In a recent executive order President Trump called for an end to taxpayer funding of NPR and “public” television (PBS), created by Congress in 1967 to laughingly create an “independent” news source. Yes, they have always been independent of the free market and of the hapless American taxpayers, but certainly not independent of the deep state Washington establishment. NPR has always been a government-subsidized propaganda organ. If Americans want even more government propaganda thrown at them than what they already get from the “mainstream media,” Hollywood, the universities, Google, Facebook, and dozens of television networks, NPR and “public” television should have no problem at all at attracting investors and viewers for a very profitable private business.
NPR’s lawsuit claims that President Trump’s executive order deprives the employees at NPR of freedom of speech, with the implicit assumption that only government subsidies allow them to have freedom of speech and that that freedom will be abolished if the subsidies are ended. As the president of the private, nonprofit Mises Institute I can attest that it is indeed possible to speak freely and even criticize the government without a single red cent of taxpayers’ money.
NPR claims that depriving it of taxpayer-financed subsidies is unconstitutional when in fact it is the existence of NPR and PBS that is unconstitutional. There is no mention of government-subsidized statist propaganda – or of any other kind of taxpayer-subsidized propaganda – in the delegated powers of the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8. The existence of “public” radio and television is consistent, however, with the sixth plank of the ten planks of The Communist Manifesto: “Centralization of the means of communication . . . in the hands of the state.” NPR, along with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), do nothing if not centralizing more communication in the hands of the state. During the FDR administration the FCC essentially abolished criticism of FDR over the radio by denying or eliminating broadcasting licenses of his critics. Other radio stations got the message and kept silent.
Government-funded statist propaganda is also immoral, tyrannical, and un-American for as Thomas Jefferson once said, “It is sinful and tyrannical to compel a man to contribute to ideas with which he disagrees.” At least half of adult Americans disagree with NPR/PBS leftist propaganda.
Executive orders can indeed by tyrannical but in this case President Trump is doing what many of his predecessors did before it was established by the Civil War that five federal government lawyers with lifetime tenure (the majority of the supreme court) will have a monopoly on constitutional interpretation. Before that time it was understood by everyone that the president, the Congress, and the people of the free and independent states had equal rights of constitutional interpretation. When the supreme court “ruled” that the Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed, was constitutional, for example, President Andrew Jackson responded by essentially saying thank you for your opinion by my opinion as president is different and equally valid. He then vetoed the recharter of the Bank of the United States which then went out of business.
President Trump probably is unaware that this is what he is doing despite having a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the White House. His instincts are right in that there should be no role in a free society for government-funded state propaganda. That was a hallmark of the Soviet Union and of all other oppressive, totalitarian regimes in history.
