I've spent this last week at home, getting ready to move, so I've
had more time than usual to listen to the radio [-] public radio,
that is, KUSC in particular.

It's pledge week, and usually that means I go find some other
station to listen to until they get over it. After all, I've sent
in my pledge for this year, and I know I'm not the target of all
this impassioned begging that's interfering with the usual
programming.

But Congress is now beginning to debate ending federal subsidies
for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, scheduled to receive
$292 million for 1995 if the tax faucet isn't turned off. I
wondered how the prospect of losing that money would affect the
pledge drive, and also I was curious to hear whether the station
would be encouraging its listeners to lobby Congress on its behalf.

Some stations have done so, to the considerable irritation of
legislators who think that's not the sort of noncommercial activity
foreseen by the legislation establishing CPR. I'm glad KUSC isn't
doing that, and in fact, they're being straightforward about the
amount of money they have at stake [-] about $680,000 a year, or 19
percent of their budget [-] and evenhanded about recognizing that
their audience includes both opponents and supporters of federal
funding (and they offer a plausible reason for partisans of each
view to call in).

But as much as I have enjoyed KUSC, and all the other noncommercial
stations that I've listened to faithfully over the years, I don't
think they should be getting tax money.

Not public broadcasting, and not the national endowments for the
arts or the humanities, or any of the other federal agencies that
are busily doing something the people who work there think is
worthwhile, and doing it with other people's money.

It's only $1.09 per citizen, the pitchmen are saying, ``not a
significant tax expense,'' and only 29 cents of that amount goes to
radio.

The amount of money may not be signficant, but the principle is.
The KUSC people say their audience is about 400,000 people a week,
and their subscriber base is about 22,000. That means that
approximately 95 percent of the people in Los Angeles County are
being assessed to help pay for a station they don't listen to,
while 95 percent of the people who do listen don't pay. Why?

This isn't national defense, after all. It's nice, but it isn't
essential. Take away all the nice-but-inessential things the
government is doing for us willy-nilly, and there might be enough
money for a tax cut that actually would make a difference in
families' budgets.

Some of them might decide to make bigger pledges to a favorite
radio station [-] but if not, that's the point. It's their money,
not Washington's, and they should be making those decisions.

The other thing to remember is that the amounts may be
insignificant at the taxpaying end, but at the receiving end they
are more than large enough to attract grantseekers in swarms.

Some of the people who get grants use them to do weird or peculiar
or ostentatiously offensive things, but that is less troublesome
than the central-planning problem. A lot of art is funded on a
shoestring; in comparison, the federal funding for the combined
national endowments, $386 million, is huge. It matters immensely to
artists who is in charge of the agencies, and who serves on the
panels that evaluate grant proposals. Political considerations
drive the process as much as aesthetic ones, influencing even the
work of artists who don't seek or receive federal money.

Sure, royal patrons used to engage artists and some of them had
lousy taste. But just because they were royal  patrons, they
weren't accountable to anybody for their taste. Tax-funded art has
to be accountable, yet nobody really knows how to do that. Does
making grants to religious artists imply a weakening of the walal
between church and state? Possibly ... at least, composers of
church music often feel their work is less likely to be funded than
secular, or even aggressively sacrilegious art.

Tax funding, in summary, elevates otherwise harmless differences of
artistic judgment into constitutional conundrums.

Defenders of the arts endowment like to say that federal funding is
essential because it helps artists raise money from other sources.
But the problem is too much power, concentrated in too few hands,
and if arts grants are in fact highly leveraged, that's just more
evidence of why centralization is such a bad idea.

My objections owe nothing to any disagreement with the left-wing
bias of public radio and television, although I believe it's
endemic.

Case in point: the news announcer Friday morning led off her
announcement of President Clinton's proposal to raise the minimum
wage by saying the president was going to help 10 million poor
people. She didn't see fit to explain how raising the minimum would
help those who lost their jobs to pay for it [-] likely hundreds of
thousands of them, many economists believe. An editorial writer or
a columnist might take that her position, but it is  opinion [-]
not news.

Public broadcasting types find the Clinton administration
hospitable. Some who have joined it, according to a list compiled
by Media Watch, include Douglas Bennet, president of National
Public Radio 1983-93; Anne Edwards and Lois Schiffer, also of NPR;
and Jonathan Spalter of MacNeil-Lehrer.

But it would be no improvement to have right-wing bias instead. The
problem is that when there's only one game in town, it matters too
much who is making the rules. The solution is just to stop
collecting so much of the nation's resources in taxes. Then no one
will have to fight over who gets to give it back.