It's Time To Unendow the Arts

Burt Prelusky at Big Hollywood is not a fan of federal funding for the "arts":

For years, I have argued against the very existence of the National Endowment of the Arts. If an artist can’t be self-sustaining in a capitalist country as large and as rich as America, he should get into another line of work. It’s certainly not the business of the politicians and the bureaucrats, who you notice aren’t spending their own money, to support him and his artistic pipe-dreams.

If 300 million of us have decided we don’t wish to underwrite inferior work, where do a handful of senators and congressmen get off wasting millions of our tax dollars to keep these dilettantes in beer and skittles?

Understand, I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy, and I have no problem with the private sector squandering its own money any way it likes. Heck, if the trustees of the MacArthur Foundation see fit to bestow $300,000 grants on a bunch of weirdos who write Eskimo poetry or build sand castles, that’s their affair. Still, I can’t imagine why they’d rather give all that money to some beatnik who makes giraffes out of pipe cleaners, and will probably blow the dough on cheap hooch and wild women, when they could just as easily give it to me, knowing that I will use it to buy tax-free municipal bonds.

Almost every time you read about a community going berserk over an art exhibit that is either sheer pornography or re-creates the Christmas crèche using animal blood and human excrement, you can rest assured it’s your tax dollars at work.

Read the rest of it here. Artists for years have produced works that could never get funding on its own. Somebody in Washington funnels dollars to these losers in the misguided notion that their "voices are important" and we need to "support diversity" in the arts. I'm with Prelusky - if you want to support a Virgin Mary made out of elephant dung, have at it. But don't make me pay for it with my tax money.

The U.S. Treasury can no longer afford to support artistic endeavors that cannot make it in the commercial world, whether it be a performance art piece by somebody who paints themselves purple and sits naked in a box, or National Public Radio. The National Endowment for the Arts is a luxury which could be acceptable in a time of budget surpluses, but not in a time of trillion dollar deficits.