Voluntary Support versus Coerced Support

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has announced that it is shutting down. That’s the entity that receives hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal government and then uses the loot to fund “public” (i.e., government) radio and television stations across the U.S., including the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.

Why is the CPB shutting down? Because the federal government, under the Trump administration, is terminating the flow of federal taxpayer dollars into its coffers.

But wait a minute! Can’t the CPB get funding voluntarily from donors? It could, but obviously people don’t wish to donate money to fund this operation. If they did, the CPB wouldn’t be shutting down.

From its beginning in 1967, it was clear that people had no interest in donating their own hard-earned money to this operation — at least not in the amounts needed to sustain its existence.

No problem. The federal government decided that the American people were wrong. Thus, it simply used the IRS to tax Americans and then use that money to fund an entity that Americans did not want to fund voluntarily.

That’s what’s called “freedom” in a welfare state — the “freedom” of the government to force people to fund what they don’t want to fund by having the IRS seize their money and give it to the entities that Americans did not wish to fund voluntarily with their own money.

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