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Comment by mrcrumb1 | Hacker News Reader

The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy. Clearly lots of people value the arts enough to want the government to be funding it. To frame it as some ivory tower conspiracy to get a free ride from the government seems a little disingenuous.

I don't necessarily disagree that there are business models that could support good quality content, or that UBI is a good way to keep arts alive; maybe we could have all three.

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> The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy.

I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.

(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.

To be clear, we're talking about funding of the arts here. Without going down the rabbit hole of debating all of your critiques of the civil servant, if you really have this view of the public sector of the government of the US, then public spending on arts funding is pretty far down the totem pole as far as problems go.

I will say I think your general picture of civil servants as a cabal of lobbyists and special interest does apply to a portion (arguably a disproportionately powerful portion) of them, but the population of civil servants is huge and is definitely not monolithic.

> Clearly lots of people value the arts enough to want the government to be funding it.

More accurately, they want someone else to fund it. They don't find it worthwhile to spend their own money on it.

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