Come on, silly. That money is needed to fund abstinence awareness, both here and abroad.
>PBS and NPR are funded by the government (just not 100%):
>
>
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3968>
>Still there are constantly lobbies to stop all government funding of any radio or tv network.
>
>
>>>>Along these lines, what use is the capital punishment if it doesn't punish capital?
>>>>
>>>>I mean, for capital offenses like spamming and telemarketing.
>>>
>>>I have to factor in that your childhood was spent in the socialist cocoon so you didn't develop the immunity to advertising that many of us did <bg>
>>
>>Au contraire, mon ami. That's when I developed the aversion. We were a socialist market economy since mid-sixties ('63 or '65, can't really remember). So worker-managed enterprises were freely competing on the
market, and the larger ones have discovered advertising. You won't believe how fast I learned to despise it. And I was just at the age of 10 or so.
>>
>>>But there is kind of a problem for you with TV - you don't want ads but you don't want to pay for it.
>>
>>I want to pay for it. We can haggle, but I do want to pay for ad-free TV where you can see some culture. Show me the world, show me the world's art. I want to see Shakespeare festival, I want to see Aida performed at Giza, I want to hear whoever is the equivalent of Andy Warhal, Susan Sontag, Salvador Dali, any of those smart guys - Chomsky maybe - speak for an hour without being cut mid-sentence, I want some unbiased news (I really wish they'd stop China- and Russia-bashing for a while and start reporting instead, BBC included) which wouldn't be reduced to soundbite sized headlines but actually have some content, show me any Dutch or other criminal series, a Thai love drama, and show it all in enough detail that I can really feel I saw something - not zap through it like the Travel channel does (yes, I know they are actually selling travel, and I took some time to see what they sell - gave up when I saw that I saw nothing about everything).
>>
>>> Do you expect the Big Government TV Fairy to provide free, live, spontaneous content? Maybe make TV producers, actors, writers, directors civil servants? (hey, that may be a plank in the Democratic platform so you may have hope <g> )
>>>
>>>TANSTAAFL <s>
>>
>>Free? Never was free (as in "free beer" and as in "liberated"), and we all know it, so that guy never had straw enough to be a man.
>>
>>And yes, I'm not imagining - we had it. Can't say how it works now, because it's now a public service, pretty much BBC-like, funded by mandatory subscription (attached to your electricity bill) and still full of ads (worst of both).
>>
>>But what'd be wrong with that, to complement the rest? As much as state owned TV network was wrong - it wasn't wrong for what it did, but because it was a monopoly. Nowadays when the emission spectrum is for lease to the best bidder to fulfill a public need, there's competition. So, IIRC, Italy has RAI (state network) and a bunch of private networks (I know, we watched them... when I was in the service, on a hill on the coast... if you turn the aerial just right, you watch soft porn on Rete Quattro or Canale Cinque); UK has BBC and ITV and whatnot. So why is the US afraid of letting a public service into the mix? Something that would be just granted sufficient funding to be independent... from commercial interests. Which would then finally have some competition.