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 had a nice bar chart [back then] showing
the FCC's budget authority 1996-2008. And then shakes his head:
Seriously, I just don't get it. Why does the FCC's budget keep growing
without constraint? Why does it need $313 million and nearly 2,000
bureaucrats to regulate industries and technologies that could do just
fine, thank you very much, without endless meddling from DC. It seems to
me like all those unregulated rivals are doing just fine without the FCC
serving as market nanny, so why not cut the flow of funds to the FCC for
awhile and see what happens?
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.)
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