President Obama has nominated Tom Wheeler to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), replacing Julius Genachowski, who will be departing in mid-May.
With a budget of nearly $400 million and almost 2,000 employees, the FCC is one of the largest and most powerful federal regulatory agencies. The agency has unwisely been granted enormous authority over the critical communications sector. It can approve or block mergers and acquisitions in the industries it regulates, and it administers the federal Universal Service Fund (USF), a tax that shows up on almost all communications bills and that adds up to over $8 billion every year. It’s clear that FCC policies have a direct and dramatic impact on the economy at large, as well as upon the day-to-day lives of American consumers.
So it’s worth paying attention to what’s going on at the FCC, especially when there’s a change at the top.
The choice of Wheeler has been criticized almost exclusively on the grounds that he once represented the communications industry. The New York Times called him an “industry man,” while Free Press predictably blasted the choice, saying that he “does not appear to be” the right person for the job.
Of course, we have no idea what kind of chairman Mr. Wheeler will be, though we doubt the president would nominate anyone sufficiently skeptical of government intervention to satisfy us. Indeed, in a blog post, Mr. Wheeler seemed to endorse the AT&T/T-Mobile merger as an excuse to introduce the heavy hand of regulation into the wireless space. So we’re “cautious.”
But what is truly unwise and indeed offensive is the larger idea that experience in the private sector, indeed experience in the very sector you’re supposed to be regulating, is some sort of contamination.
The alternative, of course, is LACK of industry knowledge and experience. That’s better? In other words, the alternative is rule by academic and government elites who proclaim from their ivory towers how an industry should be run, and what the future should look like, without ever having labored in the very fields over which they claim to be an expert.
America is successful when a robust private sector drives the economy, and when government performs its most basic and essential duties. America fails when appointed elites with little or no real-world experience attempt to manage the economy through top-down central planning.
Given the poor performance of this administration, especially its inability to meet the most basic desire of the American people to get the economy going again, we should be begging people with private sector experience to enter government and fix things, instead of treating them as pariahs.
May 9, 2013