Most cable channels can’t exist without mandatory cable fees. Without the buck per month or so they get from your cable bill, they go out of business. ESPN, for example, is on everyone’s cable service and the fee is something like $5 a month. They get close to seven billion a year from those fees, despite the fact only 20% of homes watch ESPN. If we ever went to a la carte pricing or pure pay per view, ESPN folds up shop. They only generate about two billion in ad revenue. If they survived, it would be a much different format. They would not be paying the NBA those enormous rights fees either.

A better example is MSNBC. This sob story in the NY Times reports that their best shows draw fewer eyes than late night informercials.

Rachel Maddow, the biggest star on the MSNBC cable network, just posted her lowest quarterly ratings results ever.

“Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s signature morning program, scored its second-lowest quarterly ratings, reaching an average of just 87,000 viewers in the key news demographic group.

And “Ronan Farrow Daily,” the network’s heavily promoted new afternoon show, which stars a 26-year-old Rhodes Scholar with a high-profile Hollywood lineage, has been largely a dud.

Though it has mostly happened quietly, which may be a comment on the cable network’s larger status in the media landscape, MSNBC has seen its ratings hit one of the deepest skids in its history, with the recently completed third quarter of 2014 generating some record lows.

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, acknowledged that his network had been struggling, but put it in the context of the overall drop in cable news. “This has been a tough year all around,” he said. “All three cable news channels are drawing a smaller combined audience than they were five years ago.” He also emphasized that despite the plunge that caused it to trail CNN in the last quarter, the network remained ahead of CNN for the full year.

In the past, MSNBC’s ratings have typically fallen during times of intensely followed major news events. The current period is awash in them, with stories like ISIS and Ebola commanding a high degree of international reporting. This plays well to CNN’s strengths.

MSNBC consciously established its brand as politics-centric, approaching stories from a left-of-center viewpoint, in deliberate contrast to the right-of-center approach of Fox News, which continues to dominate the news channel ratings. At the same time, MSNBC moved away from a close relationship with NBC News that it had during the early years of the network. Today, fewer NBC News correspondents appear on MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said that a general apathy about American politics has also hurt the network. “You can look at the dysfunction in Washington, the wariness about politics, the low approval ratings,” he said. “That’s had an impact. But we’ve got to adjust; we’ve got to evolve.”

MSNBC’s recent results have not been encouraging. During the third quarter, Ms. Maddow reached an average of 183,000 viewers in the audience component that most matters to MSNBC’s advertisers, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, her lowest total since she started her show in 2008.

Note how the Times tries to equate Fox News with MSNBC, like they are mirrors. That’s insane, of course. Fox is pretty much straight news with a prime time of infotainment shows. O’Reilly, Hannity and the others are entertainers. They generate the big ratings and that’s how you pay the bills, usually. MSNBC is just a parade of screaming lunatics. Rachel Madow looks and sounds like a woman struggling with her sanity. A generation ago, these people would never been allowed to be on television.

It is just another example of how socializing costs boils off the normal and rational, leaving the weird and the extreme. The proliferation of cable channels relies on every home having cable (or satellite) and paying roughly the same for the service. The 20% who love sports get ESPN at a far cheaper rate than under a pay-per-view scenario. Billions are shifted from people with no interest in sports to these sports teams, via the socialism of the cable bill. Instead of catering to a broad audience, ESPN can focus on fanatics and indulge in their crackpot politics.

CNN and then MSNBC followed a similar path. CNN got on everyone’s basic service, thus guaranteeing them a buck a month from every home, whether anyone watched or not. With a guaranteed revenue stream, they were free to indulge in whatever nonsense that was current at the time. Now, the only place people watch CNN is at airports. Similarly, MSNBC piggybacked on NBC to get on basic cable. They drifted into insanity and now the only place people watch is at the day room of the local asylum.

This happens whenever the link between the paying customer and the service provider is unclear, as is always the case with third party payments. Medical services get increasingly worse at the retail end because the patients are not the customers. It is the insurance company and government paying the bills. The schools are another example. The people running the schools care more about the unions and pressure groups than the students. People respond to incentives and when you funnel those incentives through third parties, it is natural to assume the needs of those third parties are supreme. In the case of the cable news channels, the money is there no matter what they do, so the weird tastes of the people running the channel dominate.

It is why I think a smart politician on the Right would be wise to champion a la carte cable. No one likes dealing with the cable monopolies. No one likes the fact they are paying for a bunch of channels they never watch. The cable monopoly is a perfect target for a populist politician. It’s why the lunatics chirp about “net neutrality” They know making the ISP’s into bad guys is easy money. The benefit to the Right is forcing a la carte pricing on the evil cable companies would go a long way toward de-funding the Left’s propaganda organs.