by Rob Natelson

A version of this article first appeared on May 5, 2025 in Complete Colorado.

I’m a classical music enthusiast. Colorado Public Radio (CPR) offers classical music programming. So I was listening recently when an ominous announcement came over the air: It said that unless we sign a petition to Congress to continue federal funding for CPR, the classical music will stop! We won’t have it any more!

But this self-promoting ad was deeply dishonest.

For one thing, it clashed with the claim of the public broadcasting complex that federal dollars comprise only a small portion of their budgets. Well, if that is really so, then why will ending federal subsidies cause the classical music to stop?

The ad also was dishonest because it ignored the fact that there are myriad other ways we classical music devotees can feed our habit. For example: I have an “on demand” subscription to the Metropolitan Opera. Those who subscribe to Sirius XM have free access to two classical stations. YouTube offers scads of free classical content. And you can download classical offerings for little or nothing. Then there are CDs and other media. You can listen to classical music 24 hours a day at little cost if you are so inclined.

So why the dishonesty? I don’t know. But dishonest advertising usually is a sign of a bad product.

And in this case, the product—continued federal funding for mass media—is pernicious:

*          A very long history confirms that government funding tends to corrupt the arts. That’s one reason public broadcasting’s “news” coverage is so heavily biased in favor of the leftists who support their funding. Employing public funds to generate more public funds is yet another example of corruption.

*          When the federal government amplifies its voice in the mass media, it undercuts the free debate protected by the First Amendment. (National Public Radio’s claim that President Trump’s effort to stop funding is an “affront to the First Amendment” has it precisely backwards.)

*          The federal government has an enormous annual budget deficit, which is feeding a debt monster larger than the entire American economy.

*          Expenditures on public broadcasting are regressive—that is, the relatively wealthy CPR listener gets content at the expense of poorer taxpayers.

Two additional points are worth further exploration. First, CPR funding illustrates the federal government’s current fiscal trap. Second, the damage from federal funding of programs like CPR are social as well as fiscal.

The fiscal trap

The Constitution created a federal government with an extensive, but still limited, list of powers. A few powers were broad enough to encompass some promotion of the arts. Thus, the Constitution authorized congressional copyright laws and it permitted Congress to subsidize the arts in federal territories and in Washington, D.C.

Otherwise, however, the Constitution mandated that art was solely a concern of individuals and private associations, state and local governments.

Obviously that is not the situation today. During the Great Depression the Supreme Court came under enormous pressure to bypass the Constitution’s limits on federal spending. In United States v. Butler (1936) and Helvering v. Davis (1937), the court—hiding behind a figleaf of legal doctrine—announced that it would stop enforcing most of the Constitution’s limits on federal expenditures.

In my series of essays entitled “How the Supreme Court Re-wrote the Constitution,” I described the fiscal consequences:

“Before those decisions, Congress usually balanced its budget or ran a surplus. In the 85 years since, Congress has rarely balanced its budget, and the size of the deficits continues to accelerate.

“Furthermore, as Justice Butler predicted [in a dissent] . . . these decisions enabled Congress to bribe states with their citizens’ own money. This undermined state independence and weakened a check in the constitutional system.

“Removing limits on the federal spending power also created a mob of special interests that pursue federal dollars irrespective of the public interest. Because those special interests fund congressional re-election campaigns, cooperative members of Congress can remain in office for decades.”

Unlimited federal funding also has become a fiscal trap. As the dishonest CPR advertisement illustrates, federal dollars create special interests that lobby for more federal dollars. And those special interests enjoy great lobbying advantages over ordinary citizens.

Hence, our government’s seemingly irreversible fiscal spiral into bankruptcy.

Undermining traditional culture

My “Re-wrote” series identified another consequence of removing constitutional limits on federal spending:

“Since the 1960s, moreover, the federal government has used its unfettered spending authority to create dependency, fund favored political causes, promote fringe social theories, and undermine traditional culture.”

Again, CPR may serve as an example: It has been an outspoken supporter of Gay Pride Week—an event largely irrelevant to its classical music programming. CPR seems not to care that it lives in part off of taxpayers who are not fans of publicly-flaunted homosexual conduct. Quite apart from the merits of sexual politics is the fact that observant Catholics rank “pride” as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Yet many recipients of federal arts spending seem to have an irresistible urge to attack the values held by those who pay their salaries.

I saw a similar phenomenon while serving on a state university faculty: Money raised at the expense of conservative taxpayers was deployed to promote causes those taxpayers abhorred.

The revelations of the kinds of projects formerly supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) confirm the phenomenon in spades.

The lessons

One lesson from this experience—and from the experience of other debt-laden Western democracies—is that the sooner we correct fiscal dysfunctions the better. Drastic action is far better than no action. In fact, experience tells us that only drastic action has a chance of working.

I have been pleasantly surprised to learn that the Trump administration understands this.

Another lesson is for social conservatives: In my experience, they often overlook the damage done by government spending programs. In many cases, they prefer prescriptive remedies (“You can’t spend money on this”) over the more complete solution of defunding agencies entirely. But prescriptive remedies can be evaded, weakened, and reversed.  Only defunding works well and is relatively permanent.

Why does defunding work well? Because, as the late H.L. Richardson—long-time California senator, national columnist, and political humorist—used to say: “I never met a bureaucrat who worked for nothing.”

CPR has many donors and dedicated listeners. It’s time for the station to pull its snout from the federal trough.