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- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesDecember 2012 Supporting the "public good" by Daniel Grant On government funding for the arts in Europe & America. There are three reasons that arts advocates customarily give for continued and increasing governmental contributions to the arts. The first, oldest, and most traditional (and least used nowadays) is that the arts are a “public good”—that the arts are good for us. The second rationale, which has been increasingly used since the mid-1970s, is that money funneled into the arts by government has a “multiplier effect”; that is, publicly expended arts money helps the rest of the economy. The third is made by comparing arts support in the United States with that of most other industrialized nations, finding that the United States lags behind Canada and much of Europe (and should become more like them). Each of these arguments is problematical. Who is to say what is “good” for you or for anyone, and what makes it good? There is something highly elitist and top-down about the idea of a public good. Th ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 December 2012, on page 32 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Supporting-the--public-good--7500
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The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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