Frame the Issue!

By Dean Baker, TomPaine.com. Posted November 16, 2001.

What's the difference between conservatives and progressives? Conservatives support free markets, whereas progressives support government solutions to social problems, right? Wrong. Conservatives like the government every bit as much as progressives do, they just don't advertise this fact. In actuality, conservatives want the government to shape markets in ways that provide profits to corporations and high incomes to rich people, instead of using it to ensure a decent standard of living for everyone.

For example, with regard to airwaves and patents, conservatives expect the government to grant them exclusive rights and arrest competitors. Even in the recent battles over Social Security, conservatives have not been pushing a market solution -- rather they advocate a policy of government-mandated saving, which would put citizens' savings under the control of the financial industry. In all of these instances, conservatives are not pushing for a market solution. Their desired policies require large-scale government intervention in the market. Conservatives conceal this fact in their rhetoric, implying that they simply want the market to be left alone.

Unfortunately, progressives have generally been willing to accept the right's characterization of them. When the free market is depicted as the conservative solution and government as the progressive solution, the ideological conflicts are cloaked in misrepresentation. Progressives must expose the deceptions underlying the conservative position and clearly set out their agenda as simply an alternative form of government intervention.

It is worth examining specific cases where the right has demanded government intervention and depicted this as the "natural" or "free market" solution. A close look at these cases clarifies the way these government interventions take place.

The Airwaves

The airwaves provide the clearest case study of this problem. When radio airwaves were first commercialized in the 1930s, the government assigned frequencies to corporations for their exclusive use. It continued this pattern with the assignment of television frequencies in the 1940s.

The logic of assigning a frequency for exclusive use is difficult to contest -- if more than one broadcaster used the same frequency in the same place, then neither could be heard (or seen) by listeners or viewers. But there was no reason that the airwaves had to be parceled out in this manner. For example, they could have been made available for set intervals (e.g. hour-long blocks) parceled out through a lottery. Or they could have been auctioned off for set periods, either by the hour or by the year. If one considers the lost income from an auction of this asset, the government intervention on behalf of broadcasters runs to the tens of billions of dollars every year. (Earlier this year, an auction of frequencies in Germany, which were to be used for wireless communications, raised over $30 billion.)

Remarkably, this huge gift from the government to the broadcasting industry is seen as a free market arrangement. When the public demands that conditions be attached to broadcast frequencies -- such as designating time for children's programming or for political candidates to present their agendas -- this is treated as interference with the market.

Neither progressives nor conservatives would want the resulting anarchy if the government withdrew its regulation of the airwaves. Yet, progressives have let the right's preferred solution appear as a market solution.

Intellectual Property "Rights"

A similar situation exists with patent and copyright protection. Such protection is an explicit form of government intervention in the market. The government guarantees a patent or copyright holder a monopoly on a specific product (or process) for a designated period of time. It is clear that these interventions serve a purpose -- they provide incentives for innovation and creative work -- but they are nonetheless forms of intervention. In the absence of government intervention, anyone could sell copies of Microsoft software or Viagra, without getting permission from, or paying royalties to, Microsoft or Pfizer. By failing to recognize that patents and copyrights are interventions in the market -- and not the free market itself -- progressives give these forms of intervention a degree of legitimacy they do not deserve.

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