Man in a Shed: The arts

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Arty farty burdens on the tax payer

Man in a Shed is about to make himself very unpopular with the luvies but he can't see any reason for the state to fund arts - at all. There's a lot of special winging going on right now in the media over arts funding.

Like the lottery its a case of the poor paying tax to fund rich people's taste for opera and weird workshop on socially liberal topics.

Can I suggest arts funding is cut by 95%. Lower our taxes and let those who want to see and hear these things pay for it - or alternatively the performers / artists do it as a hobby.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman