UK Authors aren't making a living from writing.

[sr71plt]

Og, I have been told that the UK market is particularly difficult to break into for new fiction authors because of the dominance of a couple of retailers, WH Smith and Waterstones. They allegedly demand a substantial 'up front' payment from publishers and authors to put their books in the store and argue that it is a legitimate marketing expense. Is this correct? Such payments, if made, would be illegal in some other jurisdictions (hidden commissions).

If correct, these demands might also drive even more authors towards internet selling.

When I was living in a former British colony and writing mysteries about British expatriates there, I tried to get a British publisher and was told that I couldn't be published by them simply because I wasn't British. That was before a couple of them began to gobble up the rest of them.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

'Hate to say this, but...' Do I really hate to say it - not sure.

I have a set of filters I guess you could say, to pick through a regular selection of the new stories lists.

My estimation is that not much more than about twenty individual writers produce (what would be) the consistently commercially marketable material here - and, I would even say, just plain good whether commercial or not. From the literally thousands and thousands of stories here, most of which are self-indulgent in the sense that they are the writer appealing to his or her own cherished impression of some sort of romantic or nostalgic vision of THEIR own love of stories (not necessarily a bad thing in its own way) - only a very very few make it as engaging to seasoned readers. The basis for any reason that I should be believed? Well, I've done close copy editing and been inside both the legal departments AND production departments of big corporates in the entertainment industry. I lived and worked in Chicago in the late Eighties for what was then United Australasian and American Filmco, which made Superman, The Thorn Birds, and The Year of Living Dangerously.

I have a family member, let's say somewhere RIGHT AT THE VERY CENTRE of the production of the movie Love Actually. This is not a good thing for me - I hated the idea when it was pitched and I thought the whole storyline was absolutely crass when I first heard it; except that the casting in the end was so superb and the eventual script and wrap so fucking good it is one of my favourite of all time flicks. I know it took a long long long long time to get the movie made.

WaddoIknow?!

The thing is though, for those professionals who write here, I am pretty sure one of the main reasons they do is that it is so liberating - you don't have to justify anything, follow any publisher's explicit or implied orders, or worry about your normal paying reader base and their expectations. Not too deeply, anyway.

If you are a self-indulgent, nostalgic romantic, living in a golden era that is long gone, you can't really expect writing to make serious or even any money for you... I don't believe.

But if you are a serious writer with some handle on what constitutes writing for a more broad and experienced reading audience, then you have to realise that the modern world has altered the economics of the average person's disposable cash - and their time as well. There is a guilt trip put onto people who buy cheap paperbacks, whereas there is an unstated 'point' to having a piece of technology hardware that also allows you to read erotic or adult stories on the side.

The economics of publishing and the trade in books or virtual books has changed.

Does this mean no writer will ever make a decent living again?

Far, far from it.

There are more words 'traded' today than ever before throughout the whole history of Mankind.

There's plenty of salt water in the sea too.

And there's some fresh water.

And there's some wine.

But there are only around two thousand bottles of Angelus or Haut Brion made every year.

Quality in, and the knowing of what your product really is and who it appeals to that will pay for it, are key to understanding why and how you can make a lot of money from writing erotic or adult subject material fiction.

Writers deal in ideas. Not old ideas that everyone else has - new ideas that no one else has had yet. Even if you think you are writing nostalgic detective fiction, I'll guarantee you that there will be some new spin or new angle in anything that achieves significant appeal and a wide readership or a premium selective readership.

Some of you guys who talk all this doom fraught stuff about how little writing earns are totally forgetting how powerful real writers are.

A writer - a real writer - has a great deal of self-confidence with the proposition that he or she can give a depressed, miserable, downtrodden, even decadent world, an idea that will spin their heads around so fast they won't know what the * is going on.

Plato was a writer, Homer was a writer, Hans Christian Anderson was a writer, even Adolf Hitler was a (bad one!) writer.

Moses was a writer, and ultimately, if there is or was a god, god is nothing if not a writer.

