19 May 98

To:
A letter to the Editor
USA Today

The recent Supreme Court decision concerning which political candidates can debate on public television is condemnable.  By funding the broadcast of certain ideas, especially political ones, with the tax dollars of those who do not support those ideas, yet refusing to broadcast the ideas they do support, is a direct violation of the First Amendment.  The fact that airing everyone’s ideas would be logistically impossible is not an argument for limiting access to public air time.  Rather, it is an argument against public television all together.

One of the reasons behind the establishment of public television was for those who held ideas that were not mainstream to have their ideas heard.  As fallacious as this reason was, without it public television no longer has a leg to stand on. 

In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, regarding the property status of airwaves, Ayn Rand argued “Since ‘public property’ is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its ‘property,’ that ‘property’ will always be taken over by some political ‘elite,’ by a small clique which will then rule the public--a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians.”  In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, I can only say “she told you so.”

 Eric J. Lakits
Westland, MI