Both the Net and Linux were created, grew and flourished almost entirely outside the regulatory sphere. They are, in a literal sense, what free markets have done with their freedoms.Saving the Net: "'I think that I could turn and live with the animals... Not one of them is demented with the mania of owning things.'
--Walt Whitman "

Relaxing broadcast property ownership rules, in the absence of making larger chunks of available spectrum for everybody, is hardly deregulation. It is a highly selective change in existing regulation that opens opportunities only to the most successful players in a completely closed marketplace

Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple: they love winners, literally. They like to reward strength and achievement. They hate rewarding weakness for the same reason a parent hates rewarding kids' poor grades. This, more than anything else, is what makes conservatives so radically different from liberals. It's why favorite liberal buzzwords like "fairness" and "opportunity" are fingernails on the chalkboards of conservative minds. To conservatives, those words are code-talk for punishing the strong and rewarding the weak.

As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.

In street basketball there's a rule called "make it, take it". If you score a basket, you get to keep the ball. Three-on-three basketball works the same way. So do volleyball and other sports with rules that favor achievement over fairness.

Relaxing media ownership rules is all about "make it, take it". Clear Channel and Viacom have made it. Why not let them take more? It's simply the marketplace at work, right? Again, only in a highly regulated context.

We can't change conservative value systems. But we can change the emphasis on what we conserve and why. That's why we need to figure a way around the Property Problem too.

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Duhaime's Law Dictionary defines property this way:


Property is commonly thought of as a thing which belongs to someone and over which a person has total control. But, legally, it is more properly defined as "a collection of legal rights over a thing". These rights are usually total and fully enforceable by the state or the owner against others. It has been said that "property and law were born and die together. Before laws were made there was no property. Take away laws and property ceases." Before laws were written and enforced, property had no relevance. Possession was all that mattered. There are many classifications of property, the most common being between real property or immovable property (real estate, such as land or buildings) and "chattel", or movable property (things which are not attached to the land such as a bicycle, a car or a hammer) and between public (property belonging to everybody or to the state) and private property