 examples we were talking a little bit about is music. So I'm Canadian and the one of the great Canadian pastimes is to hate Nickelback, but of course Nickelback is a pretty successful band. So if you don't know Thomas Kincaid, you might know Nickelback and maybe you can sympathize with me or you're going, what are you talking about? Nickelback is great, but if you are, please don't tell me. And you can also say, you know, there's another argument to be had considering music. A good friend of mine is a big fan of Steely Dan, a band from the 70s. I can't stand them. I can't, I have to leave the room when they're on. I just hate them. But listening to them, I understand that it is well done music. There's a lot of talent there. There's a lot of skill there. I understand why people who are not me would like it and would value it. It's very, you know, so it's good art. It's just good art that I really don't like, right? So you can have these three different categories operating all parallel to one another, right? The economic value of something, the artistic value of something, and then the subjective value that that thing has to you as a person when you're deciding how much economic value on it, whether you want it in your house or whether you want it on your stereo. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of a lot to think about. So I'm going to take this opportunity to let everyone know that you can ask questions anytime and we'll tackle them a few times through the event. And these are the kind of basic things that we're going to be building on through the event. So if you are not clear, feel free to ask questions. So that's one way that we can get confused about art, or I'm sorry, art in subjective value. And in subjective value and art, it's a little bit more obvious. People kind of get that teach their own. But on other topics outside of art, there are some things that people believe if the value isn't subjective. For instance, there are a lot of people that believe things like gold have inherent value, or people who believe that the amount of work that someone puts into something should matter and how much it's worth. We can talk a little bit about that because I think that's an important distinction as well from a theory that says that value is primarily subjective. Right. I think actually, Janet, that the labor theory of value is really interesting when you think about art. There's an art movement called Dada that was big in the 60s and Marcel Duchamp was famous for artistic stunts like taking a urinal from a men's room and mounting it in the louvre as part of an artistic exhibit. And I think it's called Fountain or something like that. And people look at that and become outraged. All he did was take a urinal from a men's room and decide that it was art. And then all of a sudden it's an artistic piece and it is worth, I don't even know what that would go for, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. Probably a lot because I waited for one room to another room and declare that it is art. And so they're mystified how with this little work something can gain that much in value. Yeah. Right. Another example would be those paintings that are kind of a big block of color with a line through it. Yeah, color field paintings. Yeah, absolutely. When you have sort of like arrangement in blue and gray and it's a big blue square with a gray stripe across it. And people say, well, my five year old could do that. Why is that? If there's no effort in it, how is it art? Yeah. And by contrast, Thomas Kincaid probably spends quite a bit of time because there's a lot of detail in those paintings. Enormously effort. Definitely, that's a common theory of value and it's not quite right. Because, for instance, things can be valued for quite a bit more. And in the case of Thomas Kincaid or in the case of a lot of things, you can put a lot of labor into something. And it's a little bit more obvious and things that aren't art. For instance, you could spend I could spend a really long time doing some electrical work for you. It would not be very valuable. It might work. But the amount of work that I put into it is not what's important. What's important is whether or not it works for you, which is a lot more subjective. Do you have any thoughts on I know how I feel about things like gold having some sort of intrinsic value? Do you have any thoughts on that? I don't think it's necessarily a settled question. I'm not I'm not. We're getting out of my territory. So I'm getting a little nervous here. I'm not quite sure what you mean by intrinsic value in that case. I mean, it seems to me that that, you know, one of the reasons that it's valuable is because it's it's rare. One of the reasons it's valuable is because of the uses to which we put it. But if aliens landed tomorrow with spaceships full of gold, we wouldn't suddenly be an incredibly rich. I mean, you know, if suddenly everybody had buckets and buckets and buckets full of gold, gold wouldn't be worth that much anymore. Right. So yeah, it's a lot. And I think that although you were out of your comfort zone, I think that was a good way of putting it because yeah, you're right. It what matters is how useful it is to us and how easy it is for us to put it to the uses that we want to put it, which is not something that's intrinsic to gold, it really depends on how we value it. Right. And you know, you can look at literary examples too. There's a great novel by Frank Norris called McTeague, which is about, among other things, the Gold Direction California. And it ends, I'm going to spoil it for you guys now, I'm sorry, but the novel was written in like 1901. So I feel like the spoiler warnings have kind of run out by now on this one. But it's a great novel and you should read it because it's very strange and it's a wild ride, but it ends with two mortal enemies stuck together in Death Valley, dying from thirst with all kinds of gold around them. Right. And that gold is not doing them a whole lot of good right then what they need is a good bottle of water, right. And they don't have it. And so and there's no one to get it from. So the gold's not worth anything. Yeah. Which is interesting, because there is more water than gold, which is a whole other webinar. Okay, awesome. So, Sarah, if you have anything else that you want to talk about on subjective