In fact there is the ultimate solution to belief/atheism: there is definitely a god and he/she/it is a writer and certainly possesses all the characteristics of one. Stupidity, naiivite, knave-ity, self-doubt, no doubt, not enough doubt when it comes Man, megalomania, grandiosity, invisibility, over-exposure, under-exposure, hatred of critics, love of fans... Et cetera et cetera et cetera. And the occasional mysterious brilliance that cannot rationally be explained.

Does god earn a decent living?

 

[sr71plt]

My only quibble is with the "twenty" figure. I may just be guessing--maybe you are a voracious reader eighty hours a day--but my presumption is that there are hundreds of authors you haven't even encountered yet on Literotica who write/wrote real gems of stories. (And, no, I don't think you'll find much of their work in the top lists.)

 

[Hypoxia]

Does god earn a decent living?

'God' is a job title, not a proper name. Do gods earn decent livings? Allah, B0b, {JHWH}, and Eric Clapton all seem to be doing well. Osiris, Odin, Quetazlcoatl, and Garelamaisama -- not so great, these days.

In fact there is the ultimate solution to belief/atheism: there is definitely a god and he/she/it is a writer and certainly possesses all the characteristics of one. Stupidity, naiivite, knave-ity, self-doubt, no doubt, not enough doubt when it comes Man, megalomania, grandiosity, invisibility, over-exposure, under-exposure, hatred of critics, love of fans... Et cetera et cetera et cetera. And the occasional mysterious brilliance that cannot rationally be explained.

Interesting idea -- creator gods as more-or-less failed writers. Self-published too, right? I sense some plot bunnies hopping around in there. Let's see: A contest on the Goderotica website pits wannabee divine storytellers against each other, competing for votes and faves, and being slaughtered by trolls. Something like that.

 

[StrangeLife]

Does god earn a decent living?

Next time you are in Rome Italy, you should drop by and visit his house. The dude is not exactly slumming it...

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/068/cache/st-peters-basilica_6809_600x450.jpg

 

[PayDay]

Next time you are in Rome Italy, you should drop by and visit his house. The dude is not exactly slumming it...

Sick burn

 

[NaokoSmith]

I read this article in the FT Weekend last Sat, which really disappointed me. (Can Books Cross Borders - it's about whether we can only understand books written in our own culture.)

I was disappointed not because of the boringly jingoistic idea of Michael Gove that young people should be forced to read Dickens instead of Steinbeck.

The whole article pondered whether you can read a book that is not set in your own culture, as if literary studies is all about some kind of cultural anthropology. You would only read Steinbeck to get a sense of the United States. Oh, but wait, you only get a sense of the United States in the Depression in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Christ knows what Gove thinks we are going to get out of Dickens with such a limited notion.

I figure if writers are to be valued, then we ought to think about what it is writers are writing. Just a banal account of a particular time and place?

Acksherly, I like to read Homer and Milton and William Carlos Williams and T.E. Lawrence. I like to read them not because they instil in me some sense of Britishness , nor for the understanding of another time and place they might offer. I like them because the way they use language thrills me.

It drives me wild that schools will not teach young people about how writing is formed: rhetoric. If you do an English Language exam, they tell you to write a story. It's very hard to fail a story (although that newbie who popped into the board to beg for an adulterous underage 5 parter seemed to be managing it spectacularly well). They try to squeeze you a Pass, instead of teaching you to write a proper essay.

Gosh, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains the most unethical piece of writing I have read. That's not because of the content, it's the exquisite Oxford prose, which uses exactly the same beautifully balanced sentences whether describing a line of camels crossing the desert or being raped by a Turkish commandant. That is just so wrong! (I adore and loathe it.)

And Steinbeck's novel - that's not about imagery, or human relations, or that a dog could eat your manuscript and you have to re-write it and it be brilliant. It's just about the United States.

