Chapter 35
FLIMSY FABRIC OF THE ABSTRACT
2Monopolies
3 In 1918--1919 a fine point of legal statecraft arose.
4 Long, long before the World War Fincap developed his by legislation-granted track-and-wire franchises, and evolved from these certain monopolies of transportation and communication despite efficiency’s having demonstrated, in older and more integrated foreign countries, the necessity of socialization or governmental control of inter-locality communication facilities, including transportation, which is a ‘‘face-to-face’’ form of communication articulation.
5 The franchises in America were obtained originally from sovereign federal government, sovereign states and sovereign cities by virtue of the size of the operations to be incepted. Between cities in the United States, the wide open land expanse dwarfed the proportions of such inter-unit operations in Europe where smaller scale services were often underwritten and maintained by the government.
6 These operations in America necessitated a vast capital expenditure. The debt-accounting system, imposed on the American Government by feudal Fincap, allowed of no legal way in which the government might provide the funds for underwriting such vast transport and communication instrumentings. Government could pioneer ‘‘legally’’ only in the mechanics of war. So Fincap insisted that unless he were accorded PERMANENT franchises, by legislative enactment, he would not ‘‘PUT UP’’ the capital to inaugurate these popularly acknowledged to be desirable mechanisms. Of course, Fincap never sought mail franchises, because on a complete national scale they would have been too costly to maintain, although he did procure subsidies for carrying mail over his franchise routes set up between points where traffic was voluminous enough for profit.
7 The fine legal point that loomed at the end of the War was: How could the wireless and trackless radio and aeroplane services be CAPTURED by Fincap within the frame of legal advantage? Answer: Through ‘‘precedent interpretation’’ of constitutional rights. Fincap awoke suddenly to the fact that these pre-War derided services were not only important and imminent industrial services, but that they were essential of capture to protect his wired, tracked and, therefore, comparatively highly limited monopolies.
8 The earliest precedent, in demonstration of Fincap’s ‘‘right’’ to interpret the volition of the United States people, occurred in his dominance over the enactment of the Constitution itself. This was a post-Revolutionary War interpretative document of a pre-War Declaration of Independence on the part of the people. Its writing occurred to a high degree under circumstances of popular unawareness, i.e., while the populace was preoccupied with a post-Revolutionary family rehabilitation and reunion similar to and necessarily of longer duration than our own generation’s post-World War readjustment. True, it was written by representatives of all the states assembled in constitutional convention, but these were primarily butter-and-egg men who haggled almost to the point of agreement failure over their special interests. The recent ‘‘little businesses’’ Washington conferences is reminiscent of the original Constitutional Convention. The big brains finally carried off the victory with various important loopholes for Fincap. The Constitutional hagglings took weeks and months for news-broadcasting. There was no Tel. & Tel. Stage coach travel was arduous and letters and word of mouth tales were vague, wherefore public reaction to the ‘‘fine points’’ was virtually impossible.
9 At the conclusion of the World War, radio had a limited set of wave length octaves, in the terms of the radio instrument’s thencurrent limitations. Despite the fact that these wave bands were, in theory, globe encircling and, therefore, non-characterized by national sovereign borderlines and non-subject to titular franchise grant by the constitution of any one sovereign state, the bands, nonetheless, became the objective of legal capture by Fincap’s lawyer-slaves.
10 During the War, as a matter of expediency in non-confusion of broadcasting stations, afloat or on land, special wave-bands were assigned to respective allied nations. These ‘‘bands’’ were subdivided within the nations for specific operations. Although radio receiving sets could be tuned in on any wave length, broadcasting equipment was designed for elective operation within a specific wave length band.
11 The legal representatives of Fincap found it expedient first for ‘‘sovereign nations’’ to agree to a division among themselves of all of the available bands. The joker in evolution’s unbeatable pack of cards lay in the fact that the up to then discovered span of bands was conceived of by the non-scientific legal fraternity as constituting th< full expanse of ever-to-be-discovered radio ‘‘bands.’’
12 England and other nations, much closer by actual experience to the horrors and bloody chaos of the War than was the United States, maintained a socialized government operation of services and a more generally tolerant attitude for a much longer period after the War than did America. England and some of the other nations, internally fraternalized through the social momentum of the World War, legislatively adduced that radio was a SOCIAL property and, as such, should be managed by the post office or communications branch of the government.
13 Contrariwise, Fincap’s lawyers and law-passers in America adduced as factual precedent that since the communication system was, prior to the War, a private franchise property and monopoly and since the NEW means of communication was simply a sub-division of communication, it must, by divine right, be regarded as an appurtenance of Fincap’s repossessed property. To avoid over-publicity, Fincap conceded a few bands of operation to the Federal Government for statecraft and military purposes, while retaining for himself the majority of the bands (including the central bands) of most facile-to-instrument-ability use.
14 For the first few years, Fincap had little means of exploiting his new property other than in wireless communication between shore and ship and between countries which he had not linked up by commercial cables.
15 Meanwhile, another phase of the problem developed, necessitating Fincap’s legal scrutiny of the most attentive kind. This related to the mechanics of exploitation of the hitherto unthought-of popular broadcast and reception, essential to the profitable utilization of the world-encircling waveband properties. The capture of these bands had been originally viewed only as constituting a defense structure tactically of great use in preventing upstart intrusion into the potential enjoyment of high profit from their wired franchises of earlier piratical seizure.