A new member of the Obama administration — and, more sadly, a former LA Times columnist — has proposed, among other things, that the government should license newspapers in order to save them. That’s the report from Fox News, anyway — the closest thing Americans had to a government sponsored news agency during the Bush years.

Rosa Brooks’ proposal is a little more nuanced than that — here’s her column on the subject — but she does use the word “license.” This, in my opinion, should scare Americans more than the idea of gun control scares a card-carrying member of the NRA.

If the government wanted to allow for non-profit news agencies that were tax free, I’d be okay with that. But anything that gives government power over the free press is a very very bad idea, not to mention being unconstitutional.

“But as I say goodbye to my wonderful Times colleagues, I also can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed.”

Well, Rosa, I sure can. How about, for starters, a society that gets all its information from the government (which, in our case right now, is owned by heavily financed special interests)?