Radio Free Austria

My great grandfather was the president of Radio Vienna in the 1930s and 1940s. So family lore tells me.

[My mother corrects me: the name of the company was Radio Austria, not Radio Vienna.]

Also, according to that same lore, he was arrested during WWII, by the Nazis, for not being a Nazi. Then, after the Soviets drove the Nazis out of Vienna, he was arrested by the Communists for having been a Nazi. You just can't win. I know very little about my great grandfather, but anyone who was arrested by both the Nazis and the Communists -- the right- and left-wings of socialism -- can't have been all bad.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. of A., government coercion of radio broadcasters was taking place more subtly.

Now, we all know -- all of us who took 8th-grade Social Studies -- that in the early days of radio, all these different broadcasters, amateurs and professionals, were trying to transmit in the same frequencies at the same time, interfering with each other's signals, etc., right?

Right?

It was an anarchy of the airwaves. But then the Federal Government came to the rescue, creating order out of chaos, first with the Radio Act of 1927 and the creation of the Federal Radio Commission, then later with the more powerful and more orderly Federal Communications Commission -- the good ol' FCC.

Right?

That's what I believed, not through bad assumptions or some other form of intellectual laziness, but because I was explicitly schooled to believe it! I remember being told in grade school that "the people own the airwaves" because early radio was chaotic and that television and radio could not exist as media without the intervention of the Feds.

Is it possible that electro-magnetic spectrum would be more justly and efficiently managed under a common-law private property system?

Please see Radio Free Rothbard and Jesse Walker's Radio History for some sobering historical revisionism.