Why should you pay for the NHS if you haven't been to the doctor this year?
Why should you pay for subsidies for telecoms connections to poor rural households when you have plenty of money / don't use a phone / live in a city?
Why should you pay for pavement repairs when you drive everywhere?
Why should you pay for street lighting when you carry a torch if you go out at night.
Why should you pay for a police force if you don't commit crimes or get burgled?
Why should you pay for people to monitor riverwater when you don't even fish?
Why should you pay for schools if all your kids are grown up?
...
Taxes are paid, a small amount by all, to pay the large amounts for the few. That's how they work.
To be honest, I'd be quite happy to scrap TV licensing and actually just tax TV purchases. Literally put a 10% import / sales tax on new TV's. Problem solved. No complicated paperwork, no real evasion of it, easy to enforce (just tax the importers/manufacturers like you do for all kinds of things anyway), and then put the funds. Bigger, luxury TV's with all the knobs on would be charged more than tiny little screens, etc. Or even a tax on streaming services, there's no reason you couldn't tax Netflix/Amazon Prime/Google Play/etc. or subscription providers (Virgin, Sky, etc.) and make them increase their prices to reflect that.
The administration, legislation and enforcement of such licensing must cost me more than the BBC ever sees from my paying it. And I've lived without a TV for many years in the past, I didn't miss any of it. It's now literally the "something to watch while eating tea" phase of my life, and anything I do watch is purchased streams/DVDs of old shows and very, very rarely anything new.
When the tax rule is anything more complicated than "some percentage of an amount we collect anyway", without lots of disclaimers, exceptiosn and differences, the administrative costs just don't make it worthwhile. "10% on every new TV sold" is easy to implement, collect, enforce and prove evasion of. But they should have done it a year pre-digital, and THEN they could have raked in enough to keep the BBC going for 10 years on that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
