Government plays a huge role in people’s daily lives, managing everything from utilities to roads to local parks. But should elected officials and government staff use taxpayer dollars to support the arts?
A new book from Professor Michael Rushton at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs asks whether there is a moral imperative for government to support the arts.
“The Moral Foundation of Public Funding for the Arts,” recently published by Palgrave Macmillan, aims to answer some of the central questions in arts policy, including why an arts policy exists at all, why the arts aren’t just left to the private market, why governments in other countries support the arts more than governments in the United States, who deserves arts funding, and more.
“Governments grant money to arts organizations – opera companies, orchestras, nonprofit theatres, ballet companies, and art museums,” Rushton said. “In the U.S., this is through such entities as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Arts Commission. But only a minority of people actually attend these sorts of offerings. The percentage of adult Americans who go to the opera or a non-musical stage play in a year is in the single digits. Furthermore, the people who do attend tend to be better off – richer, with higher levels of formal education.
“So how can we morally justify using tax dollars, collected from the population at large, to subsidize the arts?”
The book considers various ways the question can be answered. Is it for the “greater good,” even if some people are paying for something from which they receive no benefit? Maybe people who don’t attend the arts do benefit, but in subtle ways? Is it wrong for governments to pick and choose which arts are worthy of subsidy and which are not? Is there a communitarian interest in preserving culture beyond what individuals like or do not like?
“I hope that readers are spurred to think about what turns out to be a difficult public policy question,” Rushton said. “I do not advocate for one approach or another; I do not conclude ‘we should all be utilitarians about this’ or ‘we should all be communitarians about this.’ I do want people to consider different perspectives, utilitarian and communitarian, liberal and conservative. That’s what we have done for years now in the O’Neill course on public policy and the arts. I thought it was time to get this down in a book.”
“The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts,” is available from Springer Link or wherever books are sold.
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