# LR Editorials (Sept. 1981) **URL:** **Published:** September 1, 1981 --- “Back in July 1980, four million 19- and 20-year olds were ordered by their government to register for a possible military draft.” ## A move toward the draft? Back in July 1980, four million 19- and 20-year olds were being told by the government to register for the draft, or else. The “or else” meant a possible five year prison sentence and/or $10,000 fine. Since then, another three million or so 18-year olds have been commanded to sign up. Millions did, but one million didn’t. Such is the gargantuan enforcement task the Reagan administration faces in its first year of office. Reagan, you will recall, used to shout his objections to conscription from every street corner. In his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention that same July 1980, Reagan proclaimed “I do not favor a peacetime draft or registration.” When asked by _The New York Times_ a month before the November election if he would sign an executive order to abolish registration, Reagan replied “I’d think very seriously of doing it, yes.” The candidate’s radical rhetoric ended the day he was elected to the Oval Office. Queried on draft registration shortly after his victory, the President-elect backed away from his earlier pledge to end the signup. Nine days after the Inaugural Ball, Reagan answered a question on the conscription issue by saying that the administration would “make a decision on what to do with it down the road someplace.” Even before the Supreme Court decision on women and the draft was announced, the government was moving to prosecute draft nonregistrants. The Selective Service System (SSS) sent a letter to 160 people June 17, on the eve of the high court ruling, informing the recipients that the SSS was “required by law to refer possible violators of the Military Selective Service Act to the Department of Justice.” The agency gave the potential nonregistrants 15 days to respond and threatened that if they did not, “We will send your name to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.” blared _The New York Times_ on July 21. “With approval of White House, Service Asks Proceedings Against a List of 134.” Of the original 160 to receive the Selective Service threat, 103 were referred by the agency to the Justice Department. A copy of the cover letter SSS sent with the nonregistrant files revealed that the records of another 31 people who had _not_ been sent letters were also referred for study and possible indictment. As of the end of July, Reagan officials continued to deny that Justice had any White House authority for further action, but a clear danger signal has emerged. Bureaucratic machinations have been allowed to rumble on, which indicate yet another drift toward the loss of civil liberties for young men in this country. Such an inexorable movement may run contrary to Reagan’s rhetorical flourishes against draft registration, but the potential indictment of draft nonregistrants is in concert with the administration’s newly announced plans to prepare for the possibility of up to two-and-a-half wars on other nation’s lands. One must look back to 1969, when Richard Nixon had his hands full with a _real war_, to discover a governmental defense policy based on a two-and-a-half war strategem. Ronald Reagan, determined to bluff and bluster his way past an emerging Soviet threat, has introduced the spectre of protecting our city on the hill on the storied land of Europe, on the deserts of the Persian Gulf, and in brush-fire skirmishes with the Russian tide in an El Salvador or a Nicaragua. This horrific perception has led to the “need” for conscription. The revived two-and-a-half-war myth entails an additional 250,000 troops to fill the ranks of an expanded Army, Air Force, National Guard, and Reserve units. The time has come for the American people to declare that they do not have to condone the Reagan defense plan. The contradictions of such a posture are becoming all too clear. Despite the administration’s talk of supposed communist dominance in the El Salvador-ean civil conflict, a torrent of White House mail registered a 10-1 popular reaction against the administration’s archaic cold war logic. NATO allies are seriously questioning the Reagan policy of belligerent anti-Sovietism while the U.S. pushes for deployment of nuclear weaponry on European soil. Security analysts are beginning to state publicly that pouring $1.5 trillion into an unrestrained Pentagon may further our demise rather than aid our defense. And, finally, the internal squabbling over the revival of the draft within the Reagan administration is forcing the White House to acknowledge the deepest contradiction of all: despite the glowing pictures painted by the editorial page pundits, the nation will not tolerate an actual draft induction. Many a young man decided to register in 1980 who vowed never to be inducted by a draft. Close to 1,000,000 who were called to register for arms refused to do so, confident of the support of millions more. Nationwide polls on the question of the draft fluctuate weekly, but the legacy of our most recent history foretells an ultimate rejection of political leaders who would yet again drag this country’s people into another exercise in madness. This administration is seemingly unable to cope with the