Rodent Regatta

Wrong About Liberals

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

I used to believe that contemporary liberals (really illiberals) were intellectually inconsistent. I was wrong. They are quite intellectually consistent, as a recent experience of mine showed.

The experience was sitting on a panel with a bigwig from the American Civil Liberties Union, an executive from the Consumer Federation of America, and the legislative director of a local of the Communications Workers of America—all contemporary liberals. I was the only classical liberal, if you will, or conservative in the image of the Founders. In today’s vernacular, that makes me a small ”L” libertarian.

The panel was put together to discuss and debate the FCC’s proposed rules that would permit more consolidation of media ownership and more cross-ownership between the broadcast and print media.

The contemporary liberal, er, illiberal, panel members were against the new rules, for their stated reason that the rules would result in a greater concentration of ownership and thus less diversity of political viewpoints.

The purpose of this article is not to demonstrate where their assumptions, facts and beliefs were wrong, but suffice it to say that history shows that there was less diversity of political viewpoints after the advent of modern-day FCC regulations than before. For example, under FCC regulations, the three ”monkey see, monkey do” networks of ABC, CBS and NBC had a virtual monopoly on television news for decades. That monopoly has been busted with cable television.

Anyway, back to the issue of intellectual inconsistency.

At first blush, the illiberal panel members seemed to be intellectually inconsistent in three areas:

One, they were concerned about fewer media conglomerates having greater control over political speech, but they were not concerned about a much more serious issue in a free society: the government having a monopoly over K-12 classroom thought.

Two, they were concerned about family newspapers being sold to such media giants as Gannett, but, being illiberals, they support the inheritance tax, which is the reason that many family newspapers cannot afford to pass the business to the next generation.

Three—and I’m not making this up—they discussed the idea that a possible solution to their imagined problem was for the government to get into the newspaper business or to use the tax code to punish TV stations that do not cover local news to the degree that they think is appropriate. In other words, because of their purported love of the First Amendment, the illiberals believe that the government should be in the business of regulating speech. This is the same convoluted line of thinking behind campaign finance and clean election reforms in which the government dictates how much money citizens can give candidates and when they can engage in organized political speech.

Intellectually inconsistent? Not at all. The foregoing is not intellectually inconsistent because of three underlying illiberal beliefs: Government is good, business is bad, and citizens are stupid and need to be guided by paternalistic illiberals.

It doesn’t matter to illiberals that the government engages in coercion and business does not, that governments throughout history have killed hundreds of millions of people and businesses have not, or that people cannot easily change government regulations but can easily change news sources in a free market.

Illiberals may be intellectually vacuous, but at least they are not intellectually inconsistent.

• * * * *

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.