In keeping with the federal budget theme of the past few days, Adam Thierer at the Tech Liberation Front asks a really good question: "Why Does FCC Spending Keep Growing?" He has a nice bar chart showing the FCC's budget authority 1996-2008. And then shakes his head:
Yeah! The FCC was established in 1934, an time when Americans were looking wistfully at both fascism and socialism and wondering, gee, maybe there's something to that stuff. We're smarter now—at least we'd like to think so—but the barbarous remnants of those failed ideologies continue to haunt us. (Aided, of course, by the power junkies in Congress and the Executive who can't bear the idea that they're not needed to "benevolently" run things.)