🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <tdamkf8@zola.esd.sgi.com> rmr@sgi.com (Robert M. Reimann) writes:
>
>I'm talking about keeping all the unique voices
>that chronicle the American experience alive and shouting,
>including those on the margins of our mass culture.

Interestingly enough, I would say our disagreement is not moral
moral but economic.

You appear to think of art as a "public good."  A public good is any
good whose benefits cannot be restricted to those who pay for it.
National defense, for example, is a public good.

Free societies have an awful hard time financing public goods.
Suppose, for example, that the United States of Atlantis (an
up-and-coming utopia somewhere off the coast of Portugal) finds
itself under attack by the evil Kassites - savage barbarians with
absolutely no respect for human life and no love for anything but
gold, broadswords, and forcible anal sodomy.  If the US of A does
not defend itself, its great civilization will be destroyed in a
night, and its valiant citizens forced to undergo the most
horrible and degrading tortures that man has ever devised.

Fortunately, the US of A has a thriving free-market economy, which
springs to the challenge.  Prominent among the new startups is
Joe's Defense Inc.  Pay Joe's Defense a thousand zorkmids and they
will use it to furious advantage in the cause of great Atlantis.
No $600 hammers here.  These boys are clean, lean, and mean - and
to a man they have perfect rectal virginity.

So for a while this works perfectly.  But then Warren Wonk, a man of
intense avarice but little martial spirit, hits upon a great idea.
"Hey," he says to himself.  "The Samuelsons down the street are
still paying their Joe's Defense bill.  So are the Schlumbergers.
So are the Sungs - and the Sumbothos.  So nothing bad will happen
if I stop paying mine!"  This idea spreads.  Soon no one at all is
buying Joe's Defense.  The brave young men with the teflon
sphincters run out of ammo and are overrun by the brutal Kassites.
As this is a family newsgroup we end our story here, but the
creative and bloody-minded among ye can surely fill in the details.

Now, the traditional libertarian approach is to cast a cloak over
one's eyes and maintain that charitable impulses will take care of 
these annoying creatures, and, furthermore, they don't exist
anyway.

Hah.  Almost Communist in their sheer bloody-minded stupidity.

Fortunately I have no such moral qualms, and am perfectly ready to
stick a gun in your back and make you pay up if a real Public Good
is at stake.

But what I don't see is how art, or literature in specific, is
such a good.  After all, to my stubbornly myopic view of things,
it seems that restricting the reading of books to those who pay
for them is perfectly good disqualification from this exalted
status.

Because let's not forget what we're doing when we subsidize
literature.  I might be able to support it but I will brook no
euphemisms in the process.  What we are doing is forcing people to
buy books that they do not want to read; and before you do this
you had better have a pretty damn good reason.

Right?

c