vagaries of its bureaucratic departments, and therein lies the fatal flaw in the entire Reagan foreign policy. A campaign based on the promotion of an all-volunteer force seemed by the beginning of August to have been lost within the structures that comprise the United States government. Ronald Reagan promised to “get government off our backs,” but his legions propose to jail women for choosing to abort, gays for declaring their sexual proclivities, and draft-age men for refusing to participate in the hysteria of war preparations. The fact that this would involve jailing tens of millions does not seem to daunt them. They are too busy attempting to maintain the enormous power of the American government. It is not so much administrative decisiveness which threatens our freedom as it is political confusion. Reagan campaigned on the plank of abolishing draft registration — he should do it immediately. To allow his governmental agencies to threaten the imprisonment of war-objectors conjures up another national nightmare of lying politicians. Whatever Reagan’s good intentions, his government is now moving in accordance with the realities of his foreign policy wishes. The draft issue has become the linchpin of his defense expectations—which are now questioned by the American people, our allies, and security analysts. Were he to remove draft registration, we might all begin to speak in a serious way about peaceful international coexistence. — AR ## Between the 1st Amendment and a hard place Over the past few months, new legislation touted as broadcasting “deregulation” has been wending its way through Congress. It is the first legislation to significantly alter the structure of communications regulation since the passage of the original Communications Act in 1934. The significance of communications deregulation can hardly be overstated. Following closely on the heels of a revolution in communications technology, the impending changes in telecommunications policy recall the ancient battles for freedom of speech and separation of church and state fought by our classical liberal forebears. Ironically, though, those who go under the name “liberal” today are emerging as diehard reactionaries in the communications revolution. Thus far, the actual dimensions of “deregulation” are quite modest. What is important is the precedent or momentum established; whoever wins this first battle may well win the war. Thus when the deregulatory bills were crammed into a mammoth budget bill in mid-July to expedite their passage, a major battle of the lobbyists ensued. On one side were the broadcasters, the Republicans in the Senate Commerce Committee and the spectrum management bureaucracy, who all favor some deregulation. On the other side are the liberals and some peculiar allies—who oppose it. While both sides claim to represent the “public” and its interests, the unfortunate fact is that most of the public doesn’t even know what is going on. The “Radio Deregulation Act of 1981” (S.270) would not deregulate all that much. Station licenses would be granted for an indefinite period of time instead of for three years. This would free radio stations from some paperwork and uncertainty, but licenses could still be revoked on “fairness” grounds. The most important change wrought by S.270 is its restriction of the FCC’s power to regulate program content. Until recently, the FCC issued guidelines controlling the quantities of news and public affairs programming heard on the air. It required program logs of all stations and forced them to ascertain the “needs and interests” of their service areas. Its guidelines also governed the length and frequency of commercials. The FCC stopped using these powers in January of 1981, noting that market forces regulated the quantity of commercials and public affairs programming better than its own guidelines. But S.270 would legislate an end to the FCC’s power over radio programming, with the important exception of the Fairness Doctrine. This assures that the FCC will not issue program guidelines in the future, regardless of who the Commissioners are or who is President. Television deregulation does not go even this far. The Television Licensing and Renewal Act of 1981 (S.601) would extend the license period from three to five years and leave programming regulations untouched. Both S.270 and S.601 would make another important change: the FCC would be empowered to use lotteries to award broadcasting licenses. Currently, when there are mutually exclusive applications for a radio or TV station license the FCC is required by law to hold “comparative hearings.” When TV channels are available they frequently attract as many as 10 applicants. Comparative hearings are costly, time consuming anachronisms by which the FCC attempts to evaluate the applicants’ character, financial stability, and dedication to “community service.” Aside from its other defects, the system simply cannot handle the caseload any more. Like many others involved in spectrum management, Dale Hatfield, Associate Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration complains that “the FCC is too often faced with selecting from among equally well-qualified applicants. In effect, they must distinguish the indistinguishable and decide the undecidable. The results are incredible delays and excessive costs that