#1: Line-item veto of cable TV channels.
By my count I have about 125 channels. I don't have the spanish tier, nor the catch-all tier (Disney XD! Sprout! Great American Country! MTV35!) nor any of the movie channels. I have basic cable and a sports tier and a few others that the cable company throws in for 'free' with our cable box. Some of the channels are repeated in HD, others are not. We almost never watch anything that isn't in HD.
Out of the 125 channels, I would guess that my family watches only about 15-20 channels. Kids have their Disney channel and NickJr. We watch the networks, a few basic cable channels, and probably 6-8 sports channels. In particular I have the sports tier for Fox Soccer channel, which is going away at the end of summer, and NBC sports network which has more and more soccer. The other hundred channels we don't even know exist...when the NCAA tournament was on a few weeks ago and had some first-round games on TruTV, I had not turned to that channel since last year when games were also on TruTV. I think it's channel 2051. Not sure...if they moved them there to get people interested in the channel it didn't take on me.
I don't care about BET. I don't have any interest in Fox News. I could care less about NASA TV, the tennis channel, or E! The Longhorn channel is in the wrong state. Let them all go far, far away and I'll be fine.
But to get the channels my family likes, I have to pay for them. Cox sends each of these channels a small residual each month to pay for my subscription. For a few of them it may be pennies and a few may not cost anything at all. But I'd suspect those 100 channels add up to something.
I understand that they arrange their pay structures so that everybody can have many choices, and that we subsidize the less popular channels I understand that, and I suppose that if paying a little bit for the NHL network means somebody else will pay so that I can watch Fox Soccer, than maybe it makes sense.
But what I'm surprised about is that my free-market friends are not up in arms about this. Subsidizing one channel by viewers of another? That's socialism! If I get enough of my conservative friends to read this maybe it will become an issue, as long as their obsession with guns is starting to fade away.
I suppose it's not the worst thing in the world. Who knows, maybe I'll start watching TCM or A&E or Telemundo someday. Maybe this shouldn't be my first decree as despot. But it still annoys me, and that's what good despots do, take care of things that annoy them.
The day is coming when we'll be able to pick only the channels we want. Everything will be pay-per-view, and my reign as despot will be off to a good start.