value specifically, please feel free because we don't have any questions just yet. But if anybody has any questions, I'll encourage you to ask them now. And while we do, I'm going to launch our first poll, which is just a little bit It is just a little bit of fun for you guys, I'll give you about a minute to answer. And it just kind of allows you to weigh in even if you haven't thought of a specific question. And yeah, and as I said, this is the stuff that we're going to kind of build on it's okay that you guys don't have questions now because it leaves us time for more questions later, which is fun. And maybe these things will trigger different thoughts as we go into art more specifically. So my favorite labor theory of value, example, Janet, because I spend a lot of time talking to college professors is about student papers, right? Because there's always the kid who got the D on the paper and comes in and says, but I worked so hard. Right? And you have enormous sympathy for the kid, but you have to say yes, you worked really, really hard and you produced a D paper. It's not about, you know, it's not about sometimes how hard you worked. There are there are other standards that that are in play. Okay, I'm going to give you guys just a couple more seconds. And I will close this and we will reappear. And hopefully you guys can now see a amusing comic from Saturday morning breakfast cereal. And this will help us launch into our next discussion, which is going to be on art more specifically. Hooray. So, yeah, we talked a little bit about this already. Everyone agrees that tastes very. But sometimes people talk about art being priceless. And we talked a little bit about people saying, Well, you know, some art, I don't like it, but it's worth quite a bit of money. Or I don't understand why it's worth money, but it's worth a lot of money. But what's going on when people start saying that art is priceless? It's a really good question. I think sometimes it means I don't want to think about putting a price on it, right? Putting a price on it seems to sully it with all of that evil economic stuff that we don't like to talk about, and that we don't like to think about, right? Artists, however, are perfectly happy most of the time to put a price on their art because they're trying to make money from it. They're trying to make a living from it. It's a tricky one. When Milton wrote Paradise Lost, the publisher paid him 10 pounds for it. People tend to get outraged by that because to pay 10 pounds for this epic poem, that is one of the greatest works of English literature and that we are still reading 450 years later, it seems like it was a little low. It seems like he didn't get paid enough money for that. Paradise Lost is priceless, right? But one of the things that makes it priceless is the stuff that Milton's publisher couldn't have known. One of the things that makes Paradise Lost priceless is that we're still reading it 450 years later. Milton's publisher did not know and could not have known that that was going to happen, right? He didn't know that it was going to become a major cultural touchstone for the 18th century and the 19th century and the 20th and the 21st century, right? So that's completely unpredictable. What he had on his hands was a really, really long poem about the Bible by a guy who had been in an extraordinary amount of trouble for being part of a rebellion against the government, right? So, 10 pounds under that circumstances with those considerations, pretty good price for it. And that's back when 10 pounds was 10 pounds, of course. Yeah, as opposed to whatever it is now. And it's the kind of, I mean, I don't know if anybody ever tries to say that the Mona Lisa is priceless. The comic that should be below or possibly beside or maybe above us, depending on how you have us configured, kind of shows how economists, as you said, people don't like to put these nasty economic values on things and yet they exist. So I'm going to have to move something out of the way. It's something like 800 times more than the value of a human, 872 times more valuable than a human life, which is, of course, something else that people are, I think, justifiably uncomfortable with putting a price on. But yeah, I mean, it's a product of the times, but it's also a product of, and we had one comment from Rachel who says that she thinks that value is sometimes assigned by experience of which it was a part. For instance, the flag that was planted on the moon is probably more valuable than a flag that you could buy at Canadian Tire. It doesn't need to be art for that to be true. Right. And this can go some way to, if we go back to Duchamp, making the particular urinal that he chose into art, one of the things that makes that art is that Marcel Duchamp said that it was. Right. That is part of that experience accumulating around the thing. Right. And so I think Rachel's right about that. I also think that things become so interwoven into the way that we look at the world and the way that we think about the world that it's very hard to imagine what life would be like if they didn't exist. Right. So think about, I don't know, Shakespeare's place or think about Beatles. Right. Right. Love them or hate them. Right. The Beatles music is everywhere. Everybody's heard it. It's woven into everything. My six year old sings Yellow Submarine, not because I play it for her, but because she's heard it somewhere. It's just sort of in the in the cultural air. And so when we talk about what's the Beatles music worth, one of the things that were one of the sort of counterfactuals we're trying to imagine is what would the world be like if what would the world that we have now be like if all of a sudden this thread that has been running through it for so long suddenly doesn't exist. Yeah. Right. That's it. So it's hard to think of a world without the music of the Beatles in it. It's hard to think of a world without the Mona Lisa in it and without the eight million parodies of the Mona Lisa. Yeah. Right. That's a big part of how it's contributed. And obviously something that's not really valid. Well, I don't know. Actually, I don't know if there's any way to know if that's something that's valued in the value of the Mona Lisa. And they say it's eight hundred and seventy times two times the value of a human life. For people who don't