The Public Interest

Recently a reporter friend of mine, a good man of conservative politics, did a piece about an ongoing effort by the cell phone industry to take over WiFi.

Unlicensed frequencies are unlicensed, the carriers say. That means they should be available to everyone, including people who own licensed frequencies. That means carriers should be able to use them, too.

An interesting theory, until you recognize the intent. First, integrating WiFi into their networks lets them charge phone users for using WiFi, directly, by the bit. Second, plugging carriers into the WiFi data stream clutters the stream. Signals attenuate faster in a crowded environment. You probably notice this when you try to watch Netflix some evenings. Your neighbors’ WiFi gets in the way of your signal, and you get that little turning circle on the screen.

This isn’t how my friend wrote the story. He said that a “special interest” was fighting the carriers, and pointed to the WiFi Alliance. The Alliance has, since WiFi became a thing over 15 years ago, worked to enhance equipment standards and improve service levels. Many of these companies also make chips for cell phones and cell phone towers, but in this instance their aim is to increase the capability of WiFi, and keep it free for everyone.

When I asked my friend about this, he seemed to consider all sides on this question, indeed all questions, to be fought among “special interests.” He didn’t recognize anything that might be called “the public interest.”

That’s a dangerous attitude.

The idea of a public interest, as distinguished from private interests, is as old as our Republic. It’s in the Constitution’s preamble – it was written to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” 

Constitutional lawyers focus on the words general welfare, but let’s also look at the word liberty.

Liberty doesn’t just mean you get to do what you like. It means you are free so long as you don’t infringe on your neighbor’s rights. Powerful people don’t need anyone to defend their liberty. Weak people do. What so-called “libertarians” do, in dismissing “general welfare” or “the public interest,” is to substitute the idea of liberty with the idea of license.

License is truly the idea of doing precisely what you want, without consequence. It’s Nietschian – even if it’s called Randian. At the time of the Constitution it was a concept associated with European monarchs, especially the French Bourbons, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and the Russian Romanoffs. From license comes the adjective licentious. (Don’t get your undies in a bunch – libertine flows from liberty.) A King doesn’t have to care about anyone else. A democrat does.

There were men in America who behaved like Kings at the time of the Revolution. Many southern planters did this. They raped their slaves and killed them on whims, sometimes working them to death, sometimes murdering them as an example to “the others.” George Washington was such a man. So was Thomas Jefferson. And James Madison. The good news is they felt bad about it. The bad news is they wrote their desire for license into the founding document. It was meant to perpetuate slavery, and until the Civil War it did just that. The “new birth of freedom” promised at Gettysburg is found in the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments, which abolished slavery, established citizenship for all slaves born in this country, and protects their voting rights.

The Civil War created a new kind of tension, this one between capital and those it worked upon. The whole purpose of the Progressive era, from the “Mugwumps” like Mark Twain, co-author of “The Gilded Age,” through to the creation of the Federal Reserve, was to protect people from the excesses of capital, and capitalists. It was to establish some public interest that lay behind simple statutes against killing and theft, to mitigate the effects of extreme wealth on ordinary people. It was meant to bend the interests of the wealthy to the common weal, as Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations.”

When people reject the idea of a public interest, they reject everything that made America different from the feudal states that preceded it. Without the public interest, we simply select our Kings through the market and let them do what they will.

That is precisely what today’s capitalists are trying to do, through their control of the legislature and their control of the judiciary. They are not just engaged in class warfare, but seek also to maintain their successors within the class as Kings, Queens, and Dukes among us. Thus people like Paris Hilton, third generation wealth, live in a state of license, with no regard for others’ interests.

By ending the estate tax and creating hundreds of other tax loopholes, both in the U.S. and in British protectorates like the Cayman Islands, our billionaires and those of other nations are creating a new Royal Class to rule our children and grandchildren. They are doing it under the color of American law. And they are doing it, first, by rejecting anything like a “public interest” that differs from their own license.

Donald Trump is the ultimate manifestation of this ethos. He is by turns a joke and a serious threat to democracy. It was OK when Sylvio Berlesconi played this game on Italy. That was, after all, just Italy. But this is America, with a virtual monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, with a huge percentage of global wealth, with the power to destroy mankind swiftly, with our bombs, or slowly, with our oil.

We can’t allow liberty to become license here. What Lincoln wrote 150 years ago rings with even more truth in our time: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” 

We have a bad habit of thinking of American history as something that happened in the past. We have a bad habit of thinking of our inheritance of liberty, and of acting in the general welfare, as immutable and indestructible. It’s not. It’s something we can lose, something we can choose to toss out like we do our trash. “The Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought and regrettably, it can still be lost.” 

When we ignore the public interest, we give away our inheritance. When we think that people like Donald Trump are mere jokes, that Charles Koch is a cartoon character, we risk losing everything our forefathers fought for.

Stop laughing. Get in the game. Defend the public interest.