This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 21st, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. Subsidies for

public broadcasting are not justified. To those who love public broadcasting, the best reason to defund it might be this.

Politicians won't have a strong mistake in controlling the content.

Trevor Burris is a legal associate at the Cato Institute and author of the new paper.

If you love something, set it free.

A case for defunding public broadcasting.

There used to be a commercial that PBS ran and it was a very simple slogan I believe it was something the effect of if

PBS doesn't do it who will and that was their slogan for a while and since the

burgeoning of cable since on-demand TV programs, Netflix streaming into people's homes has made, has

answered that question, I think, to a large extent.

What now? Well, that may have been true back in the day, so to speak.

When the public broadcasting began, and the Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, there were three stations and public

broadcasting was seen as a primarily educational, and culturally enriching thing

to give people, you know, the works of Shakespeare and coverage of government, local government,

national government, things like that, science documentaries.

And in the 70s, public broadcasting put on documentaries that were significant.

Civilization was one in the first one, one of those 13 part ones with the book.

Now it's hard to say that they have a unique role.

And the important thing to ask after that is,

should government be funding something that clearly

can exist without government funding?

And does just the existence of it, the continued existence of it, does that justify continuing to fund it?

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