read Saturday morning breakfast cereal, I actually believe that he looked it up. Oh, I'm sure that there's somebody involved with that comic as an economist. Clearly. It's great if you guys don't regularly check it out. Do. And I know that I wanted to put aside a little bit of time because Sarah has her most valuable piece of art or one of one of I don't want to cause fights. One of her most valuable pieces of art. Actually, I have two of my most valuable pieces of art that she's willing to share with us. So, I'm going to give her a second. They're right here. I'll take the camera and get them. So, these these are this is priceless art for me. The first is titled Little Dogs by Penelope Washow, age six. These are the little dogs. And the second by Abigail Washow, a related artist, is a robot on the polka dot planet. These are the most valuable pieces of art that I own. And I expect some of the people listening to this webcast probably have similar pieces of art that they value similarly. They were free. Well, they have a zero dollar price tag on them. Let's not use the word free because I'll be bombarded later by economists arguing with me, but they had they cost me zero dollars to acquire that piece of art. But they are priceless and irreplaceable pieces of art. But that value is entirely subjective and I doubt very much that there's anyone else on the planet who would call them priceless. Or demand the extraordinarily high price that I'm sure you would need to be paged apart with them. Yes. Anyway, yeah, guys, I'm a big softie so I just had to let that happen. Sarah suggested it and I thought it was a cool idea. So, given all of that, one of the things that happens in awful lot is that the government gets involved in art. And you hear arguments that the government has to be involved in art because artists can go unappreciated in their time, for instance. An example is not coming to mind because it would be too convenient if it did. But I mean there are a lot of examples of this and things are becoming more niche. So what's the problem with that? Why is it so controversial when the government gets involved in art? Well, there are a lot of reasons. Probably for folks listening tonight, the objection is the government getting involved in anything. So, leaving that objection momentarily to the side, there are some very unpleasant things that happen when the government gets involved in art. There are unpleasant things that happen to art and there are unpleasant things that happen to artists when you have government involvement. So let's separate those out. In the essay that I wrote in Why Liberty that Atlas published and put out in combination with Students for Liberty, I began the essay with a long list of artists who had been exiled, persecuted, executed, put into prison, find enormous amounts of money and so on because the government didn't like the art that they were producing. Quite often, as a government tyrannizes, the artists are some of the first people who get into trouble because they have voices that are persuasive and they have voices that are individualistic and they have voices to which people attend and they are able to create persuasive works that can run counter to the things that the government would like them to produce. So you can think about Ai Weiwei in China and his dissident art. You can think about the punk band Pussy Riot in Russia who have been worth it. Now I believe they're still in prison in Siberia. They may have been released. I don't think so but I think they're still in prison. They were hunger striking. You can think within the U.S. a rap artist whose name is escaping me at the moment, Sarah, something who wrote a rap about the sexist language that is common in other rap songs and was then fined by the FCC for using inappropriate language in her own rap. So she was not able to to make the comment that she wanted and she was refused radio play and so on and so on. So these are some of the bad things that that happen to artists. The more government, I don't want to say intervention, but the more government attention is given to art. The more that that art and artists are under government scrutiny. I think the more chance there is for the heavy hand of the government to to find artists and to use to use their power to simply squash things that they don't they don't want to have said. What can happen to art is also a bad thing. Thinking about art sort of as a thing itself. The Nazis and the the Soviets are sort of famous for government produced art right and for government funded government controlled artists and there are exhibits of this kind of art periodically and you see rapidly what happens to the kind of quality to the depth of the artistic work that is produced to the to the breadth of subject matter that that can be covered. There's very often sort of one or two approved styles in which to paint or in which to write or in which to compose and you get a limited and constrained and confined kind of art that's produced for that. And so it is a good thing you know Virginia Woolf says that in order to write you need to have money in a room of one's own right. It is a good thing to have a source of support for artwork right. Whether that is a wealthy spouse, a wealthy family, whether it's having a day job in an insurance office like Kafka did or as a doctor like William Carlos Williams did. Or a friend with a room or a friend with a spare room or you know or a way of sort of or doing what Thoreau did right and lessening your needs cutting back on your needs and cutting back on your desires until you can provide with the minimal work for your basic needs so that you can do it all of your time to writing. That's good that's good stuff that does help art happen but I think we have to be very cautious about saying the government needs to do that because once you open that door and you let the government in they're in there and they're observing and they're controlling. They're a very powerful patron and they're a patron that has not historically been at all shy about executing the artists who were not fulfilling their job description for their satisfaction. I'm going to play devil's advocate just a little bit and say that of course we saw terrible things happen under the Nazis and under communist governments but governments today aren't that they're not as they're