I find this a fascinating question: should the Arts, predominately enjoyed by the rich and the middle classes, be funded by Tax payers' cash?
Self identified leftwing commentator Oliver Kamm argues in defence of Opera subsidies (comments are interesting):
"In defence of opera subsidies
There used to be a Tory MP called Terry Dicks. He was so crude a right-wing populist that even Teddy Taylor, a veteran pro-hanger and anti-European, urgently disassociated himself from Dicks's views. Dicks's pet cause was hostility to public subsidy to the arts. The late Tony Banks said of him: "When he leaves the chamber, he probably goes to vandalise a few paintings somewhere. He is to the arts what Vlad the Impaler was to origami ... He is undoubtedly living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can be elected as a Member of Parliament."
So I immediately thought of Dicks when I read Fraser Nelson of The Spectator referring - without irony - to opera subsidy as a middle class rip-off. Dicks was the last person I remember using that argument. Here's how Fraser resurrects it:
"Great moment on the Today programme this morning when John Major – without irony – told James Naughtie how great the National Lottery was because an opera lover like him could benefit from the money poured into the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. That deal was perhaps the most egregious example of cash transferred from poor people to rich people, but sadly typical of the regressive nature of arts funding. I can understand the logic behind supporting indigenous arts lest they die out, but why have British taxpayers subsidise the singing of songs written a hundred years ago in Italian or German? If the usually-rich people who tend to watch opera do not wish to fund the real cost of it, I have never seen why hard-pressed taxpayers should cover a chunk of the ticket price. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy opera, I just don’t see why other people should subsidise my night out any more than they should subsidise my holiday."
Oh dear. Leave aside the cultural nationalism and the assumption that opera is an activity for the affluent; if Fraser believes the value of a night at the opera is the recreation he gets out of it, then at a minimum he has misperceived the economics of the transaction. If the state were to withdraw from subsidising opera from taxation - and the lottery is of course a voluntary levy - then the cost of it would simply not be met by those who attend. The gap would be filled by business sponsorship, with a bias against new and experimental productions. Imagine the vacuous populism of Classic FM on, literally, a grand operatic scale.
If you think that opera is just an individual consumption good like your holiday destination, then that won't trouble you. But if you consider the arts are a public good, and not only a private choice, then there is an impeccable liberal case for subsidy, understood as "a network of implicit contracts, which it would be prohibitively expensive to negotiate explicitly, both because of transaction costs and because of the incentive to act as a free rider and leave others to finance the activities of which one privately approves". (The quotation comes from Sir Samuel Brittan, who uses the example of arts subsidy, in his book The Role and Limits of Government: Essays in Political Economy, 1983, p. 56.)
Posted by Oliver Kamm on August 19, 2008
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