Over the past decade, circulation of the major national newspapers has steadily declined. This is due in large part to various, typically free technologies comprising the Internet (newsgroups, RSS feeds, web-only content, email newsletters, forums).
Yet while disruptive technologies such as the automobile replaced the horse buggy, the Columbia Journalism Review prescribes an Uncle Sam solution to prevent further erosion.
As Declan McCullagh points out, the CJR would like “everything from ownership tax incentives and R&D subsidies for the development of electronic paper–to a straightforward redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to newspaper owners and employees.”
For the economic interventionist, is there any industry or business that should be allowed to fail? Furthermore, why should a taxpayer be burdened with financing business models and entrepreneurial schemes?
Perhaps the most ironic aspect to this issue is that it is receiving widespread attention solely because the original story and follow-up commentary are easily accessible via the Internet.
More on protectionism:
Protectionism and the Destruction of Prosperity
The Fallacies of Shrimp Protectionism
George Mason: Protectionism at its Worst
Protectionism Didn’t Help Copper
Etatism, Protectionism, and the Demand for Lebensraum
Asian Tiger or Asian Kitten?
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Ridiculous. Forcing the taxpayer to pay for the provision of newspapers? Gee, I wonder what’ll happen should it ever occasion that Snickers bars go out of fashion. Perhaps we need subsidies to avert that calamity as well!
Was not the printing press once a symbol of liberty?
“Gee, I wonder what’ll happen should it ever occasion that Snickers bars go out of fashion.”
Yes and since that is unhealthy as well, they will have to introduce both a special “Snickers” subsidy AND a special “Snickers” tax.
What is next ? Providing subsidies to companies that produce NO good or service at all ?
How is it that magazines still survive? They certainly don’t provide relevant up to the minute information. It is because they provide information that their readers want. Maybe if newspapers focused on informing their readers instead of preaching to them the elitest liberal or big business party line then their circulations wouldn’t be in decline.
Until newspapers again learn that they are in the business to serve their customers and not the other way around they will continue to suffer. It’s not the 50′s anymore when they had dominance. Start informing and stop preaching a tainted message. Serve the customer what they want. In this case information.
It may be too late though. Once you have lost the crowd it is very difficult to get them back. That is the price you pay for lying to people and propagandizing them for decades. The first chance they get to move to an alternative, they are gone.
Network TV will experience the same thing. Those are both institutions being run by people who ascended to power when they had information monopolies and they may not know how to change. Good riddance to that lot. Change, serve, get better or die. That is the demand of the new information laced world
Kristian,
with this: “What is next ? Providing subsidies to companies that produce NO good or service at all ?
there Are ‘Farmers’, in the U.S., that recieve subsidies for Not producing. The euphemism ‘Soil Bank’ is often used to describe the program.
Perhaps the genuine, young entreprenuer should face the facts and realize that in order to really live his or her vocation and start a fantastic organization, they should leave the U.S.
As an entreprenuer myself, I have been grappling with this question for some time. Because if I do accomplish anything extraordinary, my competitors will be given tax dollars to protect them from my organization, injuring me and my organization.
I feel as if I am being cast into economic exile!!! As the son of Cuban exiles who fled communism I feel as if my family had escaped the fire only to be cast in to the den of a lion…
I did recieve a powerful grace from this meditation though, that my only home is in the Church.
Ron Paul 2008!
For the economic interventionist, is there any industry or business that should be allowed to fail?
This is a particularly important industry to prop up – it gives the interventionists a platform from which to lobby for all the other propping up they want to do.
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