Posted on 03/26/2011 8:02:07 AM PDT by Shout Bits
Last week The House voted to defund NPR by cutting the Gordian ties between Washington and the radio network. A metaphor for everything Washington, nobody knows how much government nectar flows to NPR or in what form – estimates vary from $4MM to $90MM, not to mention its dubious tax exempt status. Sen. Harry Reid offered a typically pathetic defense of NPR by citing critical investigative reporting on dog racing. To be sure, NPR provides a left-leaning window into esoteric topics no other radio station covers, but time has passed NPR by. News sources like 24 hr. cable, blogs, and Sirius have made NPR hopelessly obsolete. Without government funding, NPR’s content could easily find a home on the internet or on Sirius. Why, then, does the left convulse at the thought of NPR’s defunding; why is a world without NPR unthinkable to statists?
The obvious answer to the left’s attachment to NPR is that it is a consistent voice for government. NPR uses government funds to report on opportunities to spend more government money. Statists and dictators have always had government propaganda outlets, and NPR serves this role comparatively benignly. NPR makes for fairly easy training in Becking a story (i.e. Internet searching the names of NPR guests to reveal that they are often radical revolutionaries and communists). Still, there is more to NPR appeal.
George Mason economics professor Daniel Klein published The People’s Romance, a paper on why people are so reluctant to give up even obviously worthless government programs. He presents several theories, including Adam Smith’s idea that people naturally seek to coordinate their sentiments, not just Pareto self-interest. Unlike talk radio and blogs, NPR is a one way flow of left wing sentiment; it coordinates the sentiments of its listeners. NPR is the left’s shaman telling his tribe the stories that define a cultural identity. Klein would argue that this collectivist instinct is part of what keeps government programs alive well past their logical termination.
Since NPR’s message and mission would surely continue without public funding, what difference does it make to the left? A $90MM program’s termination rarely makes the news, or draws the ire of the Senate Majority Leader. Who should care? Klein goes on to observe that capitalist entities are like clubs to which not everyone is invited, while government entities are perceived as The People’s Romance or belonging to the people. Even though capitalism provides more and better services than the government, non-investors feel a greater sense of ownership and kinship toward government programs. Defunding NPR will hurt nobody, but it goes against the sense of community at the heart of NPR’s admirers.
The concept of The People’s Romance sounds like communism because it is exactly that. At its heart, communism and collectivism offer less prosperity in exchange for a sense of safety. Collectivists often refer to the ‘Socialist Family,’ Orwell depicted ‘Big Brother,’ and Social Security is a ‘safety net.’ These terms are comforting, safe, and reliable. Socialism is stagnation, but also a false promise of security. Government waste and corruption is accepted because government poses as a substitute for family and community. These are the feelings that keep even the most obviously worthless government program intact decades after it ceases to serve the people.
People are easily lulled into collectivist delusions like NPR, but they are also resilient; they provide for themselves when there are no handouts. Once NPR is defunded, liberals will begin the painful adjustment of finding their news, entertainment, and tribal identity elsewhere. Eventually, as NPR’s defunding becomes a non-event, people will realize that there is life after government programs. Perhaps NPR will be a baby step toward reducing government’s role in more important areas. On the other hand, if NPR can’t be defunded, there is no hope for entitlement reform, or the elimination of larger, even more worthless departments.
Government programs like NPR are a comforting tonic for the collectivist instinct, and they are hard to abandon. Still, the road to restoring Washington’s financial viability starts with cutting even tiny programs like NPR because that is the way toward a US that is more individualist and self-reliant.
I think it cuts both ways. Nobody objects to links to an established and interesting blog, like Iowahawk for instance.
There is some reason to object to someone posting a useless blog, just in order to get hits and possible fans.
Clearly it’s hard to draw the line between a blog that really deserves to be linked and one that is just searching for fame. So on occasion I find myself on one side of the argument, and sometimes on the other.
At least if you post the whole thing, people can decide for themselves before they start providing hits to the blog.
Please, before you embarrass yourself further, acquaint yourself with the excerpt list.
And you're right. Posting a single line would be serious pimping.
But if someone should post three or four paragraphs one should be able to tell if the blogger was serious, literate and providing useful information; and, of course, clicking to the blog would be a quite appropriate payment for work well done.
And, of course, if it's garbage, it's a lot better to read the three graphs on FR and know than to actually have the whole unfathomable story on FR.
I appreciate that you posted the entire thing. I think it was very well written.
Excuse me, possibly just for NPR. The entire public broadcasting behemoth has revinues in the several billions.
Is it just NPR that irritates you?
Shout Bits has a well-written blog.
Shout Bits posts material on FR in its entirety.
Shout Bits has my respect as a blogger.
Blog pimps post what is usually poorly written material or they purloin pieces or videos from other authors and put them on their own blogs, sometimes passing them off as their own.
Then they needlessly excerpt their blog on FR for the sole purpose of drivng traffic to their sites to obtain blog hits.
Shout Bits is not a blog pimp.
Here's Free Republic, spread out before you like a feast, and all you have to do is the tiniest bit of easy research to learn all you need to know, and right from the Home Page.
Of course, common sense would probably help a lot too.
Honey, we are not talking copyright laws. We are talking right and wrong, and treating friends at least as well as enemies.
But that's just something you don't seem to get.
Agreed. I think he posted the whole thing because some Freepers have suggested that that’s what bloggers should do. But a few paragraphs would be enough to tell most readers whether it was worth going to read the rest
Perhaps if I heard a friendly word, I would return one, but you came out with your nasty-guns blazing about the horrible Pimpbusters.
What did you expect? Thanks and friendship?
Sorry </sarc>, we aren't your dogs to whip.
Right and wrong? There's the requirement for that pesky "common sense" thingy again.
Of course leftists enjoy leftist viewpoints. Just like I enjoy Rush.
What they need to do before funding it publicly is to tell the NPR-niks that an independent analysis finds that the political viewpoints on NPR are not mixed. They are all to the far left. Therefore, public funding could only continue if the Fairness Doctrine is applied... Suddenly they would agree to fund their little pet privately.
Friendly word :-)
(And "pimpbusters" isn't a word I believe I used)
Dittos. Hopefully next time he does an excerpt and ignores the whining.
“Dittos. Hopefully next time he does an excerpt and ignores the whining.”
Why? Are we a community of like minded individuals who seek to stay informed or a 90% group of like minded individuals who seek to stay informed and 10% of like minded individuals who seek to increase their personal blog traffic?
But if I refer to the commie, illegal-alien, America-hating, destructive, incompetent, gey, mozlem usurper in the White Hut, I can do that without actually saying, “Obama” too.
If you’re talking about humblegunner and crew, you’re referring to us, the Pimpbusters.
Friendly word to you, too.
I think we are a community of like minded people who want to change the direction of society from the cliff to which it is heading.
If someone is simply trying to drive traffic to a useless site simply because he thinks it's going to be easy money, then you are quite right in that such a person should not be welcome.
But if you have a conservative who is doing actual work and trying to grow in influence in his community and society in general -- and Shout Bits falls into this category -- then we ought to at least try to help him a little, don't you think?
Encouraging him to excerpt rather than giving him grief about it is one very minimal way of doing it.
And Shout Bits, just curious, but do you have a link to FR on your blog? I might have missed it.
I'm missing something here. Do you a specific post from me about which you are upset?
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