Auerbach's Mimesis, which I am slowly exploring, argues that the style and the ethos of Classical vs. Christian literatures were inextricably entwined. What kind of ethics are we operating by, if our banal body of literature is just a lot of stories about a particular time and place? No wonder, then, that writers are not highly regarded enough to be paid properly.

 

[DesEsseintes]

Superbly put, NaokoSmith. I've long argued against the naive idea that art merely holds a mirror to nature, or the even more absurd notion that art can teach us to be good people. Perhaps the majority of humanity has had absolutely no feeling for art whatsoever, but that did not make them bad people. Many of the Nazi commandants were exceptionally cultured people, but that appreciation of Beethoven and Velasquez did not seem to render them humane.

Every historical programme seems desperate to assure us that the Romans/Byzantines/Mesopotamians/etc, etc were 'just like us', in a feeble attempt to keep people watching. Science fiction is marketed with the idea that really we are not reading about different planets and species, but gaining a different angle on ourselves. How dull. How narrow. Well, I'm bored of humans. Have you ever met any? They're largely dreadful - 'haunted sacks of meat', as Charlie Brooker once described them. I don't want to read about people like me. Why on earth would I? I know what people like me are like. I want my mind to be expanded; I want my prejudices challenged, not confirmed.

If anything were to make one despair, it would be this notion which, pursued to its logical conclusion, merely echoes the hopelessness of the Bible's 'nothing new under the sun'. Art means itself, nothing more. It is not ethics by another name.

But I do have to make a feeble protest against the cheery free marketeering tone of several of the last posts. I am an unashamed paternalist: truly great artists (I am far from claiming I am one, before anyone gets the wrong idea!) need to be supported, by rich patrons or by their modern equivalent, the State, simply because great art is an inherent good which does not need to prove itself by any methods other than aesthetic ones. And the rabble will never buy good literature until they are properly educated. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, there needs to be a way of supporting artists - playwrights, painters, film-makers, musicians as well as novelists - whose work is important, but which will never pay for itself. For unless we wish to sink, within a few generations, into a morass of mediocrity and demotic outpourings of little to no value, we must keep the great artists from starvation.

We do this for classical music, especially opera. We do it for ballet and theatre. Why not for writing?

 

[sr71plt]

Some truly great artists are/have been independently wealthy and don't need anyone to support them. Being independently wealthy is what gave them free reign to develop and train their art.

 

[oggbashan]

...We do this for classical music, especially opera. We do it for ballet and theatre. Why not for writing?

I'm not sure we do.

The New York Metropolitan Opera is one of the best in the world, yet it is struggling with its finances. Part of its problem is the featherbedding of the stage hands. Every live transmission shows armies of people moving scenery in a way that no unsubsidised theatre could afford.

The Royal Opera House Covent Garden produces the same effect with a small percentage of the people, less expensive machinery, and far less space.

Both companies are supported by government funds and public and private sponsors, massively so.

It is almost impossible for an individual to create a new opera and get it performed. There are few funds available to support an operatic composer and librettist, and the financial risk of staging a new work would be crippling.

Ballet? Theatre? Both have the same financial problem. A new ballet can be staged to known classical music by a popular composer, but to newly composed music - that is very rare even if it has been done. A new play? If it can be staged with a very few actors and little stage effects/scenery it might stand a chance in the experimental theatres, but any large cast or special effects - no one can take the risk.

We continually revisit and restage the classics - with subsidies - but we don't support the new.

 

[DesEsseintes]

I suspect that is largely true, unfortunately. We certainly don't value the new. I was lucky enough to see the world premiere of the wonderful Thomas Ades opera The Tempest several years ago, at Covent Garden - he was then well-known in his field, but by no means a household name, so it was certainly not a banker. What intrigued me was that I was able to get stalls seats, more or less the best in the house, for £50, with little fuss, not long before the night. The same tickets for Tristan, or Figaro, or Aida, would have been at least 3-4 times as much, and in any case I would never have had a chance because they would all have gone to the members. Bayreuth, of course, is even worse.

