I totally agree that money is a great way to incentivize the production of content. That’s why I think content producers should be allowed to charge whatever they want for their work, and the law should be designed to assist them in doing so, and prevent people from obtaining their content without paying the compensation the producer requests.
Public libraries are just fine because they still involve compensation of the creators. If more and more people start getting their media from public libraries, the creators can raise their prices to compensate. A public library buying 10 copies of a movie and loaning them out to various local citizens is totally different from some guy putting a copy online and making it available for free to the entire world, in that there is a still a well-established way that the creators get compensated by making their stuff available through libraries.
Yeah, if you only listen to it once, both situations are identical. The problem is that once you listen to it more than once, or distribute the copy to your friends, this is no longer the case, and you’re depriving the creator of compensation, either directly or indirectly.
Your idea of people paying a flat rate for access to all content, and the creators getting compensated with a flat rate based on the number of consumers, is absurd and unworkable. There are tons of problems with it. To name just one - high-end software often costs millions of dollars to develop, and may only have a potential market of a few tens of companies. For example, I have worked for a company that develops very specialized fluid dynamics simulations for a specific industry. How exactly would this company survive in your flat rate compensation system? Their license price is in the range of a few million dollars, and they sell only a few licenses per year.
As you say, the government would not support them if they tried to distribute it outside FECMA, so they would have no legal protection if a customer distributed their software for free. This would cause them to go out of business, since they would have no legally enforceable way to derive money from software sales. And if they were paid the same flat rate as some guy in his backyard that builds the next Angry Birds, they’d collect only a few hundred dollars a year at most. Conversely, the government would be bankrupted if they were paid their usual license fee for each user, yet every yahoo who paid their annual $250 FECMA fee were legally allowed to use the software.