Watching TV
Driving
Gun Ownership
Angling…yes we do
These are just a few.
I got to wondering which bright spark first thought of the idea of a licence and in particular the one required before you can go fishing.
This has to be one of the silliest on record but if you’re caught fishing without a licence your tackle will be seized, you’ll be taken to court and fined a maximum of £2500.
We used to have to have a licence if you owned a dog, not sure if you still do
I know things often look different through our respective cultural lenses. But do you really think that needing a fishing license is stranger than needing a license to watch TV?!
Hunting and fishing make sense to me. The license fees can be used to fund Game Management, the study and monitoring of population stocks so proper quotas can be made for the next year. They also fund Game Wardens who’ll help insure those directives are met.
Why though must you have a license to watch TV. Does that help fund the BBC?
Yes, money generated from the sale of fishing licenses is used to fund management of the game species, and in some cases, improvements and maintenance on facilities (boat ramps, piers, etc). The license database can also be used for data collection. The same is also true of hunting licenses here in NC, but elsewhere YYMV. One could argue that those fishing without a license are “stealing” the resource (see: poaching).
Please tell us more about a license to watch TV. For all channels, or just some of them? Everyone has to have them… or just “professional” watchers?
It provides the vast majority of the BBC’s income. (And, as a nitpick, it’s a licence to *own *a TV, not to watch one.) There is some opposition to funding the BBC this way, but most European countries fund their public broadcasters the same way. (There are also commercial broadcasters, funded by advertising, and scrambled digital channels funded by subscription - not workable for analogue because analogue signals cannot be securely encrypted.)
If you have two televisions, do you need two licenses? Or an endorsement on the first license, or just an additional fee? Or does the first license entitle you to as many TVs as you desire?
Here in Summit County, Ohio, you need a license to sell firewood.
Personally, I think the TV license is a great deal. For that, we get to watch, listen to and read the BBC, which has, indisputably, the finest TV programming in the world, with no adverts.
When TV started in the UK after WW2, we had one channel, BBC. It was, and is, funded through the license fee, currently £142 p.a.
In the mid '50s, a second, commercial channel (ITV) started. In the late sixties, the BBC added another channel (imaginatively named BBC2). In 1982, we got another commercial channel, Channel 4, followed in 1997 by Channel 5 (you see the exciting pattern here of naming channels?) Despite these channels being funded by advertising, the license fee still has to be paid.
The license fee pays for four BBC TV channels, many local and national radio stations, their web sites, and a whole lot more. All of which are leaders in their respective fields, and paragons of quality.
ETA: your license covers all the TVs in your home.
And you still need a license if you’re blind. It is half price, though.
It used to be that you needed a radio operator’s license in order to work as a deejay. Whah? A license to babble nonsense and play recorded music and commercial announcements? I believe the licensing requirement no longer exists. The real technical “operation” is done by other people anyway.
Isn’t that daft. You can’t see the thing, and you have to pay. When you’re old and decrepit, I guess they think you’re too senile to know how to switch your TV on, and won’t understand what you’re watching, so you don’t have to pay. Aah, a caring government.
Licensure requirements serve a variety of more logical and less logical purposes.
[ul]
[li]General revenue enhancement.[/li][li]Targeted revenue enhancement (“user fees” such as fishing or driving licenses, where the fees ideally go toward the agencies regulating and managing the underlying activities).[/li][li]Assuring competency to undertake an underlying activity for personal safety reasons (boat license, hunter safety license).[/li][li]Assuring competency to undertake an activity on behalf of others on a professional basis (doctor, lawyer, electrician).[/li][li]Limiting the number of purveyors of a given service for an arguably laudable purpose (taxi licenses or liquor licenses, on the grounds that we don’t want the streets clogged with taxis or lined with saloons on every corner).[/li][li]Limiting the number of purveyors of particular goods or services for anti-competitive/cartel protection reasons (requiring cosmetology license to braid cornrows for money, because established salons don’t want random ladies in the neighborhood competing with them).[/li][/ul]
So the underlying justifications boil down to some mix of economics and a claimed public interest in making sure people don’t just do activity X willy-nilly and without some (allegedly-necessary) publilc oversight.
You need a license to sell alcohol. I suspect this requirement must be universal. In fact, several, depending on how you want to sell the stuff. One for ‘on’ sales (consumed on the premises), another for ‘off’ ( to take away). For wine, one license to sell by the case (12 bottles), another to sell single bottles. There are probably more.
Well, right. The state gets involved because it asserts (at various times) an interest in making sure that the parties are: (1) competent; (2) not related by too great a degree; (3) not diseased in a way that could lead to a blight of sick babies (remember how some states used to require a syphillis test?); (4) not rushing into it (license requirement often=built in waiting period for the processing time). Also, marriage creates big legal and financial consequences, which the state will then possibly have to adjudicate it, so the state claims an interest in some minimal oversight over how and when a valid “marriage” may be created. Currently, there’s a debate over whether that can include limiting “marriages” that the state will license to those between a man and a woman, as has historically been the case.
