Happy Monday everyone! As usual, Monday’s post is by Stephen Hall. Thank you Stephen!
John Locke was of the opinion that in order to communicate and truly discuss anything, people needed a common definition of the words that they were using so that there would be clearer understanding promoting honest debate and the foundation of agreement.
Recently, the word license has come up in the news in the context of a “tweet” involving the nation’s president and a broadcast media corporation. There have been numerous comments and derision upon the notion that such a license might be revoked or not renewed for ostensibly partisan motives.
Many people are of the opinion that to revoke a company’s license to broadcast is a violation of the corporation’s 1st Amendment Rights under the Freedom of the Press. This results largely from the common perception that the threatened revocation was a political move, though I’m certain the administration would characterize it as based upon the promotion of falsehoods and fraud.
Oddly enough, the greatest decriers of this concept are leftists who hypocritically proclaim that a Supreme Court case, Citizens United, was on the verge of treasonous for declaring that corporations actually had Constitutional 1st Amendment Rights in the first place.
So it behooves us to understand just what is at stake and the subject of such conjecture and debate within our nation, even if the idea does not appear to be going anywhere and is most likely nothing but a red herring, some red meat to keep the curs occupied and distracted.
License: 1. permission to act or 2. a permission granted by competent authority to engage in a business or occupation or in an activity otherwise unlawful. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/license ; This is the commonly, nearly universally accepted, definition of a license, with but minor variations in the wording of the definitions.
So what happens when the common, universally accepted definition of a very common word is completely and totally wrong?
Socrates was of the perspective that the purpose of defining words was to seek a perfect understanding of the nature of the thing itself, not merely to agree upon a basis for communicating. It is one of the very few distinctions between the philosophy of John Locke and Socrates.
In my home state of West Virginia there are about thirty different state licensing boards governing the issuance, qualifications, and maintenance of just professional licenses including doctors, lawyers, barbers, accountants, et alia. Though, to be fair the legislature is looking at simplifying this bureaucratic morass.
What it is to practice law without a license? To engage in the practice of medicine without a medical license? The state will tell you that the purpose of a professional license is to protect the public by making sure that people practicing in the field are at least minimally competent.
To engage in certain activities without a license is a criminal act.
The true nature of the word “license” is not permission by the state for that licensee to engage in activity, but rather it is a prohibition of everyone else to not engage in that activity. A license is an exception to the rule that an activity is otherwise prohibited.
The basic philosophical foundation of English common law gets first codified in the Magna Carta, and the beginnings of what came to be called “The Rule of Law” can be seen in that document, that no man is above the law and no man is below the law. The King himself was subject to the laws of the land.
So, just who gave permission to the state to prohibit the very activities of society from the general populace of that society in the first place? Imagine for just a moment, in the abstract, the absence of such license but the placement of such prohibition.
Medicine and surgery are outlawed, commerce in services such as accounting are prohibited, legal representation and advice are forbidden, et cetera. Entire fields of endeavor are eliminated from society, only performed by criminals.
Oddly, we do not need to imagine too hard, it is the essence of certain sexual services for hire which are strictly outlawed without a special license given for sex workers. (Unless one were perversely to view the marriage license as such an exception to the general prohibition of the trade in sexuality.)
The state has assumed authority not over the practice of such endeavors, but the trade in such activities on the commercial level. Those activities are not actually prohibited as a favor or barter between individuals. If you cut a friend’s hair, or fix their car, such activities are not regulated. One would presume it is beyond the very power of the state to prohibit a friend from advising you on your health or even legal matters.
It was the practitioners of those commercial activities who actually sought the government’s intervention in the concept of licensing to prohibit competitors from bringing down their profits by challenging the exclusivity of their profession.
Every professional license is really a state enforced union shop where not only is there a threat of a general strike of people refusing to do the work if scabs are employed, but a state enforced union shop where such scabs are sentenced to prison for daring to defy the union.
So, about these media broadcast licensing, they are not professional licensing, but how similar are they to the concepts and dynamics of licensing just mentioned?
To understand that let us go back to the early days of the Marconi. (The Marconi, for you youngsters out there too youthful to remember, was the original name for what would commonly come to be known as the “radio”.) This is the setting of the stage for broadcast licensing.
When Marconi invented the “wireless” to compete with the monopoly of the telegraph, the trans-Atlantic telegraph in particular, on the preposterous theory that certain frequency energy waves would bounce and reflect off of the ionosphere thus did not require a direct linear connection which would be impossible on an oblique spheroid such as the Earth was known to be.
Of course, his theories were known to be ludicrous as the science of electromagnetic wave propagation was well settled science and such waves could not be reflected, so there was no way to communicate outside of a direct line of sight. He was wasting a fortune of his own money trying to prove the settled science wrong. And prove them wrong he did.
It took people formerly working for his company, backed by financial opportunists, speculating on the viability of these “air waves” to conceive of the idea that rather than a series of personal private communications as the telegraph company had shown profitable, money could be made not by selling the communication itself but by selling advertisements on broadcasts to large masses of people of an entertainment product dispensed for free.
Fearing that just about anybody with a modicum of finances or technical ability (remember this was a time when those non-publicly educated youngsters would string together parts purchased in the store and build their own radios.) could set up a broadcast to compete with their new endeavors, thus undermining their potential profits, the new “radio” broadcasters lobbied the government to make the electromagnetic spectrums “public property”.
Having declared a natural phenomena, a force of nature, certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic specrum, to be owned by the state, the state then issued their petitioners the exclusive licenses, or rather prohibited those not so permitted, to broadcast on certain regulated bands of wavelengths as certain signal strengths.
The rationale for this government seizure and declaration of the common, collective, socialistic ownership of this suddenly useful property was that the free market could not regulate itself and somehow people would undercut each other by building too many broadcast stations in either a destructive chaos or a monopoly domination of wealthy broadcasters.
So, the networks were created to protect our capitalist society from the evils of capitalistic competition, first in radio then later in television. The oligopoly of networks was created to “protect” us from the hypothetical monopoly which might have existed but for their protective cabal of media moguls.
It is not an accident that the media is dominated by socialistic entities and transmitted from the most far left cities in the nation, it is by design because the licensing structure supporting it could support no other outcome.
So when a president threatens the license of one of the oligarches, I do understand the threat to the liberties of Freedom of the Press, but I also recognize that such freedom was abandoned from the inception of the Marconi.
