Protect the free market! Block AT&T!

The government is soon going to authorize the sale of some more of our mobile phone spectrum.

Should the goal of the auction be:

(1) Get as much as possible from that auction, regardless of who buys the spectrum?
(2) Manage the sale for the long term good of consumers?
(3) Get government off the back of god-fearing, job-creating businessmen?

Okay, okay, you're right. It was a trick question.

Next month, bills will be introduced in Congress that may include language that allows the FCC to structure who can bid on the spectrum. The "Government is bad! Always bad!" crowd will of course scream "Freedom! Let capitalism work!"

Except we know that market capitalism can harm market capitalism. Where limited resources are concerned, like oil or railroads or tobacco in the 19th century when the Sherman Anti-trust act was enforced, sometimes the government has to protect market capitalism from itself.

In the 1890s, the Rockefellers crushed many companies and put many people out of work with their money. The same threat exists today. We need competition in the mobile phone industry and there is national interest in seeing that competition can flourish.

Fighting monopoly is fighting for free market. Fighting concentration of power is fighting for small businesses and is pro-business.

This is even more true of the mobile industry than it was with oil. This is our spectrum. And if We, The People decide to foster competition and protect free markets by selling that spectrum to competitors of AT&T and Verizon, that is advocating for the free market, it is not "socialism," despite what the fear mongers on the right, the pro-monopolists and their lackeys like Rep. Greg Walden, would have you believe.

Promoting free enterprise in this case means potentially limiting who can bid on the spectrum and potentially taking a loss in the short run so that competition can, in the long run, keep prices competitive.

(By the way, I almost included the Boston Tea Party as an example. I'll submit, just for the joy of it, that the East India Company was in collusion with the British Crown. It was their tea! That's the history of influence of business on government. If the "Tea Party" wanted to be true to its namesake, it would join the Occupy Wall Street folks and demand that corporate scofflaws go to jail.

Big pharma, Goldman Sachs, the insurers, those are the East India Company of today. Don't tread on me!

At some point, some smart grad student at Berkeley or Stanford or the University of Chicago or Wharton will do a study on the minimum number of competitors required for a market to remain healthy, and how barriers to entry into that market affect that number.

My theory is that markets with higher barriers to entry require more existing competitors to be healthy, because companies outside a market that see the attractive profits will find it more difficult get in.

I will join the right wing in saying the Supreme Court has failed America. The overturning of campaign finance laws was to allow the East India Company to marry into the royal family. Talk about protecting an institution from incest! )