Agreed. And not all licences require payment of a fee - some are issued free of charge.
We used to have the TV license in New Zealand. The money funded local productions regardless of whether they were shown on the government owned TVNZ or a private station. Unlike the BBC, and ABC in Australia, TVNZ stations run commercials and competes like any other station. Until the mid 1970’s in NZ you even needed a radio license to operate an AM radio. All stations were government owned. The TV license was scraped a few years ago.
I remember reading an article on how to build a metal detector in a British electronics hobbyist magazine many years ago. It sounded hilarious to read that in the UK you needed Pipe Finders Licence to operate it. I’ve since heard that there is a serious reason for this. It’s because of the number of unexploded bombs from WWII. I don’t know if there is a test but the licence at least comes with some safety information that people are expected to read.
Very good points and better put than I did. I only want to point out that sometimes, the public interest is 100% in the mix, and economic interest 0%, for example driver’s license: the state doesn’t get any money from the license. (Maybe there’s a fee for issueing the paper itself, but that’s nominal, not income-generation).
There’s no test?! You should improve this to protect the enviroment! Here, you first have to show knowledge (I know a written test, I don’t know if there’s a practical part) that you know the types of fish, and can recognize and distinguish them, know the seasons and habitats, so you don’t start fishing species A during the protected breeding season, when your permit is for species B.
Additionally, you pay for permits allowing some species of fish during a certain season, above a minimum size, with not forbidden methods (no dynamite fishing!) when you actually start fishing.
I think that seems to be what we call “Kfz-tax” (car tax), which you pay as long as you have a car that can drive. The tax should be used to repair and upkeep existing roads, improve them and build new ones. There’s an ongoing debate between the state, who says the car tax only covers part of the actual costs, and the ADAC (German AA) which says that car owners are over-taxed and the tax used for other traffic stuff while the roads decay and building of new roads is delayed. Each side has vastly different figures, naturally. (And politicans who want to score easy points with the dumb voters talk about car owners being the milking cows of the nation= they pay for everything else).
You have to pay a dog tax over here - I assume to cover the expense of cleaning the streets - but no cat tax, AFAIK. Though with the vicious dogs problem (pit bulls) a license showing that you know how to treat your dog correctly would be a good idea. (Dogs become mostly vicious because they are mistreated on purpose to become aggressive).
You know, I do find this model preferrable to the US model where CNN is the offical mouthpiece for govt. propaganda, and Fox news is a platform for conservative lies, because doing real fact checks by proper journalists is not what the market wants, or what the people need. I don’t want to give half a dozen rich people to have the power to decide what the public should know, and what not.
While over here, the idea of bleeping out words or delaying broadcasts to check for offensive words and bleep them would cause a riot of the population. Because we are very much against censorship, whether directly or indirectly. And I’m continually amazed at how easy the American population gives in to the demands of religious fundamentals as long as they are Christian (while warning about how the Muslims are subverting Europe because we are so liberal and politically correct to have secular states which give people equal rights regardless of their religion).
Here in the USA (Minneapolis, Minnesota), the dog license fee goes to support the operation of the city Animal Control department. They operate the city pound, the dogcatchers who go out to catch loose dogs, cats, etc., and to pick up dead animals that have been hit by cars. (At a loss – a fair amount of additional general tax revenue is allocated to keep them operating).
Officially, we are required to have licenses for cats, too. But hardly anybody does that. (I know about a third of the City Council members have cats, unlicensed.) However, if the Animal Control picks up your loose cat, and it doesn’t have a license, they do hit you with a very heavy fine for that (around $300), which you have to pay before getting your pet back. And if you don’t, it’s put up for adoption or (more likely) euthanasized.
Ah, another Monty Python joke revealed!
It’s a bit late, but I think you have your analogy a bit muddled. The BBC is like the US’s PBS. The British equivalent of the FCC would be Ofcom.
There is a booklet that comes out every year with all the fishing & hunting rules, seasons, size limits, etc. But you aren’t required to show any knowlege of the rules or even to pick up the booklet. You can buy the licences without even being smart enough to know how to find you way back out of the store. But you ARE going to get fined if you don’t follow the rules. The expression is ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. It’s up to the indivudual to know what is allowed.
“You didn’t know that fish was out of season? Tough, that will be $250 and we’ll take the fish.” The fines can be quite steep and may also include loss of fishing or hunting privileges for a number of years.
You think not having to complete an exam to fish is odd? I can buy a hunting licence without knowing a thing about guns, not even which end to point. Only young hunters have to take a gun safety course, not sure of the age under 14-16 I think.
Again, it’s a personal responsibility issue and you are expected to take it upon yourself to get educated on what you are allowed to do.
No. Just make sure that your TV can’t receive live TV, and you’re fine. Actually, even if you just tell them that you’ve done that, you’ll be fine. You’ll get letters again after a year, but just tell them the same thing.
Only if they don’t have any records at all at their new address, like a tenant’s agreement or phone bills.
