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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

if you're referring to Germany, you're obliged to pay anyways - whether you own a device or not (it's per household/company since a while). It doesn't matter how many devices you own though. And you're not paying "the regime", you're paying an independent institution. It's not a tax by design though it may feel like one. The government never gets to touch the money.

Now, there's a ton of things that are wrong with our nominally independent radio/tv stations, but if I look around and see how things go in other states on this little planet (hello fox news), I don't have any idea that works better in principle. I'll take the german system over any alternative so far offered (though the BBC is a close contender)

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An unusual but arguably correct perspective is that "independent institutions" that pair extreme media influence on all other institutions, politicians, and democratic outcomes with the power of raising a privileged tax (they don't share their tax revenue with any other branch of government) ... are the regime.

Here's the problem with this tax (or however it's called): you're basically paying for some third party actions that you have no control over. Someone emits some electromagnetic radiation that you may or may not care about, but for some odd reason you have to pay for that. That feels... wrong.

Can't remember any other tax-like charges where one has to pay for something artificial that they could be completely unrelated to, yet don't have any control over.

If you remove the abstractions down to "someone emits some electromagnetic radiation" then yeah it makes no sense. Just like saying "someone out there is mixing hydrocarbons with rocks and dumping it on the ground that you may or may not care about".

Most people would rather discuss it in terms of "funding an independent source of media" and "building road infrastructure to move goods and services".

I'm not sure comparing radio with roads is correct.

For roads, maybe somewhere it's the same, but there are also funding ways that work differently. If you use the road (have a vehicle) you (probably, depends on where you are) pay the tax, either directly or included with the fuel price. If you don't drive a vehicle but use the roads indirectly (because the services you use, use that roads) you pay indirectly - trough your funding of those services and their respective use of vehicles. E.g. you buy stuff in a grocery store, the store pays to a transportation company, the transportation company pays taxes for their trucks - everyone's paying for what they actually use. So, it still feels fundamentally different from the broadcast taxes to me.

Public schools or libraries are probably a better analogy.

In the US, various forms of taxation at the federal, state and local level go in to providing funds for public schools. Everyone pays for schools even if they have no children. The only significant exception is that in some places, parents can receive vouchers to pay for private schools. Either way, the goal is that everyone receives a basic education to make a better society.

Everywhere in the US I've had a library card, it was similar. Libraries are funded by general taxes and their basic services are provided without charge to users who live in their tax area (county, most places).

Whether publicly-funded radio stations are a valuable public good in this way is reasonable to debate, but that's the model.

Depending on a single revenue source is the exact opposite of being independent; which is why they are always that outraged if someone proposes some reduction in funding. They are 100% dependent on parliament will. (...whether this is something you want your media to be, I don't know. It's a very German thing.)

But of course it's not only financially. The German Rundfunkrat is basically designed to be the very essence of what other cultures might dispraise as corporatism. - Despite it's justification as some cross section of society.

I'm not necessarily against the idea but the institutional design of German state media is arguably very bad.

ch4ck might have meant Poland, since there is a similar requirement here. However, the sentiment towards it is extremely negative because the new government (which is viewed very unfavorably by many) has decided to increase the monthly contribution, crack down on non-payers and tie the payment to your electricity bill. This also creates an issue for people and institutions who pay multiple electricity bills and thus are unfairly burdened by this new tax.

So an "independent institution" gets to use the power of government rifles to force you to pay tribute for a product you might never use. If it's independent, then why is the government working as their collection agency? How independent is it really? If your collections infrastructure can get cut off by the government at any time, where's the incentive to stay truly independent? I would offer that most organizations won't bite the hand that feeds them.

>> It's not a tax by design though it may feel like one.

If I'm forced to pay money to the government for a public "good," it's either a tax or extortion -- there's no other way to define it.

It doesn't matter if the cause is "worthy" or not -- it's a tax. Why not let the people that consume the product pay for the product? Imagine if the government forced everyone to buy a Spotify subscription. It's the same exact thing.

> Why not let the people that consume the product pay for the product?

Yeah, why not let the unemployed pay for the welfare! Or why not let the kids pay for the public schools!

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