1. From Jason Potts.
For conservatives, public funding of arts and culture is worthy when it supports the values of civilisation, which means a John Ruskin type view of the best of cultural heritage: museums, galleries, botanical gardens and opera will always do well here. What this group is hostile to are threats against that – barbarism – which come from the transgressive, edgy frontiers of arts and culture.
He offers a three-axis model take on arts funding.
2. From Tim Harford.
People are too used to the idea that someone else – the state or an insurer – will pay the bill. Free choice is nice but what everyone seems to prefer is free treatment.
Pointer from Mark Thoma. I call it the desire to be insulated from paying for health care.
The Harford piece is the usual Obamanite double-talk, first denying that Obamacare involves rationing at all, then admitting that it does, but that’s okay. Of course, all third-party payer systems involve rationing, but the special charm of Obamacare is that it will reduce the quality of care for the middle class to finance the expansion of care to the underclass (including recent unskilled immigrants whom we are told are such a boon to the country’s wellbeing). Meanwhile, the Democrats harvest middle class votes by screaming about the Koch brothers, the war against women, and similar irrelevancies and hallucinations.
Other than Tyler Cowen I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard a conservative (sic) stumping for taxpayer funding of the arts, per se. Perhaps it is a matter of a lesser outrage to the point of not moving the needle versus a jar of urine filled with a cross.
Someone once made a perhaps spurious distinction between art that is meant to exalt artistry (and culture?) versus the kind of stuff that people look at and say “how is that art? I could do that with a paintball gun” that is supposed to me more subversive- e.g. The Beatles vs Yoko Ono.