Rep. Pete Sessions is getting grief from an organization that wants to use public policy and public funds to manipulate the media to its liking.
Sessions, a Texas Republican, has drawn heat from Free Press, a Northhampton, Mass., group that calls itself a public-interest organization.
Pete’s sin? Sponsoring a bill that would prohibit cities from offering high-speed Internet service to their citizens unless the local governments can show that no business can or will do it, according to a story in the Dallas Morning News.
Free Press says that since Rep. Sessions owns some stock in one phone company, which might benefit from such legislation, that his motives are suspect. The truth is that it’s Free Press whose motives are suspect.
Sessions’ office says the congressman is simply acting on the principle that government shouldn’t compete with businesses.
He’s right, of course. Do cities build free grocery stores or provide free cell phone access just because consumers want – and may even need – these services?
To Pete’s sound economic philosophy we will add this radical thought: Providing Internet service is not a proper function of government, any government. A lot of non-users will be forced to subsidize a convenience for others.
Furthermore, when government steals a market, it hinders the private sector from doing what the state can’t do: innovate, grow, provide jobs and expand the economy. Have people forgotten that for a century the government controlled access to landlines, and all we got was poor quality and high prices?
But the bigger public policy issue is that liberal groups such as Free Press want to manipulate the media landscape to their liking; so that they can ultimately control what the public can see and read.
They don’t want the market – the private, voluntary exchange by people free of state coercion – to determine how the media is shaped.
In short, Free Press and similar organizations don’t believe in freedom because it has produced conditions they don’t like, such as the widespread access to information and – gasp! – independent thinking. When the government controls that access, it can control the public, which is why the questionable motives are those of Free Press.