Plays, as you suggest, are different - premieres of difficult new plays are commonplace, but perhaps they do tend to be small-handers. But we do at least have government funding for opera and theatre, even if it is very limited and takes few risks. Why not a similar scheme for writers - perhaps limited to those who have already had at least one book published, or matched funding so that royalties/advances can actually pay a few bills for a new writer. It needn't be at all expensive. But, perhaps because publishing in terms of sheer volume is obviously in rude health, it is not perceived as a problem.

Oh well. I am sure I seem a dinosaur. But I remain an unabashed Reithian when it comes to culture. And for me, 'popular' culture is very much like 'alternative' medicine. If it's good enough, it loses the first word and becomes, simply, 'culture'. But that's a curved too far for this interesting thread, so I'll leave it there.

 

[NaokoSmith]

I remain an unabashed Reithian when it comes to culture. And for me, 'popular' culture is very much like 'alternative' medicine. If it's good enough, it loses the first word and becomes, simply, 'culture'. But that's a curved too far for this interesting thread, so I'll leave it there.

Oh no, threads in here often get distorted far beyond their beginnings. Uh, usually because of flirting <snerk>, it's true.

One of the things I enjoy about living in Wales is the wholly different ethos in relation to popular culture. This is the land of Raymond Williams and of Working Men's Club lectures on culture, a land where one of the key universities: Bangor, was set up with contributions by farmers and quarrymen from their wages.

I was thinking recently about how the poetry of Welsh writers: Dylan Thomas, Owen Sheers, transcends the Cartesian split between mind and body. Although that probably is a sideways leap out of this thread, LOL.

I think the way forward has to be education, although how we achieve a decent arts education while choosing to vote between Philistines and Barbarians is a question. Nowadays, at least we have the internet so we can debate across meaningless global borders about culture without relying on local political restrictions. Gently critiquing smut with the occasional tip about finer writing might help too . Smut is so popular, a good candidate for smuggling understanding about ethics into people's consciousness à la Trojan horse.

 

[DesEsseintes]

I think a lot of good poetry - perhaps all - does that. Ted Hughes, than whom a more English poet has perhaps never lived, talked about poetry getting under the skin, and getting his fingernails dirty. The merging of the sensual world and what one might as well call the soul is, for me, at the heart of poetry. Catholicism understands this better than Protestantism. We cannot transcend our flesh, we humans. But we might transcend through it.

And whilst Wales, as you point out, is perhaps the epicentre of that late Victorian urge to autodidacticism, it used to be almost universal. Every mining village had its library, and its Shakespeare society. Almost all gone now - people say they have no time, but they certainly have more time and energy than those who set up such institutions after a twelve hour shift down the pit. And education goes on for longer, and is more professionally taught. I think the issue is wider than merely education. It comes down to the conscious redefinition of our culture as fundamentally instrumental. Everything must be measured - at least in quantitative terms, and preferably financially. Wilde's aphorism that all art is quite useless would be seen as even more radical today than when he first made it.

 

[NaokoSmith]

You know, you are probably right. It's the poetry, not the Welshness.

And the lack of interest in a thorough cultural education has to be saying something about us as a human society.

I always think Damien Hirst's horrid art is the art of our age, although I dislike it - perhaps that's why I dislike it. It seems to be a repetitive statement that art is only worth what people will pay for it. I heard one story that someone was telling Damien Hirst about a blot picture he had bought, and Hirst said: "Oh I think that was one I let my kids do," and the person sort of blanched and giggled nervously. A lot of his art was created in a factory way - Lauren Child worked at sticking spots on some of his spot paintings. There is nothing wrong intrinsically with factory creation of art, as in the Campbell's soup tins. But when people will buy a skull embedded with diamonds as an investment not as art, then there is something wrong - not with that artwork, but with the society which values it so highly.

More highly than Chris Ofili's beautiful golden monkeys which are such as stinging critique of religion.

