Massachusetts Bill Set to Subsidize Newspaper Subscriptions

No thanks. Norway is a tiny country. We have 10 metropolitan areas in the U.S. with more people than all of Norway. Norway is also unique. They discovered oil in the 1960s, socialized the production and have a sovereign wealth fund that has essentially kept 5 million people living in a way not possible in 99 percent of the rest of the world. They subsidize way more than newspapers in Norway -- on the back of their petroleum -- and it's the favorite go to of people suggesting the U.S. should be like Norway.

Norway is also not really the nirvana people think. When you go down that path of everything is FREETM, the government has got it, etc. etc., politicians tend to move onto more and more things having to be FREETM. As a result, Norway has taken that oil reserves gift. ... and somehow turned it into a growing debt load on the back of all the FREETM! It's now somehow living a fantasy, just like we are (which was largely based on currency debasement and beggar thy neighbor policies). That's just not a formula for a healthy country. You can delude people for decades with it. ... while setting yourself up for a miserable price that has to come due. Norway is already crossing that line.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/31/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund-loses-164-billion-in-2022.html

 

Putting aside the moral aspects of coercing people to have to pay for discretionary things that benefit others (which itself is a rights violation). ... again, no thanks. I don't want people who want to design things they don't even understand to be fucking around with the most basic enlightenment rights -- like a free (from government) press.

Do you want Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump being sanctioned to make "subsidization" decisions (really any decisions that cross over into being able to pick winners / losers) regarding the press?

It's amazing to me that people insist on opening these barn doors. ... and then act shocked when the animals are running wild.

 

I'm sorry, but putting aside Reporters Without Borders or wherever you are getting that #1 / #43 thing from, it's not as if Norway is a bastion of freedom that the U.S. isn't.

Norway does not have news gathering organizations doing the journalism work of the scope that the United States does, and on an international level, the rest of the world does not turn to Norway for information the way it does from various U.S. outlets (We have good and bad here, as a truly "free" press does).

When you are looking at press freedom, you essentially have the democracies that have some kind of Constitutional press freedom guarantee. ... and you have dictatorial places in which an authoritarian regime is controlling information. Any gradient they are pointing out between #1 and #43 comes down to Norway being a relatively homogeneous country, with a tiny population and news organizations that are piddling relative to the U.S. For example, during the riots in the wake of George Floyd, you had police departments stepping over the line, so a journalist who was wrongly arrested might move the U.S. down a list like that. Norway doesn't have the diversity, the size, the economy, etc. to have those kinds of social problems, so of course those things don't happen in Norway to the extent they do here. Which is why you can even argue that the press is remarkably MORE free in the U.S. than a list like that would have people believe, because our free press has to stand up to a lot more than some of the homogenous Scandinavian countries that I am sure headline those lists.