Dr. North Slips Up

I read Dr. North assiduously, but he makes an important mistake in his most recent posting on LRC.  He advocates the FCC auction off the subsidized, set-aside radio spectrum that benefits "public" radio.

We all want to end the hated subsidies and set-asides, but here is the problem, in two parts - A.  the government does not own radio waves, in any form, by any definition. B. Radio is an invention, controlling it arrests it.

Radio waves occur naturally, and so when you are between stations or out of range you get static, natural radio waves.  Marconi and others discovered sound could be recorded, transmitted and sent to receivers (radios).  That is an invention.

Around the 1900s a theory emerged that said there was such things as natural monopoly, for such things as roads, telephones and radio.  Therefore, the government should step in and control these things.  But they would say that, wouldn't they?

About 1980, the scales fell from the eyes, and we had the unimagined wonders of the internet when telephones were deregulated, just lightly.  Imagine what we would get with full deregulation!

The internet is an example of unseen goods and services that emerge in freedom, and deregulation is a return to freedom.

As to radio, it is an invention.  100 years ago the invention was in a stone age form.  The government locked down the invention.  So entire swathes of band are allocated to one owner.  This is madness.

Think of a sine wave of a radio frequency, with its up and down pattern.  There is no reason why radios cannot be designed to separate out the wave upswing with the wave downswing for reception of signal, and then build the reception with that half of the wave.  It would be a mere improvement on what we have now.  It is in fact exactly how your computer works.  And email is broken into many packets as it goes out, and on the other end a computer reassembles the parts into a coherent message.

Now, if you can wrap your brain around cutting a bandwave in two, then you can see how where we allocate certain bandwith to one radio station now, we can split it in two so we can serve two radio stations. Call it AM 1000 a and AM 1000 b.  Same bandwidth, just double the capacity.  Old radios might no longer work (or someone would come up with an adapter) but we have plenty of old computers that do not work either, because they cannot handle the internet, a new invention.

Once you understand we can cut bandwidth in two, then you see we can cut that in two also. So, one channel, two channels, four channels, eight channels, 16 channels, 32 channels... on to infinity, for that one dedicated channel of bandwidth.  That is to say, radio is an infinite resource, limited only by mans desire to exploit.  The price of something with infinite supply is very cheap.

But it is the nature of the people who tend toward government to create artificial shortages in order to constrain and control other people.  So when you turn on your radio, you are locked into 100 year old technology.

Eliminate the FCC.  Abandon radio to the free market.  The participants will meet and confer and the most generous and creative will overcome the dour and censorious.  We see it whenever it is allowed to occur.  Jut look at the internet.

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