“Trump administration approves sale of CBS parent company Paramount after concessions” —NPR
If the deal struck by Paramount and President Donald Trump sickens you, your intuitions and perhaps your principles are in good working order. Make no mistake about what’s at the root of such things: ominipotent government. You need its permission for all kinds of things—so much for individual rights.
As the NPR story states, the headline termination of The Late Show (which I’ve never watched) came “amid a flurry of steps taken by Paramount and Skydance Media—which has been seeking to acquire the media conglomerate—to appease the Trump administration. On Thursday, federal regulators announced they had voted to approve the deal valued at $8 billion.” It goes on:
Paramount paid $16 million to resolve a lawsuit filed by Trump as a private individual against CBS and 60 Minutes. Skydance CEO David Ellison promised to eliminate all U.S.-based DEI programs at Paramount and to create a new ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias in news coverage. Skydance has not denied Trump’s assertions the network will run $20 million worth of public service announcements consistent with his ideological beliefs.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr cited Skydance’s promises to make “significant changes in the once storied CBS broadcast network.”
Hang on. Paramount/CBS accepted the series of conditions—which you may or may not like—demanded by the Trump administration as the price for having its sale to Skydance Media approved … by the same Trump administration. It’s the principle, not the conditions, that matters.
What’s wrong with this picture? Here’s a good first crack at the answer: that’s not capitalism, although this happened in that supposedly quintessentially capitalist country, the United States. In a market economy, two companies are free to combine if that’s what their owners want. The offensiveness of the “settlement” is even more egregious because it involves a media company—I’ve heard rumors that there’s a First Amendment in the Constitution. But does the First Amendment apply? Thanks to Herbert Hoover, who was secretary of commerce in the 1920s, the airwaves are treated as public property, that is, government property, in the United States, giving the state broad power to set terms on their use.
A good deal of activity in America requires government permission. Sometimes a government agency, perhaps with a push from the president, imposes conditions before saying yes. Sometimes it just says no. A government that has the power to approve or veto mergers and acquisitions has the power to set the terms of business. Bye-bye capitalism, freedom, and steady prosperity. (The Great Recession was partly caused by the government’s requiring banks to make mortgage loans to bad credit risks if they wanted mergers, etc., approved.) Needless to say, bureaucrats can’t know what “the market” knows because knowledge is dispersed throughout society and is often unarticulated and even inarticulable. Any system that smacks of central planning is for losers.
Donald Trump did not start this, however much he enjoys exercising the frightfully expanded powers of his office. This goes back over a century. Think of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, Radio Act of 1912, Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, Radio Act of 1927, Federal Communications Act of 1934, Banking Act of 1935, and the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938. They all interfere with business conduct, which means individual conduct. Businesses are associations of theoretically free people. I’m sure that’s not an exhaustive list. Individual states have their own regulatory agencies too. (The Civil Aerorautics Board and Interstate Commerce Commission were abolished in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, after a weird fit of deregulation that started under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Go figure.)
A society is free to the extent that one needs no meddling authority’s green light to engage in, in Leonard Read’s phrase, “anything that’s peaceful,” or in Robert Nozick’s phrase, “capitalist acts between consenting adults.” As Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute writes, “freedom means not having to ask permission.” Contrast that with totalitarian states, such as National Socialist Germany and the Bolsheviks’ international socialist Soviet Union. There, the rule was, more or less, that which is not prohibited is required. As F. A. Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, in those states, one was not even free to decide how to spend one’s “free time.”
By the rights-not-permissions standard, America fails to live up to its reputation as a free country. Of course, this can be exaggerated. Freedom has not (yet?) been abolished, which is why we are still wealthy and getting wealthier. Persevering, enterprising people work around political obstacles, and in a traditionally private-property system, the state can’t keep tabs on everything. God bless the loopholes! Less-than-full capitalism goes a long way, but not far enough.
Still, freedom has been eroding from the high, however imperfect, level it had reached in late 19th-century America. The erosion, alas, has not ceased, despite some setbacks. Rule by permission rather than by right obviously suits The Maestro, The Sun King, that is, the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If you doubt that those titles fit the man, check out his latest trade deals with South Korea and Japan, according to which those countries will reportedly invest billions of dollars in the United States in ways directed by Donald Trump. (That’s what he says anyway; the foreign governments aren’t quite so sure.) One commentator dubbed this “Republican socialism” in contrast to Democratic socialism. Well put.
Sandefur asks:
So how have we come to the point where today you need to get the government’s permission for a wide variety of the things that you spend your daily life doing? You need a permit to build a house, own a gun, get a job, to buy some things, run businesses, pay your employees—even freedom of speech now often comes with some sort of permit requirement. We have colleges and political conventions setting up “free speech zones,” which are basically cages where you’re allowed to express your opinion.
And let’s not forget mergers and acquisitions. “The most offensive part of the permission system, across the board, is how it deters innovation,” Sandefur writes. That’s what bureaucracies do. (See his book The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It. Also, The Institute for Justice, heroically, has been devoted to helping ordinary people challenge the “permission society” in the courts.)
The socialists of all parties will defend such government power on the grounds that people should have a say in everything that affects them. That may sound good on first hearing, but a moment’s scrutiny exposes it as a recipe for total state control. What does “affect” mean? Should you have a say in which religious institution, if any, your neighbors attend? Should you have a say in what restaurant opens down the street? Should you have a say in the wage contract your business-owning neighbor offers prospective employees? These things may “affect” you.
The principle that all should have a say in whatever affects them, of course, usually means that democratic, representative government should oversee those peaceful activities. But in reality, that “power” is a joke. One vote is a drop in the ocean. The idea that you have a real say by voting periodically for politicians is a delusion. Beware “democratic socialists.” They are hawking snake oil.
There is, however, one sense in which you do have a say in what affects you. In the free market you control your spending. If you don’t like a product or a company, you can do business with someone else. Hence, through your buying and abstention, you and your fellow consumers determine who controls scarce resources for the production of consumer and producer goods. That’s real control. It puts democratic power to shame, and it is exactly the sort of control that the socialists of all parties despise.
