Merit Goods Usually Do Not Have, Nor Produce Any

Representative Louise Slaughter seems to have renewed a cause which I find odd - she wants to reintroduce the "fairness" doctrine. When the broadcast spectrum was limited to a couple of stations the argument was made that the government had the obligation to regulate content to assure it was balanced. The argument was that if this limited resource was not regulated that one side of opinion would predominate and somehow stifle the public discourse. This nonsense did not apply to print media - because the bar to entry into the realm was pretty low - there were lots of options and if you choose a paper with narrow views, so be it.

In economics the arguments for things like the fairness doctrine are called Merit Goods. Public Goods are those things which are produced for all of us and which cannot exclude consumers - our defense system is a good example. If you live in the US, whether you want to be or not, you are protected by our level of military preparedness. But then some economists like Paul Samuelson argued that there are also a group of social activities where we don't do enough of something so all of us should participate. Sounds a lot like your mother's explanation for castor oil. The fairness doctrine is a Merit Good. If the government does not regulate content in the broadcast spectrum there will not be balance.

The trouble with Representative Slaughter's commentary about balance is technology. When we had three channels of TV or only a few radio channels it could possibly have made sense. But now we have hundreds of TV channels and with satellite radio and the internet possibly thousands of radio channels. The wealth of options is mind-boggling. Ms. Slaughter, if you don't like Rush Limbaugh, turn to another channel. I don't watch CNN because I dislike its bias (but then I don't watch Fox either, same reason). As the title suggests there are two problems with Merit Goods. Most of the ideas under this category have little merit and ultimately don't produce any good.