[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by nobles_point

The CBC is cultural and intellectual infrastructure.

Which is easily duplicated by the private sector. It made sense to have a public broadcaster in the 1950s, when television was cutting-edge technology and long-distance broadcasting required a massive investment in things like microwave relay towers. It makes no sense now.

In addition, it completes its mandate while stimulating the Canadian economy, nationally and regionally.

Broken window fallacy. Government spending stimulates the economy if and only if the economic activity produced by the spending exceeds the activity that would have been produced if the money had been left in the taxpayers’ hands to spend themselves. This is asserted but not proved.

It gives Canadians enhanced connectivity from Coast to Coast to Coast while providing programming that can enhance Canadian well being.

It gives connectivity to the government and its hand-picked producers and actors, not to the public at large. The public are merely required to sit there and passively consume what the CBC chooses to offer them. This ‘enhances Canadian well-being’ only if you assume that the government knows better what Canadians need than they know themselves, which again, is asserted but not proved — and very unlikely on the face of it.

It fulfils a vital role that private broadcasters cannot fulfill because it has a goal of enhanced Canadian well being, not simply profit.

You have learnt your lessons well, and you shall have a cookie with 100% Canadian content. As for me, I prefer to pursue my own idea of well-being, and not have it defined for me by a shiny-bottomed bureaucrat in Toronto.

Oversimplifying the government funding of public broadcasting to "I pay for it whether I use it or not" or "I can get all of that from the internet" is ridiculous.

But in fact, I do pay for it whether I like it or not, and I can get all of that from the Internet (and much more besides). If you consider it ridiculous to cite obvious facts, then you need to re-examine your standards of ridicule.

It sounds like statement straight out of the Edmonton Oiler book of management.

Irrelevant ad hominem, and silly besides, since you assert an analogy without in any way explaining where the alleged similarity lies. But perhaps you think I am so stupid that I will be shamed into changing my considered views by the utterance of the taboo-word ‘Edmonton’. I can assure you that I am not.

Maybe I should have "a choice" to Cherry pick what infrastructure projects I choose to fund because I don't have the mental capacity to understand the complexity involved in bringing products to and from market.

Disagreeing with statist rhetoric is not evidence against anyone’s mental capacity. I will not be buffaloed by insinuations that I am mentally defective, since I have abundant proof that this is not the case. If anyone in this conversation lacks mental capacity, it is yourself, for blithely assuming that your opponents are ipso facto stupid.

Oversimplifying things to this kind of rhetoric is toxic.

Really? What are the toxic effects of ‘this kind of rhetoric’ on the human system? What is its LD50? Does it, in fact, have such effects at all? Or are you merely being rhetorical yourself, to the point of plain absurdity? I conjecture the latter.

The benefits of utilizing infrastructure (physical, cultural , or intellectual) are not straightforward.

Indeed. Which is why one must carefully investigate the alternatives, and allocate the limited resources available where they will do the most good. The CBC is not an instance of this; it is merely a case of allocating resources where they have been allocated for more than 70 years past, because the bureaucracy acts as a lobby for its own continuance.

Like most economic development, it's diverse, variant.

The CBC is a political and ideological monoculture. If you want diverse and ‘variant’ broadcasting, you had better leave it to the voices of the citizenry than to a self-perpetuating bureaucratic monolith.

And much like venture capitalism, it is highly unpredictable to discern where and when MASSIVE benefits that dwarf the original investment can and will occur.

We have been waiting now since 1936. Where are these massive benefits of which you speak?