They really big up their rights in the letters they send, but it’s all typical bailliff blather. They can’t enter your home without your explicit permission. I doubt there are any real detector vans - or, if there are, there are very few and they can’t be very effective for flats; they just presume that any address that once had a licence still needs a licence.
If you’re caught, and admit it, you will got court and get a fine. Your TV won’t be taken away.
It is one of the few debts that’s won’t get wiped out if you declare bankruptcy, and it’s one of the few debts that can land you in prison if you default:
Stores that sell TVs will have licences, yeah.
It is still a licence, FWIW, not just a fee (to whoever it was who said it wasn’t exactly a licence). There are no skills tests involved, but you do get a paper licence to show.
The main complaint I have with the TV license is that it is per household, which means that Richard Branson - with probably about fifty digital HD TVs in a huge house - pays the same as someone living in one room with an analogue TV that can’t even receive all the BBC channels that their licence goes towards funding. That’s fucked up.
People keep saying that, yet many people pay $50 or $100/month for cable or satellite. It’s similar in Canada. Yes, you can just receive over-the-air television for free (assuming you have the receiver), but doing so is so uncommon these days that the Toronto Star ran an article about the practice, describing it as a new undiscovered retro-thrifty treasure. (Granted, the article was in part as a response to the US analogue broadcast shutdown; it described the bonuses of receiving HD programming over the air.)
I agree about the perception, but the government must at present control what the licence fee is anyway.
I think it would be hard to come up with a real answer. The general idea of the local warlord/king etc charging Joe Ordinary money to be permitted to do something goes back thousands of years. The line between taxing activities for revenue and for regulation is highly blurred.
Believe me there are a fair number of detector vans and they are just as effective in sussing out who has a TV set switched on in high rise flats as they are on ordinary homes.
They have a device which is pointed at individual flats that they suspect of having a TV but no licence.
This device will not only confirm the existance of a TV, it will also tell them what programme you’re watching.
I’ve been inside one of these vans and the equipment they have is staggering
To get back to the OP:
It’s very ancient. Basically, a license is a permit to engage in a particular activity, whether that be fishing, driving a car, owning a television or anything else. So you’re looking for examples of activities that people are not allowed to carry on without the permission of some authority.
This goes back at least to medieval times, when there were many regulated professions. You couldn’t practice as, e.g., a goldsmith in London without the permission of the Goldsmith’s Company, and they imposed standards and restrictions designed (a) to keep up quality and standards in the trade, and (b) to protect the interests of their own members, by restricting competition. They got permission to do this from the king, to whom they very possibly paid a significant sum every year. All of which meant; you needed a licence to be a goldsmith though it may not actually have been called a “license”. I’m pretty sure, though, that you wouldn’t have difficulty finding pre-medieval examples of similar licensing arrangements.
There is usually some element of at least claimed public benefit in licensing schemes. The licence-issuer will claim to be regulating the trade for the public benefit. And this is not always completely spurious; consider the functions of a licence to practice medicine, for example, or a licence to drive.
But such schemes have obvious revenue-raising potential, and governments are not slow to exploit it. In the past, this was something of a necessity; the technology and organisation to apply a general income tax, or a general sales tax, did not exist, so revenue had to be raised by more specific taxes. So you had your land tax (a tax on land, obviously), your excises (taxes on specific goods such as, e.g., alcohol, luxury fabrics, newspapers – what got taxed depended partly on what was politically acceptable and partly on what was easy to collect), your customs duties (taxes on imports, collected at point of entry, mainly because this was a relatively easy way to raise tax, and it was popular with domestic producers who received a competitive advantage), your stamp duties (taxes on specific transactions) and your licence fees (taxes on specific activities).
Licence fees are still popular when it comes to hypothecated revenue; revenue you are committed to spending in a particular way. So in the UK the TV licence is justified because it assures the BBC of an income stream which cannot be cut off at short notice by a government who dislikes their editorial stance (the licence fee is reviewed – I think – every five years). Hence (rightly or wrongly) it is seen as helping to support the political independence of the BBC. Game and hunting licence fees, in many jurisdictions, go to conservation/environmental management. Vehicle licence fees go to road construction and maintenance. And so forth.
Licenses can also be used to restrict a particular activity; you can preserve fish stocks by limiting fishing licences, for example.
Forget medieval: this book(see page 73) refers to unspecified license fees having to be paid in ancient Egypt.
Really? How? I find this VERY hard to believe.
That is, how do they pick out which flat is watching TV, and how the Hell would they know which programme’s being watched?
As I understand it they point a hand held device (linked to a machine) at a particular flat. This picks up a signal telling them that a TV is in use and as different channels broadcast on different frequencies this is how they’re able to tell which programme is being viewed.
Or summink
Yes, I can understand the theory behind it. But from a practical standpoint, it seems to me to be easier to control if people know the basics before giving them the license, instead of giving the license to everybody who’s upright and breathing, and then controlling afterwards if they know what they are doing. Sounds to me as if you need far more wardens to control it.