Democracy can only survive until people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury:

We wanted to make sure arts were not left out of the recovery,” said Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. “The artist’s paycheck is every bit as important as the steelworker’s paycheck or the autoworker’s paycheck.”

To the artist?  Perhaps.

As a “public good” – the sort of thing the government is supposed to concern itself with?  They should be equally unimportant.

For the moment eyes are largely turned to the National Endowment for the Arts. Dana Gioia, the outgoing chairman, officially stepped down on Inauguration Day and President Obama has not yet named his successor.

In Congress the American Recovery and Reinvestment bill, approved last week by the House Appropriations Committee, includes a $50 million supplement for the N.E.A. to distribute directly to nonprofit arts organizations and also through state and local arts agencies.

The bill is expected to go to the full House for a vote on Wednesday before proceeding to the Senate. It could reach the president’s desk as early as mid-February, an N.E.A. spokeswoman said.

They’re pushing for a cabinet-level  “Secretary of Culture” post.  Orwellian overtones aside, sure – why not do all the wonderful things for arts that having a Secretary and an Executive-branch bureaucracy has done for Education, Housing and Energy?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under Socialism American Style. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.