According to Mehra, "the Japanese government stopped their digital recording media tax from morphing into an iPod tax." His paper provides a number of very interesting points of view on the topic. As I recall, one of the key worries in Japan was that the entertainment industry would lobby the government to keep hiking the levy. . . . just as industry lobbying in the U.S. has led to more and more protection for copyrightholders.

Perhaps that capture concern makes sense in Japanese political culture, but I don't see it as a major worry in the U.S. Our anti-tax crusaders are ingenious at defeating levies. And isn't one of the main concerns of the right that socialized medicine would starve pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and hospitals of funds? Why doesn't that concern about the "excess bargaining power" of a monopsonistic government buyer translate into assurance that we will not be overcharged for "all-you-can-eat" entertainment options?

On the other hand, perhaps the worry is precisely that--that a single-payer music plan would keep reducing funding to music, movies, and the like. I guess I can see that worry, but we have to also acknowledge gains from underpayment that may not occur in the medical context. Would we really be impoverished as a nation if we had, say, 15 fewer car chase scenes last year? Does the pro-market side really think that the British TV culture largely funded by a license tax is demonstrably worse than that which is paid for by subscribers?

Finally, before anyone starts railing against the evils of cross-subsidization, I strongly urge you to read this Nocera column on a la carte cable. Nocera notes that while it seems consumer-friendly to let people pick and choose the channels they pay for, that freedom could undermine the diversity of cable offerings:

Unmoored from the cable bundle, individual networks would have to charge vastly more money per subscriber. Under the current system, in which cable companies like Comcast pay the networks for carriage — and then pass on the cost to their customers — networks get to charge on the basis of everyone who subscribes to cable television, whether they watch the network or not. The system has the effect of generating more money than a network “deserves” based purely on viewership.

[For example, if] every African- American family in the country subscribed to the Black Entertainment Network, it would still have to raise its fees by 588 percent. “If just half opted in — still a wildly optimistic scenario — the price would rise by 1,200 percent.”

Perhaps we can work back from the dysfunctionality of that unraveling scenario to see how truly bizarre our lack of an "all-you-can-eat" music payment scheme is.