serve mostly to postpone or deny service to the public, raise prices to users, consume FCC and court resources, and simply enrich a legion of communications attorneys.” Of course, lotteries are just as arbitrary as the hearings, but at least they’re quicker and cheaper. Libertarians can support without qualification any measure which reduces governmental control over program content. There is no reason why electronic communications should not be accorded at least the same First Amendment protection enjoyed by the press. The old argument that broadcasters possess more power than traditional media won’t wash, simply because there is more competition among electronic media outlets than daily newspapers. Moreover, a greater and greater amount of the information which ends up on the printed page got there the same way radio signals or TV images get to our receivers: by wire, satellite, or other telecommunications techniques. Economically, though, the bills simply don’t go far enough. A truly free market in broadcasting would assign freely transferable rights to users of the electromagnetic spectrum and allow unrestricted entry to new competitors. The current bills remove some government regulations. But the “deregulation” takes place within the framework of government ownership of the airwaves. Neither of the bills would even begin to establish market allocation of the spectrum. Entry into the broadcasting market is still severely restricted by governmental control of spectrum allocation and assignment. There is still no price system, no free exchange of broadcasting rights, and not nearly enough competition. Because of this, the existing bills will reinforce the privilege of established broadcasters. Considerations of both justice and economics, then, indicate that deregulation of existing broadcasters ought to be coupled with efforts to deregulate entry and foster new competition. To its credit, the FCC does seem to be inching in this direction. It has ceased to hobble cable. It has entertained proposals to reduce AM radio channel spacing from 10khz to 9khz, a change that would make room for about 400 new stations. Pressure from established broadcasters has forced the FCC to reexamine its position on this, but it still may go through with it. The FCC is also planning to make spectrum space available for Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) systems. DBS is the beginning of the end of the national TV networks government-fostered monopoly, because it makes a large number of new “networks” technically and economically feasible. Established broadcasters are fighting against this too. Predictably, broadcasters complain of government regulation when it gets in their way, but fight for it tooth and nail when it protects them from competition. The hypocrisy of the broadcasters, however, pales by comparison with that of the “liberal” opponents of deregulation. As these modest deregulatory bills moved toward a vote this Summer, “liberal” groups such as the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, the National Abortion Rights Action League, Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union mobilized to defeat them. Their official line is that government control over the broadcasting industry must be preserved to assure “public access” to the media. They see license renewal hearings and program content control not as forms of censorship but as preservers of free speech in the electronic media. Their use of the rhetoric of free speech, however, is belied by the allies they have attracted. For their desire to regulate the media has led them straight into an alliance with the Moral Majority. That’s right—the “liberals” have joined forces with the advocates of censorship and intolerance, specifically with the Rev. Don Wildmon and his Coalition for Better Television (CBTV) and National Federation for Decency. The largest member organization of CBTV is the Moral Majority. The Rev. Wildmon has been very busy lately intimidating advertisers with boycott threats and attempting to prod the FCC into cleansing television of sex, violence, and profanity. Naturally, he sees deregulation as a threat to his crusade. “I’m a free enterprise sort of fellow,” Wildmon says, but deregulation as proposed in the bills “would remove any incentive broadcasters have to be responsive to their communities.” (_Broadcasting, July 13, 1981_) Note well how the right wing has picked up on the “liberal” rhetoric about media outlets’ “responsibility” to their communities. Apparently the liberals’ and conservatives’ common belief in media regulation has overcome their other differences. The National Abortion Rights Action League has made common cause with a group that believes contraceptive advertising on TV should be banned. And the ACLU, which claims to fight for the rights of minorities, has joined forces with a group whose pressures for “family” programming have prompted one network to eliminate a sympathetically portrayed homosexual character from a new TV series. Is this the kind of public “responsiveness” the liberals are working for? To the fundamentalists, “responsiveness” means kowtow-ing to their particular values, just as the phony liberals of the NCCB and ACLU hope to use that power to enforce their standards upon the media. One would hope that the obvious conflict of standards