the Dutch -German DNA speaking as my Mother’s maternal grandfather was a Glick)
If this had happened in any other country, the cynical among us might have entertained the suspicion that the good burghers of GWR FM hadn’t paid the Ofcom boys the regular ‘commission’ and were getting the old “Nice radio station you’ve got here sunshine. Shame if anything were to happen to it” treatment.
Sadly, I reckon there’s a good chance that some officious, obsessive compulsive busybody really did find some regulation somewhere and chose to enforce it.
Paul … usual and customary intrusions are allowed.
No jury will convict a man of trespass of sound waves because you could hear him talking to a friend out on the street.
You don’t get to sue your neighbor for having a porchlight, and spewing photons on your house ( Note to astronomers … got a prob with light pollution? Pay for some covenants. ).
However, a sonic cannon, or a giga-joule laser, or an aircraft radar emitter rigged up into a maser using a wave guide, and pointed at your house, and causing real damage, would be trespass.
Pointing deathrays at people ain’t usual or customary.
So, no, you don’t get to sue some person because his cellphone signal happened to impinge on your home’s siding.
There is a different issue regarding interference … who gets to use a given frequency and for what. This was being handled using homesteading common law, up until the US gov decided to inflict the FRC on us Yanks.
Kristopher – I wasn’t looking to sue anyone, don’t worry, I’m just curious to understand how a libertarian solution might work. Assume, then, that I rig up a transmitter broadcasting static on the same frequency as your radio station, in the same community – what would be the resolution there, or would it just be left to the person who could buy the biggest transmitter?
Now you get into the area of property rights, which is another whole can of worms.
In a libertarian society, radio bandwidths would be traded and valued as property rights – the idea of government elbowing its way into the regulation of ownership of the ether being an anathema.
So you – or more likely your insurance company – would find yourself on the end of what could be quite a hefty litigation, that the radio company’s insurer would have you in one way or another potentially paying off for the rest of your life.
You would have initiated a coercive act upon the station, and an independant professional expert witness would be called by the private court system (no crime can be committed against the state, all acts are judged to be against the victims or the victims’ next of kin in such a society), together with the two insurers, to estimate objectively the size of the claim for which you would be liable.
The damages to the station would be paid by the insurers in the same way as would happen with a car accident today. What the consequences would be concerning yourself and your insurer can only be guessed at since we have no experience of such a society (until the revolution comes).
The worst that could happen, possibly, is that you would be blacklisted by all insurers, thereby being unlikely to be able to insure against coercive acts against yourself in the future. More worrying than a short gaol term, no?
Thank you!
This is technically incorrect, as all crimes are “against the peace and dignity of the state”, with the victim being merely the “complaining witness”; we’ve had this discussion before. In the example being addressed by TomC, what has occurred is a tort, a properly actionable private civil matter, compensable by money damages at law and subject to injunction in equity. He is correct that it is a “property rights” issue. Ownership of that particular band of the spectrum has been leased to the radio station, which owns exclusive rights to it for a specified period of time within a defined geographic area. In a properly libertarian society that frequency would have been sold outright (or simply “homesteaded” once upon a time), and thus be freely transferrable, but even under the current regime the station has a property right in the leasehold.
Laird, re crime against state/individual: you are describing the reality as it is now, I believe that Tom was describing things as he (and I) would like to see them in anideal libertarian state. And yes, we had this discussion before, hence the “thank you!”:-)
I’m a little confused – who did the radio station buy the slice of the spectrum from in the first place? It can’t be the government, as it’s abundantly clear that they don’t own electromagnetism. I could conceivably own that part of it that is passing over my property at any time (hence my original question, in part), but I don’t find that particularly convincing. It seems that spectrum is rather like air, which I need have no license or contract to consume or in most cases to emit into.
Given, then, that they have no more right to 97.9FM than I do, it still seems to be a battle of megawatts, which seems most unsatisfactory.
Obviously, it bought (actually, leased) the spectrum slice from the government. The government claims to be the aboriginal owner of all land and attributes within the country. That’s why homesteading is only permitted (or recognized as valid) when a law authorizes it. That’s why the government gets away with issuing fishing and hunting licenses, etc. Trace back the chain of title to any parcel of land and it ultimately ends with the government (the “patent” in much of the eastern US, which is the original land grant from the King of England). True, the government doesn’t own “electromagentism” per se, but since there is a limited amount of usable bandwidth it claims ownership of that, ostensibly in the “public interest”. That’s reality, and it makes no sense to pretend otherwise.
i think the coasian analysis is best. property rights should be initially distributed to minimize transaction costs. i think it would best to give the rights to broadcast to those that starting broadcasting first or have the government auction them off or give them away in a lottery. splitting them up and giving them to real property owners would be the worst option.
It is often forgotten (not by the writer of this post, but by many other people) that the “private” radio and television stations of Britain tend to be just as bad as the B.B.C.
Both in their news coverage, in the coverage of current affairs – and in their general cultural attitudes.
For example, even on a music station like “Classic F.M.” the spaces between the music are full of leftist slanted news broadcasts, plugs for leftist films (by the staff, not as ads) and so on.
This is only partly because most ads in Britain seem to come from government and government controlled entities – it is also because the “private” stations are not really independent at all.
This is the future the left have in mind for talk radio in the United States.
When the revolution comes, all government property is up for grabs. This is because it only holds such property by means of its “monopoly on coercion”.
In the resulting power vaccuum, property goes from belonging to the “collective” – which is an anathema, since there is no such thing outside of the pretend world of government – to the property of the first person or persons who can demonstrate ownership by “mixing their labour” with it. I take it that this is the equivalent of the American term “homesteading”.
In other words if you want to claim your local town hall, you have to be the first one to change the locks, give the place a coat of paint and maybe start the process of renting it out, keeping your invoices to prove your case if necessary to a local private arbitration service when it is eventually set up as a replacement to government courts, should someone else stake their claim.
To claim a radio bandwidth, you’d probably have to invest in (or expropriate unowned i.e. government) equipment and resources, and have made at least one broadcast on that band which would demonstrably have been recorded and witnessed by public listeners.
Thank you for the “thank you”, Alisa. I appreciate that some subjects may have been covered previously, and I apologise, for I am relatively new here. And yes, I am talking about a possible future theoretical libertarian society.
Tom, it was a real thank you for echoing the sentiments I expressed on that earlier thread. And I am glad you are here: you make a lot of sense.
Alisa, in my last post I got caught up in my response to Paul’s question/comment, and forgot to include an apology to you. I had not understood that your brief “thank you note” (or TomC’s earlier post to which it related) were speaking to a hypothetical future “libertopia”.
No problem Laird:-)
In other words if you want to claim your local town hall, you have to be the first one to change the locks, give the place a coat of paint and maybe start the process of renting it out, keeping your invoices to prove your case if necessary to a local private arbitration service when it is eventually set up as a replacement to government courts, should someone else stake their claim.
When I read such stuff I am put in mind of these people. Though if they they are a bit too much like hard-headed political realists, you could try this chap, who used to have quite a following:
TomC – Why does property go to the first person who can demonstrate ownership, particularly for something that cannot be ‘owned’? It would seem a better idea for the person who could make the best use of it, as determined by the market, to have nominal owndership of it until such time as another could demonstrate better use.
I should add that I’m not trying to be argumentative here. I understand (roughly) the basic principles of libertarianism, but understanding the application in a specific situation is most instructive.