Recently by Gary North: Snowden, Spies, and Network (1976)
In 1945, economist F. A. Hayek wrote what turned out to be a classic paper on how decentralized knowledge is made available to the public by means of the free market.
He argued that most knowledge is decentralized, and the free market allows people who own such knowledge to reap profits from this ownership. There is no way that any government committee can assemble accurate comparable knowledge, and then implement this information, with anything like the efficiency of the free market system. This article is reprinted in Chapter 4 of his 1948 book, Individualism and Economic Order. You can read it on the website of the Mises Institute. Click here.
What Hayek wrote about economic information is equally applicable to information in general. Accurate information is held by individuals at the local level. It is highly decentralized. There is no way that any central bureaucracy, or group of bureaucracies, can assemble more than a tiny fraction of this information.
Fast forward to 2013. Scott Pelley, CBS News anchor, said this:
“The country is only as strong as its journalism – that’s the way democracies work. The higher the quality of the information, the better informed the electorate is and the better the government runs. And the American people can always be trusted with the information.”
Mr. Pelley is a representative of broadcast journalism. He therefore is a representative of the federal government.
GOVERNMENT-LICENSED JOURNALISM
From 1928 until the present, the federal government has regulated the creation of over-the-air radio stations and television stations. Historians generally date the first commercial radio broadcast in the United States with the 1920 broadcast by Pittsburgh radio station KDKA of the results of the presidential election. The multiplication of radio stations led to overlapping broadcasts, due to the limitations of radio spectrum. The federal government intervened in 1927 by passing the Radio Act, and a regulatory system was set up in 1928. From that time on, the federal government has controlled the number of radio licenses, and it has used politically progressive standards to allocate the increasingly valuable spectrum.
Broadcasting over the airwaves has therefore been a government-approved function since 1928. There is no question that politics was decisive in deciding who was going to get access to this extraordinarily valuable radio spectrum. This was how Lyndon Johnson accumulated his initial fortune. It began in 1943, when the FCC was about to be abolished. Congressman Lyndon Johnson intervened. He saved it from extinction. Almost immediately, his wife was granted a broadcasting license. This story is revealed in Robert Caro’s biography of Johnson.
Once Lady Bird completed her purchase of KTBC, the “five years of delays and red tape, or delays and unfavorable rules” from the FCC that had stymied the previous owners “vanished … and slowness was replaced by speed,” according to Caro. In short order she got permission to broadcast 24 hours a day (KTBC had been a sunrise-to-sunset station) and move it to 590 on the dial – “an uncluttered, end of the dial” where it could be heard in 38 surrounding Texas counties. It was no coincidence. Lyndon and Lady Bird recruited a new station manager, promising 10 percent of the profits, and Lyndon told him that the changes in the license restrictions that would make KTBC a moneymaker were “all set.” In 1945, the FCC OK’d KTBC’s request to quintuple its power, which cast its signal over 63 counties.
When Lyndon visited William S. Paley, president of CBS radio, and asked if KTBC could become a CBS affiliate and carry its lucrative programming, he didn’t have to spell out why the request should be granted. The radio networks feared the regulators in Washington as well as the members of Congress who regulated the regulators. KNOW in Austin had been repeatedly denied the affiliation because a San Antonio “affiliate could be heard in Austin.” CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton approved Johnson’s request.
When Lady Bird died, none of the hagiographic obituaries mentioned this blatant payoff. It made her a millionaire. This background is found in an article in Slate. The monopoly extended to television in the 1950s. Wikipedia reports:
KTBC signed on the air on November 27, 1952, becoming the first television station in Austin and Central Texas. It was originally owned by the Texas Broadcasting Company (from whom the call letters are taken) which was in turn owned by then-Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird, alongside KTBC radio (AM 590, now KLBJ-AM) and FM 93.7, now KLBJ-FM). It carried all four major networks at the time: ABC, CBS, NBC and the now-defunct DuMont Television Network.
The Good Old Boys at the local level got the monopolies from the Old Boy Network in Washington.
June 19, 2013
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2013 Gary North
