Everybody seems to be a fan of government licensing until a politician they don’t like abuses it or threatens to abuse it. Donald Trump became upset with NBC because it reported that he said that he wanted a tenfold increase in nuclear weaponry. I wasn’t at the meeting so I can’t say one way or another whether he said that. However, in response to the report, Trump threatened to bring the weight of federal regulations down on NBC:
WASHINGTON — President Trump threatened on Wednesday to use the federal government’s power to license television airwaves to target NBC in response to a report by the network’s news division that he contemplated a dramatic increase in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
In a story aired and posted online Wednesday morning, NBC reported that Mr. Trump said during a meeting in July that he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, stunning some members of his national security team. It was after this meeting that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson reportedly said Mr. Trump was a “moron.”
Mr. Trump objected to the report in a series of Twitter messages over the course of the day and threatened to use the authority of the federal government to retaliate.
Libel and slander are usually dealt with in court. Normally if somebody believes that they have grounds to retaliate over what somebody else said or wrote, the courts would be the place where they would take their case. But most of us aren’t high ranking members of the State. Those that are have access to other forms of retaliation that doesn’t involve potential roadblocks like juries. One such form of retaliation is licensing. If you’re involved in a business that is required to be licensed by a governmental body, pissing off any petty bureaucrat could result in your licensed being revoked without so much as a bench trial.
I’ve seen a lot of self-declared leftists decry Trump’s threat. A few of them have even recognized that this form of licensing can allow the government to violate the First Amendment. Unfortunately, I expect this recognition to disappear once one of their guys is in power again. At that point self-declared rightists will again recognize the dangers of government licensing and the cycle will continue. Until enough people can recognize the dangers of government licensing for longer than their opponent is in power we’ll never see this practice dismissed.