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Radio Spectrum and Property Rights with Thomas Hazlett

Today’s guest is Thomas Hazlett, former chief economist of the FCC and author of The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. Perceptive listeners may recall that Ed Lopez mentioned Hazlett’s work in our interview on political change.

Hazlett’s work concerns the legal institutions surrounding the radio spectrum.

Popular legend has it that before the Federal Radio Commission was established in 1927, the radio spectrum was in chaos, with broadcasting stations blasting powerful signals to drown out rivals. In this fascinating and entertaining history, Thomas Winslow Hazlett, a distinguished scholar in law and economics, debunks the idea that the U.S. government stepped in to impose necessary order. Instead, regulators blocked competition at the behest of incumbent interests and, for nearly a century, have suppressed innovation while quashing out-of-the-mainstream viewpoints.

Hazlett details how spectrum officials produced a “vast wasteland” that they publicly criticized but privately protected. The story twists and turns, as farsighted visionaries—and the march of science—rise to challenge the old regime. Over decades, reforms to liberate the radio spectrum have generated explosive progress, ushering in the “smartphone revolution,” ubiquitous social media, and the amazing wireless world now emerging. Still, the author argues, the battle is not even half won.

 

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The Poverty of Slavery with Robert Wright

Today’s guest is Robert Wright, author of The Poverty of Slavery. The New York Times’ 1619 Project has prompted renewed discussions on slavery and the New History of Capitalism literature. This episode is the first in a series addressing these topics. We discuss the prevalence of slavery in the developing world today, the arguments for and against reparations, and the rent-seeking behaviour of slaveowners in the Antebellum South.

This ground-breaking book adds an economic angle to a traditionally moral argument, demonstrating that slavery has never promoted economic growth or development, neither today nor in the past. While unfree labor may be lucrative for slaveholders, its negative effects on a country’s economy, much like pollution, drag down all members of society. Tracing the history of slavery around the world, from prehistory through the US Antebellum South to the present day, Wright illustrates how slaveholders burden communities and governments with the task of maintaining the system while preventing productive individuals from participating in the economy.

Historians, economists, policymakers, and anti-slavery activists need no longer apologize for opposing the dubious benefits of unfree labor. Wright provides a valuable resource for exposing the hidden price tag of slaving to help them pitch antislavery policies as matters of both human rights and economic well-being.

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Against Moral Stains

Have you ever been in a policy discussion and had a conservative bring up the fact that Nazis were socialists?

“‘National Socialism,’ it’s right there in the name!”

This is, at its heart, an attempt to poison the well against the concept of socialism. Since “socialism” has come to encompass everything from full public ownership of the means of production to the most milquetoast left-wing policies, this can be deployed as a general argument against all things left-of-center. The argument is that this broad and vague concept of “socialism” has been stained by the moral transgressions of the Nazis, and that stain extends to and pollutes everything associated with socialism.

I can see why this argument has rhetorical power. It gets to something deep in human psychology: the idea that something can be dirty, impure, or polluted by a moral transgression. Something as deeply immoral as the holocaust is so abhorent that anything it touches, however indirectly, is infected as if by a contagious disease. When someone tries to weaponize this moral pollution against people or concepts they don’t like, I call it a “moral stain argument.” (more…)

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