"Ending the National Endowment for the Arts would be good for the arts and good for America."
"As the U.S. Congress struggles to balance the federal budget and end the decades-long spiral of deficit spending, few programs seem more worthy of outright elimination than the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)," observes Laurence Jarvik in a recent Heritage Foundation report. Jarvik argues that "few federal agencies have been mired in more controversy than the NEA." Yet, advocates of taxpayer-funded "welfare for artists" persist in asserting that the NEA "promotes philanthropic giving, makes cultural programs accessible to those who can least afford them, and protects America's cultural heritage."
There is no basis for these assertions! Jarvik insists that the NEA actually discourages charitable giving, that its subsidies generally benefit the "upper-middle class," and that the art it favors is "offensive to most Americans." In other words, it doesn't do what its supporters say it does. Even if it succeeded in its avowed objectives, it would still be "an unwarranted extension of the federal government into the voluntary sector." In short, the U.S. Constitution provides no authorization for federal funding of the arts.
Nor do the arts need Uncle Sam's patronage. "The arts were flowering before the NEA came into being in 1965," Jarvik observes. From the beginning, NEA funding has been "just a drop in the bucket compared to giving to the arts by private citizens." Last year, for instance, the NEA contributed less than $100 million to the arts; private citizens, during the same period, contributed ten thousand times that amount: $10 billion! In fact, private support for the arts has gone up in recent years, as NEA funding has gone down.
Laurence Jarvik says enough is enough. "After more than three decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has failed in its mission to enhance the cultural life in the United States," he argues. "Despite numerous attempts to reinvent it, the NEA continues to promote the worst excesses of multiculturalism and political correctness, subsidizing art that demeans the values of ordinary Americans. As the federal debt soars to over $5 trillion," Jarvik concludes, "it is time to terminate the NEA as a wasteful, unjustified, unnecessary, and unpopular federal expenditure."
No artist need starve when the NEA ceases to subsidize his self-indulgence. If he wants to profit from the germinations of his genius, he'll simply have to put some effort into finding buyers for his work, or commission an agent to perform that service for him. Of course, if he can't find buyers for what he produces, he may want to consider producing something else, something that people will buy. If his immense integrity inhibits compromise, he may have to settle for a "day job," slaking his artistic instincts in twilight hours. No matter how fruitless his creative quest, he has no right to pick the pockets of American taxpayers. They, too, may be frustrated artists, and ought not be penalized for finding gainful employment.