More highly than Lauren Child's lovely patchwork appliqué pieces. Piglet is too old for them now, but we used to love to get the comic books based on Lauren Child characters, with patterned paper and stickers which we cut out and pasted into story-art about growing plants or going on a summer holiday. That was a kind of popular art, although of course it was only bourgeois kids like Piglet who got into it.

I do admire the BBC, though, who produce the cheapest little kids' comic which is packed with edutainment and sticker art. I am sure they deliberately make it cheapest, hoping to draw in those who don't normally do this pretentious middle class stuff which is such fun and makes you think about the world around you.

 

[DesEsseintes]

We appear to be of one mind, madam. I cannot stand Damien Hirst's work, for all the reasons you give. It is commercial in the most naked, unashamed sense. And I do not think we should be ashamed of his popularity, since he is not popular. He is collectible, by rich, international clients who know what makes a good investment has little or nothing to do with the moral, aesthetic or even practical value of an object. No-one thinks Hirst is the greatest British artist of our age, just as no-one thinks an 1810 bottle of Napoleon brandy will make a better drink than a variety of top modern brandies. Each is a commodity which will make money. Hirst's 'value' says little about British culture as a whole.

Nonetheless, I agree that our sense of the importance of culture has been diminished appallingly over the last 40-50 years, as a function of both left and right wing ideologies. From the left we have cultural relativism - let us not make judgements or discriminate between different cultures, lest we offend someone. Let us not dare to say that perhaps there is more worth in a Wagner opera than in a Pharrel Williams tune. Let us not, for heaven's sake, suggest that some types of art - the best kinds - are hard work, and take years of intelligent application to understand and appreciate properly.

The free-market right, on the other hand, has been busily undermining the idea that there is any value at all beyond the monetary. Films and theatre may be funded, but only if the producers can prove that they will make more money. Arts Council applications have several pages of criteria which are nothing to do with the value of the production(s) they are ostensibly meant to fund, and everything to do with measuring outcomes. On this reading, Dan Brown and JK Rowling are better writers than Beckett and Joyce, and Madonna a greater musician that Mozart. After all, dying in a pauper's grave makes you a failure, doesn't it?

So we the people are oppressed on both sides, by those who falsely raise dross to the status of the highest art, and those who falsely diminish the highest art to the status of a packet of biscuits, or a barrel of oil. Both destroy the importance of great works of art which are, along with great science and great architecture, one of the pinnacles of all human existence.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I always think Damien Hirst's horrid art is the art of our age, although I dislike it - perhaps that's why I dislike it.

At least we have Banksy. Wit, heart, and relevance, and not afraid to take chances.

http://banksy.co.uk/out.asp

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

DesEsseintes - Oh I do think you are totally correct there about the state's role. What it should be, that is. We are a little beyond hoping the state will do it, however.

My own belief is that we are living in a certain time of decadence. Some kind of decadence, I'm not entirely sure which kind. Too much of one type of technology maybe (high volume manufacturing, industrialism) and too much fake money backed by laws and force and not real exchange.

So I think it's kind of a bit late (at this precise moment in history) to hope or ask for the state to be a patron. I agree it should be. It won't be though unless it is patronising propaganda which it will do with all guns blazing as it were.

One of the big problems with writers being properly valued is that because of the very nature of their 'uniqueness' in copyrighted fiction, it is hard to make them a 'bloc' that has to be reckoned with by society. Sure, using the language in written words demands a level of skills but this just gets interpreted as a teacher's role, not a writer's role - although that was not always the case at all.

I always want to try and help any writer who wants to earn a living from writing - but today's economics makes it difficult to tell people the truth about what you know.

I am left with this old story I recall from somewhere, and I would apply it to all those who are dedicated to writing:

there was this Greek philosopher once that everyone made fun of because they thought he neglected what was 'important' in life, and went around looking up at the stars and disregarding things beneath his feet and one day he even fell into a big pit and people made fun of him. However, he was a very clever person who was deep in thought about some very engaging philosophical problem and knew very well that he was disregarding much of what was going on around him, but he also knew that if he turned his attention to the mundane, he would have much greater facilities than those who criticised him.

