One place to cut government

Because there exists no area of human activity that couldn't benefit from more paternalistic attention . . . Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Federal Communications Commission to your Web browser.

Congressional Democrats could not find the votes to pass "net neutrality." No problem. Three un-elected officials will impose rules on hundreds of millions of satisfied online consumers. A federal appeals court stops the FCC from employing authority over the Internet. Again, not a problem. Three out of five FCC commissioners can carve out some temporary wiggle room, because as any crusading technocrat knows, the most important thing is getting in the door.

It's not that we don't need the FCC's meddling, it's that we don't need the FCC at all. Rather than expanding the powers — which always seem to grow — of this outdated bureaucracy, Congress should be finding ways to eliminate it.

Why would we want a prehistoric bureaucracy overseeing one of the century's great innovations?

Excellent question there in that last sentence. Government bureaucrats think they can improve anything with just a little tinkering. And "just a little tinkering" always turns into massive control and abuse of power. The FCC was created for the very specific task of allocating access to finite amounts of bandwidth. With hardly any limits to access today, there is no reason to even keep the FCC, which exists mainly to violate the First Amendment rights of the media it controls.