Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert McChesney

Scarcity is the quiet pressure point in McChesney's argument, and he presses it like a thumb on a bruise. By calling spectrum "scarce", he isn’t just describing physics; he’s invoking a political category that has long justified regulation. If something is scarce and essential, the logic goes, it can’t be treated like a private sandbox. It’s a public resource that needs rules, not just customers.

The cell phone example does tactical work. It’s everyday enough to feel apolitical - everyone has a phone, everyone understands service - but it smuggles in a bigger claim: we already accept that private companies pay to use public airwaves. That detail is meant to puncture the common libertarian framing that regulation of media infrastructure is unnatural or anti-market. In McChesney’s telling, the market is already structured by the state; the only question is who benefits from that structure.

Subtext: stop pretending "the air" is free. When operators pay for spectrum, they’re paying for access to something the public owns in principle but rarely experiences as ownership in practice. The line hints at McChesney's broader critique of communications policy: that debates about media, broadband, and platform power are routinely laundered into technical jargon, when they’re really fights over rents, gatekeeping, and democratic accountability. By anchoring the point in the mundane economics of cell service, he makes a case about legitimacy: if corporations profit from a finite public asset, the public is entitled to demand conditions, not gratitude.