The Tom Woods Show, episode 1076.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of Liberty Education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

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Hey everybody, Tom Woods here. Talking about technology today and in particular, we're talking

about some issues on which the desirability of government regulation has simply been taken for granted over the years,

or the presumption that there's no way that market allocation and market decisions could substitute for some kind of wise regulator.

So I'm talking about, in this case, the radio spectrum and technologies all the way down to wireless

technology that we use so often today.

And to talk to us about this today and where regulators have gotten things wrong and where the

market has gotten things right is Thomas Hazlitt, who is the author of The Political Spectrum,

the tumultuous liberation of wireless technology

from Herbert Hoover to the smartphone. Professor Haslett is former chief economist to the Federal

Communications Commission. He's currently a professor of economics at Clemson University. He's also

held faculty positions at the University of California, Davis, Columbia University, the Wharton School, and George Mason University School of Law. Professor Haslett, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I've just read out the full title of your book, The Political Spectrum. Great book. Very clever title, by the way. That's actually a very clever title. I wonder if some people looking at it were expecting one thing and got another.

But I think this radio spectrum issue, starting when you think about the 1920s, I can understand how a layman would think that you would need government allocation here because it seems, it's hard, I think, for the average person who doesn't really understand the technology to see how this could be worked out on some kind of common law basis. It seems like you probably need somebody, quote unquote, in charge, because otherwise wouldn't you have chaos? In fact, I bet the average person who's never thought about this would assume that

the prevailing situation was chaotic and then the state brought order to the chaos. But this is

more or less the opposite of the truth? So yeah, so really you get the question about rules of the road

in wireless, in the radio spectrum, in an important way in the first time

in the 1920s in the United States, when radio broadcasting kicks in.

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