And so, one day he sold everything he had and bought up all the olive presses around - which were cheap because there had been an extended drought and no one had much work for the olive presses.

The next year when there was a bumper crop of olives he became the richest man in the region where he lived by increasing the cost of using olive presses. After he made his point he went back to his original real occupation.

Today, we are each of us living in the same circumstances and are being depreciated by the same ignorant average mentalities.

I would suggest sticking to the trade and to the craft.

Writing is a lot like philosophy - people don't see the point of it.

I don't fancy their chances though, if a good writer turned on them for real.

 

[Swilly]

The free-market right, on the other hand, has been busily undermining the idea that there is any value at all beyond the monetary. Films and theatre may be funded, but only if the producers can prove that they will make more money. Arts Council applications have several pages of criteria which are nothing to do with the value of the production(s) they are ostensibly meant to fund, and everything to do with measuring outcomes. On this reading, Dan Brown and JK Rowling are better writers than Beckett and Joyce, and Madonna a greater musician that Mozart. After all, dying in a pauper's grave makes you a failure, doesn't it?

You know, people are free to produce whatever art they'd like to produce. The free market doesn't stop them. It just doesn't fund them if the art isn't marketable. The idea that someone else should finance an artist's desires and work is ludicrous. I write here because I enjoy this form of expression. I don't expect anyone to pay me to do it.

 

[DesEsseintes]

You know, people are free to produce whatever art they'd like to produce. The free market doesn't stop them. It just doesn't fund them if the art isn't marketable. The idea that someone else should finance an artist's desires and work is ludicrous. I write here because I enjoy this form of expression. I don't expect anyone to pay me to do it.

Do you think there is anything not financially viable which is worth funding? Healthcare? Police? Transport? Fundamental science? Armed forces? Education? Roads and infrastructure?

None of these things will make huge profits, if any. Most of us see them as something worth paying for, because they make our lives better. And because, as Lear has it:

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.​

Now, unless you are the kind of libertarian who believes nothing should be funded centrally at all, you agree that there are some things worth paying for even if they do not make a return.

If so, then we are merely discussing which things should be funded. That's a question about specifics, not principles. Or, to quote Lord Beaverbrook in a somewhat different context: "Madam, we have established what you are. Now we are just haggling over price."

 

[Swilly]

I believe that some of those things are the only reason government exists. The problem with government, however, is that it has an insatiable desire to grow. As part of that process, it begins to assume responsibility-or attempts to-for things that government never should be involved with. I don't at all see it as being a question of specifics instead of principles. There are specific things the government was created to do in order to maintain a society. Funding the arts just isn't one of them. Hell, healthcare isn't one of them either, for that matter.


Based upon your writing, you are surely bright enough to make a distinction between theater and the armed forces. One preserves the union, the other is essentially recreation, even if the art has meaning. Not the same thing at all.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

duplicate

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Which is rather amusing considering how willing British royals and nobles were to intermarry at the cousin level over the centuries.

Quite untrue. The lineage was very well protected and relations outside 'the direct line' were termed 'over the blanket' and any offspring quickly hidden.

The issue you are skating over is that with small populations and a need to protect inheritance, European aristocracy accepted bastards as a natural result of extra-marital liaisons.

Even today, intermarriage/intercourse between cousins is not illegal in most of Europe. Or many US states.

Legal marriage between cousins has always been legal in Europe. Just the puritan settlers from Europe turned irrelevant religious 'issues' into some religious fervour.

 

[Aynmair]

Let's just say that intermarriage of cousins hasn't done wonders for the health or intelligence of royal families or any other instance where it's allowed. Yes, the chances of genetic mishap are lower than between siblings, but over 10% in each generation. Accepting bastards was the smartest thing they could have done.

