by Seton Motley We can almost always count on the Left’s knee-jerk, snap objection to almost anything that takes place in the free market.
Almost anytime any two or more private individuals or the companies they represent reach a mutually acceptable agreement – or when it comes to virtually any opportunity to engage in unfettered free market practices – you can invariably count on a Leftist gaggle rushing to decry, despoil and oppose.
Let us look at but a couple of recent examples.
The Leftists opposed the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. And the Barack Obama Administration-Eric Holder Justice Department sued to block it. After enduring a year-plus beating, AT&T withdrew its application. The free market agreement was blocked by the anti-free market forces.
The Leftists opposed the Comcast-NBCU merger. And the Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved it only after jamming it with pages and pages of anti-free market and illegal mandates – including seven years of conscripted Network Neutrality – that the Commission had (and has) zero authority to impose.
The Leftists just recently opposed an unfettered free market auction of spectrum – the airwaves we need for everything wireless. They wanted to again have the Obama FCC gum it up with all sorts of Big Government, unlawful diktats. Thankfully, the Congressional law creating the auction parameters largely proscribed the Commission from so doing (though the possibility for Net Neutrality imposition still exists).
You will note that the best opportunities the Left has to damage via the government the free market is in the Internet and Communications sector. For it is this free market sector over which the government most loomingly lords.
The government holds far less power to block or impede a Wal-Mart-K-Mart merger than they do an AT&T-T-Mobile merger. A dichotomy that must be resolved – to bring the Internet and Communications sector into more-free market line with the rest of the private sector.
Which brings us to Verizon’s pending $3.6 billion spectrum purchase.
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This is simply a free market transaction between a willing seller and a willing buyer.
Verizon is looking to purchase said spectrum from SpectrumCo – a cable consortium consisting of Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Bright House Networks. And is so doing because they – and every other cellular service provider – face a huge looming lack-of-spectrum problem. For at least a few reasons.
One, because people are on their phones watching more and more videos.
Two, because more people have more phones – on which they are placing more calls, engaging more applications and watching more and more videos.
And three, because Obama’s FCC has been tilting at Leftist ideological windmills – like wasting almost two years illegally jamming through Net Neutrality - rather than identifying and making available more spectrum.
The government, again, has way too much ability to block or jam up the Verizon-SpectrumCo deal. And many on the Left are calling for exactly that.
Media Marxist outfit Public Knowledge recently sent out an email:
In which they excoriate – and declare their outright opposition to – the deal.
One sentence – in multiple directions – sums up their utter disconnect from Reality and the wireless Xanadu we are all enjoying.
Essentially, Verizon and AT&T get wireless; cable gets wireline; and consumers get nothing.
A dreaded wireless duopoly? Hardly.
Public Knowledge seems to have forgotten Sprint. Whom they certainly remembered when they cashed Sprint’s checks while forming an anti-free market unholy alliance to block the AT&T-T-Mobile merger.
Public Knowledge also seems to have forgotten T-Mobile. And Boost. And TracFone. And MetroPCS. And U.S. Cellular. And Cricket. And….
Only via Leftist “new math” is this a duopoly.
“…and consumers get nothing.”
Only the Delusional Left can describe the meteoric, explosion-in-all-directions cellular phone market – which has revolutionized for the better lives all over the planet – as people getting “nothing.”
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And you know who agrees that this Verizon spectrum deal is a good one? Why, it’s Public Knowledge’s own Legal Director Harold Feld. Who seemed at the time to be speaking for his entire organization:
Public Knowledge, which is typically very skeptical of any transaction that decreases competition in any market, focused in this case on the benefits of freeing spectrum that the cable operators have “warehoused” since 2006 without any real plan to deploy a network.
“It is good news that Verizon is paying $3.6 billion to buy useful spectrum from the cable company consortium,” Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge said in a statement. “Spectrum is better held in the hands of those who will use it, as opposed to those who don’t.”
That was the free market then – this is the Big Government now. What happened?
Nothing about the deal has changed – except Public Knowledge’s position on it.
Did another set of targeted checks clear?
Like with the Tootsie Pop lick count – the world may never know.
Big Government
