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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

I hear many things on broadcast media that are contrary to my values, and tend to prune those sources from my media diet. When I am obliged by law to support those sources anyway, I get resentful. So I have been wishing for this since Ronald Reagan proposed it.

To me the bright line of "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" is crossed at least in spirit when the state seizes a dollar from a taxpayer and spends it on speech, because that abridges the taxpayer's resources for speech by a dollar. "You have free speech but I can take the money you use to be heard to speak against you" is a big loophole.

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While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. We elect them to speak and choose on our behalf. It isn’t a “loophole” when this runs afoul of an individual’s values. It is simply that we have a representative government that makes decisions by majority votes. I don’t agree with most defense spending, but I acknowledge that a majority of this country wants it. This is the purpose of compromise. If there had been a good-faith proposal to reform CPB [1], we could have made it better. The collateral damage from destroying the good parts (e.g., PBS) due to our failure to compromise should not be celebrated. [1] Such a proposal isn’t hard to imagine. A key purpose of local stations is to give a platform to the voices of local people. Simply shifting funding from national programming to local programming (without changing the total) would have accomplished this “debiasing” and empowered the (tragically endangered) local news.

>While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes,

The number of steps that “Pay Taxes” is removed from “Literally At Fucking Gunpoint” is not as many steps as you might think.

you can either pay taxes at gunpoint or you can pay tribute/protection/insurance/ransom/bribes at gunpoint. not sure there are (or have ever been) many places in the world where you don't owe some debt of obligation to a larger organization, be it a government, organized crime, or something else.

I’m not sure if you are intentionally trying to miss the point. The comment was claiming they are obligated by law to support media they don’t agree with. We are all equivalently obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes. We pay taxes. They are part of the contract of our society. What our representatives decide to spend them on doesn’t change that.

"We are all [...] obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes" is NOT equivalent to being "obligated by law to support media [one does not] agree with". Not even remotely. Negative obligations != positive obligations.

> While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend.

Without limit? If Trump and the Congressional GOP force a bunch of tax-funded in-your-face right-wing propaganda that would be ok with you because "[y]ou pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend"?

Well they're already doing this and much worse, so no need to appeal to something fake. There's plenty of actual awful things our elected officials are doing which you can point to.

But, the idea is, that we're not out here proposing that we stop paying taxes. We're not the ones committing a Jan 6th, are we?

The solution to Trump isn't assassinating him or whatever, it's legally impeaching him or not voting for him. That's how a democracy works.

So the government should just not say anything? Let’s just get all our news from X, the famously truthful platform!

And balanced. Don't forget balanced.

Yes the government should just not say anything but this is not dependent on X existing or not existing.

So the current government will stop talking as well then?

This is a step towards that which is a step in the right direction.

The government is allowed and required to say things about the current state of the law (i.e., they must publish the law, and they may educate the public about it, and they must enforce it). The government is not required and perhaps should not be allowed to say anything promoting specific political opinions or promoting specific Acts that have not passed yet. By "say" you [I think, and therefore] I mean as in publish with taxpayer money, because naturally elected officials and even appointees should be able to speak with anyone, even interviewers, and publish on their own dime as long as they don't do anything to prevent the opposition also speaking in that way, but publish? as in print or broadcasting? OP here thinks not, and OP has a very good point.

And the current government is so impartial with their news reporting that only right wing outlets get added to the press pool which becomes the de facto voice of the government since anybody else gets sued or defunded

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