A basic tenet of libertarianism is that less state power is always good because it reduces the potential for tyranny. All power corrupts, so the saying goes, and it would be easy for someone to abuse the levers of governmental authority for their own selfish ends.

Operating under this logic (and its correlate, that the private sector can do everything the state does better), politicians have spent the past thirty years shrinking the state’s role in everything from how much it can help the poor, to what it’s allowed to regulate — a process that’s been backed up and urged on by an army of right-wing intellectuals, writers, think-tanks, and activists. For instance, when Ronald Reagan’s FCC set about abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 — facilitating both the rise of right-wing talk radio and the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s current hijinks — it argued that the rule, through its “ affirmative use of government power to expand broadcast debate,” presented a “striking paradox,” because “freedom of speech has traditionally implied an absence of governmental supervision or control.”

“Throughout most of our history, the principal function of the First Amendment has been to protect the free marketplace of ideas by precluding government intrusion,” its 1985 report stated.