Both the NPR and public-sector union controversies make me think of perpetual motion machines. In both cases organizations receive government funds which they can use to lobby public officials to receive more government funds.
Most people are familiar with this concern when it comes to public sector unions given that it is well-documented that unions use money automatically taken from publicly paid salaries and benefits to donate to campaigns, organize, and lobby for higher salaries and benefits from which they can extract higher dues to push for even higher compensation, etc… Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Mind you, I have no problem with private sector unions since they can only negotiate over how to divide profits with management and shareholders and cannot lobby to increase revenues without also increasing productivity. But public sector unions can lobby for higher revenues from which they can extract a larger share for themselves without having to do anything to enhance productivity.
But people are much less familiar with how NPR utilizes the same Public Funding Perpetual Motion Machine. As Congress debates de-funding public broadcasting, NPR is making announcements alerting their listeners to this possibility and urging them to visit a web site to organize a push to maintain and increase taxpayer funding of NPR. So, NPR wants money so that it can tell its listeners to organize to lobby so that they keep getting money. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Like all perpetual motion machines, these publicly funded ones are also frauds. The system is not self-sustaining and requires that resources be extracted from somewhere else — in the case of NPR and public sector unions, it is extracted from the taxpayer.
I should also note that I like a number of programs on NPR. But it is completely unacceptable for them to take money from me and others by force to pay for their broadcasts. I’m confident they can generate sufficient funds voluntarily and may well soon have to do exclusively that.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Lest we forget, the Fayetteville School Board routinely does the same thing. It tells students to tell their parents to support Board-supported bond proposals and spends public dollars campaigning for their passage, in outright violation of state law. This happens at each and every school board bond election.
Agree with Mr. Ash. Jay’s central point applies with even greater force to the communication medium we call “school”, since the recipients of the message do not have the adult experiene against which to assess the (mis)information they receive.