here would give pause to those liberals who are truly interested in freedom of speech. Clearly, Wildmon and his ilk do not see government control of broadcasting as a way of protecting free speech or of providing public access to the media. These fellows are out to suppress certain kinds of speech and to exclude certain portions of the public from the media. And the contemporary liberals’ belief in government enforced “fairness” is aiding their cause. The issue of telecommunications regulation makes clearer than ever before the intimate connection between the free market and civil liberties; i.e. between liberalism in the economic and social spheres. There has always been an inherent contradiction between the modern liberals’ desire to license and regulate the electronic media and their pro-fessed belief in freedom of speech. Now, with broadcasting deregulation on its way, they must choose between the two. On one side is the First Amendment, on the other is the Moral Majority. —Milton Mueller ## The Hopeful Science The dismal science. That’s perhaps the best-known nickname for economics, and many of those who sat and suffered through the supply and demand curves for widgets in their college Econ I courses five or twenty or forty years ago would agree that the nickname fits. For most Americans, economics is for other people, the people “who understand that stuff,” the people who become university professors and high-level federal bureaucrats. For most of us, going to the store and balancing our checkbooks are all the economic experiences we want to have. Reading in our newspapers about CPI and balance-of-trade and M1 and what Paul Volcker said can be intimidating and bewildering. We try to make sense of it, because we know it affects us, but we’re not sure exactly how, and no one seems to want to give us a satisfactory explanation. It may be that the essential problem with traditional economics is its lack of humanity. What, really, do curves, graphs, and the gross national product have to do with _us_? How are we supposed to get excited about a “science” based on the assumption that non-existent persons have perfect knowledge about non-existent objects? If _n_ represents the marginal utility of the last widget produced, should we take our last $20 and go to a restaurant, or should we put it in the bank? Yet while traditional economics appears remote and in-human to most of us, the people “who understand that stuff” have been hard at work for most of this century, shaping the policy of government and directly affecting our lives. From fractional reserve banking to pump-priming to guns-and-butter, to tax expenditures, to safety nets, their policies, stemming from economic theories which take pains to factor out the actions of individual human beings, buffet these same human beings about as though they were so many pingpong balls in a wind tunnel. A wrong theory, in and of itself, is of no particular threat, but when a wrong theory is translated into government policy by its adherents, tragedy and injustice ensue. And the predominant economic theories and policies of this century have been wrong, often tragically wrong. For if government’s manipulation of money and credit during the 1920s brought on the Great Depression, if Franklin Roosevelt’s massive (for that time) intervention into the market prolonged the Depression and provided the excuse for our entry into World War II, if Lyndon Johnson’s statistical juggling created the myth that we could afford to “save” Vietnam with half a million troops, and if the mad currency inflation of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and apparently Reagan results in a society of individuals hopelessly trapped by rising prices, then the costs of traditional economic theories and policies in terms of human misery have been tragically high indeed. Traditional economics, based on a view of human beings as interchangeable integers within a neatly packaged society, has failed. As its pristine theories and interventionist policies—from Keynesianism to the newest supply-side fads—rapidly unravel, it is no surprise that a diametrically opposing school of economic thought—what is known as the Austrian school—is experiencing a resurgence. Austrianism, which views individual human action as the primary element upon which to base economic theory, provides a framework not only for the study of economic behavior but also for the issues of justice, freedom, individual rights, and peace which are inevitably affected, for good or ill, by the economic policies of governments. Austrianism is not new. Its traditions extend back well into the nineteenth century, but were supplanted, nearly to the point of extinction, by opposing theories and policies more in step with increasing state power. But a few strong-minded individuals kept the Austrian theories alive, developing and expanding them virtually alone, and the greatest of these was Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), whose works and teachings form the foundation of today’s young, flourishing Austrian school. This month, September, is the centennial of von Mises’s birth. It is to his life, his work, his commitment to individual human liberty, and to the hope for the future his legacy represents, that we proudly dedicate this issue of _The Libertarian Review_. —The Editors