Mark Latham is a fine example of the economic principle of specialisation and the division of labour. He is an excellent public intellectual but was a woeful politician. His passion and strong views are ill-suited for Canberra, but make for delightful reading in the op-ed pages of the Australian Financial Review.
Unfortunately, that paper has an extraordinary subscription-only policy and many of his excellent ideas and arguments will be lost. His recent articles on bad parenting are must reading. Today he is having a go at the ABC. There are so many arguments against the ABC that is hard to imagine any new contributions. Yet Latham manages to produce one.
He does raise the argument that government ownership of the ABC is no longer necessary because the market already provides a very broad spectrum of entertainment and news.
This is, of course, true. Yet the ABC is able to provide some entertainment that commercial operators would never show. For example, several years ago the ABC put on, in an early timeslot, the magnificent Angels in America mini-series.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing is rare. Latham suggests we're getting less quality and more trivia. He bemoans the flight of quality to subscription media (while writing for the AFR).
His complaint isn't that the ABC is an out-of-touch elitist organisation, but rather that ABC viewers are out-of-touch elitists; ABC employees apparently are "cornball comics". I don't know -- my understanding is that ABC viewers tend to be AB income group and Liberal voters.
The complaint often heard from Liberals is that the ABC is "our enemies talking to our friends". Latham tells us that the Rudd government "needs to be tough on trendies but humane to the much abused federal budget".
I agree. The Rudd government has spent money irresponsibly and the federal budget is a disaster. It is disgraceful to have planned a budget deficit in peace-time, even if the economy has slowed down. But it isn't clear that privatising the ABC is the solution to fiscal indiscipline. The federal government needs to stop spending money, not find new sources of revenue.
But what of the idea of privatising the ABC anyway? There is an apocryphal story that the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once suggested that he would privatise everything, except the opera.
But Mises also believed that the full costs and benefits of choices should be known to decision makers before they make decisions. If after a cost-benefit analysis voters and tax-payers still supported subsidy to the opera, or the ABC, or whatever, then a subsidy should be made.
The ABC costs a bit more than seven cents per day, and what are we getting for our money?
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