Stop Government Support for the Arts

I am going to open with an analogy that hopefully drive home an important point.



If you were to walk by a beggar leaning against a 10 story building with a sign that said "hungry, needs food" how would you address the problem?

In one approach, you would go into a store, buy him a meal, and bring it to him. Every last penny you spent went to feed that man. Nothing was wasted. The man did not take your $10 and go into the liquor store and buy wine, or down the corner for a rock of crack, or whatever drug he wanted. This approach is efficient and effective.

Another approach would be to publically sanction a criminal gang to go out and mug citizens of the city. Those gang members at gunpoint would rob people of their earnings, taking more from people with more, and taking less from people who had less, to avoid taking all that they had. In exchange for this service, the gang keeps some of the money then transfers the rest to a politician who makes some wonderful speech about how HE PERSONALLY is addressing the problem of hunger. The politician then gives a fraction of the money, say $10,000 to his staffer who pockets $1,000, and goes to the top of that 10 story building and shakes the money bag out. A stream of dollars falls down the long way to the ground, and our intended hungry man grabs a $10 dollar bill which he then beelines for the liquor store to buy as many bottles of cheap wine as he can. Our wonderfully unbiased TV crews and reporters from the Washington Post go in and do a human interest story about how greatly this man has prospered from the centralized hunger program instituted by the politician, and voters go pull the plug in November for him, sanctioning the entire process.

This second approach is corrupt, ineffective, and inefficient.

Yet the standard liberal argument against those who openly reject the second approach is that they are inhumane, uncaring, hateful people who wish the poor to die in hunger.

Lost is the relevant discussion about what is the most efficient and effective means of charity. The false choice between (hunger) and (federal anti hunger programs) is pandered off to the media, and many within the public swallow this notion whole that the only solution to this problem is the federal one.

As you centralize charity, you increase waste fraud and abuse.

This arts funding question by the government falls right in this same box. The false choice here is between (no funding and starving artists) and (wasteful, corrupt, and ineffective federal funding of the arts). Sorry, I am not buying it. If you think an artist does good work, you can personally go buy that artist's work and directly support them. This is the most effective way of supporting the arts, with zero waste. Those who do not like that artist are free to not support them.

But when you have federal programs to support the arts, you have people being robbed of their tax dollars against their will, to support artists they may hate, and money loss at each and every step of the way of the dollars going uphill to the distribution point, and downhill to the artist. You also have the corruption and political waste of redirecting those dollars to whatever purpose will most likely re-elect that politician.

I am so tired of a world in which some sob story is used to rationalize this theft of the fruits of my labor to be redistributed to things I oppose regardless of my say. Our constitution spells out and limits the power of our government to specific enumerated areas, and imposed centralized charity is not one of those areas.

As we see in the UK and Greece where this notion of centralized charity is taken to its logical extreme and those nations fail finacially. Can we not use this as a wake up call to examine the base premise of federalized charity?