Quite untrue. The lineage was very well protected and relations outside 'the direct line' were termed 'over the blanket' and any offspring quickly hidden.

The issue you are skating over is that with small populations and a need to protect inheritance, European aristocracy accepted bastards as a natural result of extra-marital liaisons.

Even today, intermarriage/intercourse between cousins is not illegal in most of Europe. Or many US states.

Legal marriage between cousins has always been legal in Europe. Just the puritan settlers from Europe turned irrelevant religious 'issues' into some religious fervour.

 

[Aynmair]

DesEsseintes's points are good ones. I'll take a single example that I'm well familiar with - when Sarah Palin took the research establishment to task for funding work in house flies as being irrelevant to human health, she was showing her staggering ignorance. (Among other things, cancer treatments would be nowhere what they are without the research she aimed her guns at. The scary thing is how influential she was and is, in a ludicrous way.) Without basic research funded by the government, the quality and length of our lives would be quite different.

It is perhaps more difficult to decide which/what works of art improve the quality of our lives, but peer review, as is well-established in the sciences, has worked well enough, as imperfect as it is. We used to have something similar in the US for art (Nat'l Endowment for the Arts) until the Republicans gutted it.

In both the case of art and science, the benefits are only obvious in retrospect, and often long removed. Perhaps Michelangelo's David was seen in the same light as Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial pieces at the time. Stravinsky's Spring certainly did not go over well.

Talent and health should not be restricted to the wealthy. All of society loses when they are. I do think it is more a matter of specifics than principles, but then I also think US citizens get what we deserve when we pay as little as we do in taxes. You see it comparing standards of living at various levels. And yes, my AH Profile says I'm a bleeding heart liberal.

I believe that some of those things are the only reason government exists. The problem with government, however, is that it has an insatiable desire to grow. As part of that process, it begins to assume responsibility-or attempts to-for things that government never should be involved with. I don't at all see it as being a question of specifics instead of principles. There are specific things the government was created to do in order to maintain a society. Funding the arts just isn't one of them. Hell, healthcare isn't one of them either, for that matter.


Based upon your writing, you are surely bright enough to make a distinction between theater and the armed forces. One preserves the union, the other is essentially recreation, even if the art has meaning. Not the same thing at all.

Do you think there is anything not financially viable which is worth funding? Healthcare? Police? Transport? Fundamental science? Armed forces? Education? Roads and infrastructure?

None of these things will make huge profits, if any. Most of us see them as something worth paying for, because they make our lives better. And because, as Lear has it:

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.​

Now, unless you are the kind of libertarian who believes nothing should be funded centrally at all, you agree that there are some things worth paying for even if they do not make a return.

If so, then we are merely discussing which things should be funded. That's a question about specifics, not principles. Or, to quote Lord Beaverbrook in a somewhat different context: "Madam, we have established what you are. Now we are just haggling over price."

 

[Bramblethorn]

Talent and health should not be restricted to the wealthy. All of society loses when they are. I do think it is more a matter of specifics than principles, but then I also think US citizens get what we deserve when we pay as little as we do in taxes. You see it comparing standards of living at various levels. And yes, my AH Profile says I'm a bleeding heart liberal.

For that matter, free-market health models aren't so great even for the rich in the long term.

Take something like tuberculosis. You can take a universal-healthcare approach and make sure everybody gets thorough treatment, aim to eradicate it from your country altogether (and then screen to stop it from getting back in).

Or you can take the free-market approach. The rich get treated with a full course of first-line antibiotics that cures their illness, the poor get incomplete or no treatment. In the short term that works out pretty well for the rich. But in the long term it's a perfect environment for breeding multi-drug-resistant, extensively-drug-resistant, and totally-drug-resistant TB, and then everybody is fucked.

It's like trying to run a fire brigade or an army that only defends every tenth house. In economic parlance, the free-market model fails miserably because there are massive externalities involved. The same is true for art these days: digital tech means that people who don't pay for the creation of art still benefit from that creation.