🚀 go-pugleaf

dreilley@pinc.com (David Reilley) wrote:
>In article <4btg96$2m7@noc.tor.hookup.net> baisa@hookup.net (Brad Aisa) 
writes:
>
>>    So put me on record as counselling the following: abolish the CRTC 
and 
>>dismantle all telecom regulation for the simple reason that business 
>>executives and their customers should be running the economy, not mental 
>>patients.
>
>
>And when *your* cell phone doesn't work in this deregulated universe, it 
will 
>be because *I* have started "Dave's Cellular Network", and no CRTC 
regulator 
>is going to tell *me* I can't use Brad's frequency.  I'll be a free man, 
>operating in a pure free enterprise economy.


You will be fully free to start "Dave's Cellular Network" if you own 
broadcasting rights to the necessary frequencies. If you don't, and 
transmit on those frequencies anyway, then you will be stopped, like any 
trespasser. It is appropriate for the government to be involved in the 
process of objectively defining property rights, and how they should be 
protected from violation. The actual ownership and use of those rights must 
be left private.

Freedom is not anarchy. Privatizing broadcasting frequencies is 
straightforward. All claims of the poster's type I have ever seen in 
criticism of laissez-faire capitalism have always been a failure to define 
the appropriate property rights in the particular sphere being discussed.

(And don't give me that "oh but they only exist in finite quantity!" line 
-- everything valuable is finite, which is precisely what makes it 
necessary to institute property rights on it in the first place.)

--
Brad Aisa, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
baisa@hookup.net   web archive: http://www.hookup.net/~baisa/

"The highest responsibility of philosophers is to serve as the
guardians and integrators of human knowledge."   -- Ayn Rand