Competition The Best Stimulus

The Gummint Does Not Do It Best

Decades ago the government in New Zealand dumped its broadcasting tax.  Some public funding remained for a few public-sector broadcasters.  It is high time these subsidies also went the way of the Dodo.  

But if New Zealand's state-funded broadcasting system needs the kiss of death, the situation is far more desperate in the UK.  In that country, public broadcasting is sustained by a tax on every TV.  How quaint.  How stupid.

Culture secretary Nicky Morgan has warned that the BBC could go the way of Blockbuster — becoming a total irrelevancy and going bust — unless it evolves.

Baroness Morgan made the remarks as her department launches a consultation on decriminalising payment of the licence fee which funds the British Broadcasting Corporation, saying  “accountability and value for money must be at the heart of how the BBC is funded”.

The TV tax is compulsory for anyone who watches live or records live television or uses BBC iPlayer. Payment is mandatory even if you watch live programming on a computer, phone, or other device and even if you watch live television from other providers but do not watch BBC programming at all.  [Breitbart London]

It is not just that when broadcasting is funded by a state imposed tax the quality of programming declines.  It also is the case that the content inevitably becomes more and more statist.  Programmes reflect this dependency by endorsing the State's growing involvement in society.   Moreover, the funds that flow to the State broadcaster become wastefully spent.

Suffocating Do-Gooders

Socialism and Paternalism Are Conjoined Twins

Controlling the media has always been a fixation with Fabian socialists.  Using forcibly extracted citizen's money to fund state media (radio, television) to produce broadcasts celebrating the panoply of causes associated with statist secularism has been a focus of the Left for generations.  If you cannot take control by revolution and force, the next best thing is to win hearts and minds.  However, the Left has always been lazy and in too much of a hurry.  Better to use the levers of state power to push state hegemony and socialist causes. 

This leads to another socialist sacred cow.  In the Leftist worldview, human society is divided along property lines.  The propertied (capitalists) are oppressors and exploiters.  The working classes and the poor are the oppressed wretched of the earth.  One struggles to get any traction educating (propagandising) working class rubes because they don't have sufficient money to fund expensive propaganda outlets like television and radio and newspapers.  Therefore, the strategy has been to exploit the monied classes through a progressive taxation system to fund socialist propaganda through the mass media, via public broadcasting.

Consequently, amongst the Fabian socialists, public broadcasting--funded by the taxpayer--has long been a sacred cow for Leftist causes, the promotion of statism and more government controls, and secularism.