I had occasion to think about the term ?public service? at about 6AM this Sunday morning. As I was driving my son to a way-too-early baseball game, I flipped around the FM dial trying to find some music. There was none. All I could find were a number of really dull programs on arcane topics presumably on the air to fulfill the radio broadcaster?s ?public service? requirements of the FCC regulatory regime. Since almost no one gets excited about this programming except for the leftish public policy types that inhabit regulatory positions, the radio stations broadcast all this garbage on Sunday mornings when no one is listening anyway. Ironically, in the name of ?public service,? stations must broadcast material no one in the public actually wants to listen to.
Which leads me to coyote?s definition of corporate public service: Make a product or service for which people, without use of force or fraud, are willing to pay the listed price.
Any moron can (or at least should be able to) offer a product or service that people will be willing to use for free. Is this a public service? Well, maybe. If you are out there helping to feed homeless people, power to you. But is it really a public service that the Miami transit system offers free rides that it can only pay for with deficit spending [hyperlink]? Or $1.50 bus rides that cost taxpayers $30 each to provide [hyperlink]? And this is not to mention the free services, like public service radio broadcasts, that many people would be willing to pay not to receive.
That?s why I say that any moron can give stuff away. But find me the person who can create enough value that people are willing to pay enough for his product to cover all the material, labor, and capital inputs it took to create it, with surplus left over for both buyer and seller, and that is the person performing a real public service.
And let me listen to some classic rock on Sunday mornings.
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