They Said What?

Are They Serious?

According to Nancy Pelosi the people in this country should, and I quote, “quit your jobs to follow your dreams…and don’t worry, the government will take care of you.”

This quote competes with President Calderon of Mexico who said, “the new Arizona law will lead to racial profiling and the arrest and deportation of immigrants that have come to the U.S. from Mexico…” And in his next breath when asked by Wolf Blitzer what does Mexico do with illegal immigrants that come into their country from Central and South America he actually said, “we arrest them and either put them in jail or send them back across the border, of course.”

Who can forget Woody Allen's comment, seriously, about how President Obama should be left alone by everyone to do what he wants. Does everyone include the Congress and the Supreme Court? Perhaps Mr. Allen forgets that our government is not set up as a dictatorship?

As the government takes over more and more of private industry radio talk show host Michawl Medved asked just how efficient is government to run a business. He said, “Where do you feel you get the best service - at a Starbucks or at your local Motor Vehicle Department?”

And speaking of radio talk shows here is part two of our series on the Fairness Doctrine:

Fairness, Justice, and the Public Interest

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial…The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

What is in the public interest? This seems to be at the heart of the debate over the Fairness Doctrine. The public interest refers to the common well-being or general welfare, and is central to policy debates, politics, democracy and the nature of government itself. While nearly everyone claims that aiding the common well-being or general welfare is positive, there is little, if any, consensus on what exactly constitutes the public interest. The public interest is often contrasted with the private or individual interest, under the assumption that what is good for society may not be good for a given individual and vice versa. The Fairness Doctrine explains that the interests, or rights, of all of the people in our society should be paramount. Is it reasonable to assume you can please everyione all of the time? And what are the costs and what are the benefits to individual liberties when trying to enforce a Fairness Doctrine?

In his A Theory of Justice, John Rawls used a social contract argument to show that justice, and especially distributive justice, is a form of fairness: an impartial distribution of goods. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. In other words justice is a form of fairness which provides basic liberties to individuals.

Rawls’ principle requires stringent protections for certain specific liberties, and liberty itself is to be assured a fair value. He states, “Fairness is justice, and justice must not be stifled or rejected.”#

Can we look at justice in terms of the Fairness Doctrine? Perhaps we should call it the Equal Time Doctrine until it is proven that it is a form of fairness. In the name of fairness Louise Slaughter and others would have a scarce resource, radio bandwidth, regulated more extensively by the federal government than it currently is. The goal of these additional regulations being an equal or fair distribution of the political ideas being discussed over the airwaves. But is the movement of information in this day and age being distributed unfairly? Some might argue that the opposite is true, and information is flowing faster than any one person can keep up with. The idea behind the Fairness Doctrine is to encourage diverse programming, and airing of controversial views. At any given time an individual can tune in radio stations that provide programming of a religious nature, political editorializing, news from around the world including current events, or just music. All of these can be in English as well as foreign languages. And that is just the radio stations. There is also television, newspapers (national to the local level), the Internet, and satellite broadcasting.

Will tighter restrictions encourage a freer flow of ideas, and at what cost to individual liberty? There is disagreement from economists and political scientists over whether government intervention is actually in the public interest.

Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek said, in an interview with Thomas Hazlett of the American Enterprise Institute, in June of 1992, “…the idea that things ought to be designed in a “just” manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty.”#

Philosopher Thomas Nagel stated that, “the range of posibilities or likely courses of life that are open to a given individual are limited to a considerable extent by his birth…his genetic endowment.”# He continues, “There is nothing wrong with the State tinkering with that distribution when attempting to equalize benefits to individuals.”#

Thomas Sowell explains, in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, that the “tinkering” mentioned by Nagel in the name of social justice is actually going beyond a social justice and attempting to produce a justice for the Cosmos, which cannot be achieved. Sowell and Hayek would probably agree with critics of the Fairness Doctrine that the current evolution of individual media outlets catering to specific constituencies has already allowed the ‘invisible hand’ phenomenon to work in the marketplace of ideas, just as it does in the commercial marketplace. The following numbers illustrate just how many media organizations are currently working in North America alone:

In North America (numbers are approximations):

Daily Newspapers…..1800

Magazines….11,000

Radio Stations….11,000

Television Stations….2000

Book Publishers….2000

Looking at the past history of successes and failures of the Fairness Doctrine will help us to determine which of the competing ideas holds merit. But first it might be good to look at what is being ‘tinkered’ with.