Merry Christmas to the FCC

Merry Christmas to the FCC

In case you haven’t heard, Obama’s FCC has passed new rules requiring private companies who provide Internet services to submit to control under the government. What will government’s rules be? Those are yet to be determined. But the government alone will decide what those rules are, how they are to be implemented, and to whom they will apply, and to whom they will not. They call this: “Net Neutrality.”

Leave it to the socialist/fascist United States government to call government monopoly “neutral,” while implying that private individuals voluntarily hiring companies who compete with each other in a private marketplace … well, “unfair.”

Here’s a suggestion for the new Congress. Give the FCC a Christmas and New Year’s present: Stop funding them.

Columnist John Fund recently wrote: “There’s little evidence that the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress. Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch.”

Of course the public did not demand these rules. The public does not want them or need them. The public only wants the Internet to function properly. The problem is: The public has been sold a bill of goods. The public believes that the FCC actually protects capitalism and makes things like the Internet function better. In reality, the Internet functions in spite of government intervention by the FCC, particularly the anticapitalist sort of intervention the Obama FCC is proposing. The Obama FCC is inventing problems to justify taking over Internet content. They recognize if they came out with a program to take over Internet content, there would be outcry from nearly everyone. So instead, they have hatched a plan to control the Internet for reasons nobody would ever disagree with — in fact, for reasons nobody can even understand. They’re counting on the vast majority of people saying, “Oh, there goes that Obama again. Well, I’m sure if the FCC thinks we need this regulation, we do.”

Of course Obama has proceeded with “net neutrality” in spite of what Congress says; in spite of what courts say; in spite of what most Americans with an opinion on the subject say; and in spite of what the Constitution says. None of these things matter to Obama. They didn’t matter to Obama when he nationalized much of American industry two years ago, and it didn’t matter to Obama when he nationalized health care. Why would he care about this?

I predicted all along that Obama, once he lost the Congress, would use the executive branch to exert his will. I also predicted that his most important accomplishment — even more than socialized medicine, in his eyes — would be the elimination of free speech. Obama’s means of killing free speech in the United States is not gunpoint, poison or stabbing. It’s suffocation. Suffocation is much easier to pull off, because the victim doesn’t understand, at first, what’s happening, and the process is much more gradual. It’s also easier to say after the fact, “Well, I didn’t do anything.” The first step in suffocating American free speech is using the apparatus of the FCC to control the technological aspect of the Internet, because few people know (or frankly care) about how the technology operates. They do care about their freedom, but they don’t make the connection that Obama is taking over ALL of the Internet, not just its technical components. The Internet, because of its nature as an easily accessible technology, represents the freest form of speech mankind has ever known. The pamphlets, printing presses and books of the past were just as important, in their time. But the Internet is, if anything, even more important today, because it opens the door for free speech to potentially anyone. To liberal socialist fascists such as Obama, this is precisely why it must be destroyed — for those who disagree with him, that is.

More than that, free speech is an inconvenience for a President who’s seeking to nationalize what’s left of the private sector in the United States. This is why it’s time for Congress to refuse to fund the FCC. Under the Constitution, the power of spending federal money — “the power of the purse” — belongs to Congress alone. It’s the House of Representatives who does the appropriations. While Congress is fully within its rights to defund anything it chooses, the executive branch is not within its right to take over the Internet and, by implication, to begin the process of abolishing free speech. Will there be a hue and cry like you’ve never seen if Congress does such a thing? Absolutely. Like nothing you’ve ever seen, which is precisely why they should do it. Why? Because the battle will change from “debate” over what the FCC should restrict, or how much it should restrict it, to whether there should even be an FCC at all.

I fully expect that Congress could ultimately fail in its quest. That is no reason not to try. Shifting the debate and putting advocates of the FCC on the defensive for a change is an important first step in restoring full freedom of speech in the United States — not to mention preventing free speech from being abolished altogether. I’m sick of Americans having to defend their rights against agencies like the FCC. It’s time for these agencies to defend their right to exist.