This is the first year that we’ve contributed to the local NPR affiliate. I listen to NPR a fair bit, and so does my wife, but, unlike her, I’d happily do without it myself. It enhances my life, but not in a way that I value enough that I would pay if they turned it into a subscription-only service (she made the contribution, then, obviously).
I probably spend a similar amount of time listening to BBC7. On my new website I mention that it could have been dreamed up just for me – the best of BBC radio’s irresponsibly depleted archives, and an old school friend of mine is their best presenter; a joy. I’d be embarrassed to admit how much I’d be willing to pay if they made it subscription-only.
So, what if some super-national governmental agency decided to charge me to pay for the enjoyment I get from NPR and BBC7? Would I have a reasonable complaint against it? Just to put one issue aside – I wouldn’t complain, in either case. But I think I would have a complaint in one case and not in the other. I’d have a complaint in the case of NPR because my relationship to NPR is like that of the shoemaker to the elves. They do something nice for me, which I enjoy, but I didn’t ask for it, and if I’d been offered the choice between paying for it or not getting it at all, I’d have chosen the latter. But BBC7 is quite different; not only do I plan around it, but if I’d had the choice between paying for it and not getting it I’d have chosen the former (at an embarrassingly high price).
So, I don’t think I’ve any complaint if they charge me for BBC7 but I do if they charge me for NPR. To say this is different from saying that the people who, in fact, pay for BBC7 and NPR, have a complaint against me if I don’t contribute. Suppose (counterfactually, but to keep the focus where I want it to be) that both are paid for entirely voluntarily by people who are producing them just for themselves and I only get the benefit from them because they don’t know how to exclude non-contributors. If the contributors are securing what they want at a price they are voluntarily paying, it might be a bit oafish of me to consume it without contributing when I could, but it is hard for me to see that I am doing something unjust to them. So my intuition is that even though there is no injustice when I do not contribute to the production costs of BBC7, there is no injustice, either, when I am forced to contribute as much as or less than I would have voluntarily contributed in order to secure access if that were the only way of doing it.
Am I right about this? I’m sure that David Schmidtz says something about it in The Limits of Government
, and even surer that Tyler Cowen does in his wonderful In Praise of Commercial Culture
, but some bugger walked off with my copies of both! And I’m impatient to hear your thoughts.
I’ll write a follow-up post explaining what this post is really about in a week or so.