If people who actually like opera won’t fund it then then why should I, not an opera fan, fund it?
I like tennis but I would not force you to subsidize its existence.
I like tennis but I would not force you to subsidize its existence.
I am not a tennis enthusiast (actually, I hate tennis), yet I would suggest that there are good reasons to provide such funding. Encouraging participation in sport is a good thing. You don't have to agree with the particulars in order to agree with something in principle.
That said, I will agree that professional tennis (or opera, or football) should not be funded. For starters, it benefits a select few rather than society as a whole. Yes, that select few includes outside businesses who may see increased revenues or the people who may find jobs near the minimum wage and seasonal end of the spectrum. Granted, I have always been more favourable to the hope provided by social welfare (even when it doesn't work) than the cynicism of corporate subsidies (even when it does work), so don't treat my opinion as unbiased.
Now that is a fantastic distillation of public goods as a concept.
Well goddamn done.
Superbowl viewership started at 18 million, hit 90 million in 1994, peaked in 2015 with 114 (true east coast/west coast game) and fell way down to 100 million or less starting in 2018. Correlation isn't causation, but there has been a pretty strong uptick in streaming media, and a similar decline in professional sports viewership, which has traditionally been on broadcast TV.
https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/super-bowl-ratings-historic...
Yet, a significant portion of what you experience has been indirectly affected by these subsidies. I am willing to bet that opera has had a tremendous impact on the music you listen to, to keep a direct example.
Just arguing that "I don't immediately benefit from it, so I should not be paying for it" is probably a bit extreme.
But cities/states subsidize a lot of things from public transit to parks to parades to cultural venues to say nothing of schools out of taxes. To say all that should be completely privatized is, yes, an extreme position.
I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did.
But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up.
As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.)
Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.
The recent Winter Olympics in Beijing used the swimming stadium from the 2012 Summer Games for curling. I assume they just put a floor over the pool(s?) with cooling loops in it, and possibly some of the machinery in the emptied pool itself. Maybe they did it the same way in Vancouver?
Some things are good to have, even though they don't make money. There's a fun novella that parodies the opera mindset, called Maskerade:
“Who does the accounts?”
“All of us, really,” said Salzella.
“All of you?”
“Money gets put in, money gets taken out...” said Salzella vaguely. “Is it important?”
Bucket’s jaw dropped. “Is it important?”
“Because,” Salzella went on, smoothly, “opera doesn’t make money. Opera never makes money.”
“Good grief, man! Important? What’d I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I’d like to know, if I’d said that money wasn’t important?”
Salzella smiled humorlessly. “There are people out on the stage right now, sir,” he said, “who’d say that you would probably have made better cheeses.” He sighed, and leaned over the desk. “You see,” he said, “cheese does make money. And opera doesn’t. Opera’s what you spend money on.”
“But...what do you get out of it?”
“You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out,” said Salzella wearily.
While we're at it why not extend that to all forms of user-pay and individual focused system?
* Why dont parents bear the full cost of their children?
* Why do we have publicly funded fire departments?
Etc.
As a society, for better or worse, we've decided we'd rather have a public good available to all than to make certain things only privately available.