certainly not as bad as Nazi Germany or communism under Stalin for instance and they do provide support for the creation of art do you think that there's any way around I mean I I know that there are some instances of censorship like the government will not support extremely controversial art even if some people find it quite valuable. Do you think that those little instances of censorship are are still important? I do I mean we can look at at US government censorship in in World War II I mean right where the forgive me you're Canadian US is the good guys right in World War II. We've all seen the movies you guys are good guys too right and we're the good guys and there was heavy heavy censorship of artistic production during the war there was there's been a heavy censorship in in the movie industry since the late 20s or early 30s with the Hayes code and it's hard it's hard to say what we would have if there were not that kind of interference I mean my my childhood was filled with oh I'm going to lose the name of the organization there was a mother's organization that was all about censoring the rock music that the children were listening to it was very hell and lovejoy type stuff and Frank Zappa was a big crusader against that because he was one of their main targets right and this is when you started seeing you know when I was a young teenager is when you started seeing warning labels on albums produced in the US about language and about content and and about that kind of thing and you know yes it's milder yes uh funding the arts you know if you want to talk about things I think the government should stop pouring money into right I got a whole long list and and the arts are kind of down towards the bottom of it I mean if they're going to be spending money I'd rather have them be spending money on art than on bombs yeah for instance I mean for instance for example um but um but I don't I don't think it does I don't think it does artistic production a lot of good and I do think that it gets in the way of as with as with other kinds of private funding government funding crowds out the private funding yeah and that's that's always a problem yeah uh that's I mean and you we are just also because of the nature of the government being something that's funded by everybody um it's going to be very difficult for small artists who appeal to only a few people even if they are extraordinarily important to those few people to get funding from the kind of like the kind of uh base that the government needs to appeal to so it's sort of hard to say that the types of people that we believe need the support whose value is hard to see are also the types of people um where the value is very subjective and individualized that are going to get the art fund arts funding from something like the government right and if you think as I do that one of the useful things that art can do is to provide a voice for people who we don't hear right for people who's um who don't who we don't hear for voices that we don't know are out there right another another big moment uh when I was growing up I grew up in Cleveland Ohio and south of Cleveland is Cincinnati Ohio which is a very conservative town and there was an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs right and Mapplethorpe is a gay photographer whose many of whose photographs are um of nude or semi-nude gay men often with a BDSM theme to it okay and his work was being exhibited in the Cincinnati Art Museum which I believe is government funded and it the exhibit was I also believe and I didn't I'm sorry I didn't check my facts on this because I didn't know that um I didn't know this was going to come up um but I believe that that exhibit was either shut down or or censored or parts of it were were made be were made to to be removed from the exhibit um and for me that's a problem um because again um Mapplethorpe's work like it or not want to hang it in your living room or not um is artistically extraordinary um and very important and well worth hanging in an art museum and and it's a voice that you know in in the the mid to late 80s as the AIDS epidemic was um beginning to heat up and really beginning to spiral out of control and and and get a lot of attention this was this was a voice that people needed to hear this was an artist who people should pay attention to and it was being shut down because it's a it's a fringe voice and that's that's a problem when that um okay so yeah it we can definitely see how political art is uh is it can be more controversial anyways especially as far as the government's concerned um but we've talked a little bit in the past and you've written I shared an article of yours this week um on the big ideas live facebook page about the value of political art do you think that people who feel that their voices aren't being heard should try to increase the amount of art that has you sometimes hear uh conservative or libertarian writers saying well all writers are bleeding heart liberals uh what are we going to do the only thing that we can do is start paying conservatives and libertarians to start writing conservative and libertarian art to balance this out um i'm saying conservative and libertarian they probably don't say and they say the one that they want um do you think there's a problem with that do you think that that's that art is still valuable um i kind of know the answer but i don't know if uh i know the whole answer so well i i think two things i think i think many things all at once apparently and can't can't put them into order i think that um i think that there is more art that is interested in questions of liberty than we think that there is i think and you know this is what this is what my column um in the freeman is is trying to do right every other week i write a piece about um a piece of literature that hasn't been getting a whole lot of attention generally that has liberty themes in it or free market themes in it um and well i'm not jumping up and down and and shouting the you know the goal of that is for people to look at those accumulated columns and say oh hey you know there actually is a lot of this stuff out there maybe we should pay attention to some of this stuff and maybe we should talk about it and maybe what we need to do is bring our leanings for liberty our desire for liberty to the art to the great art that's out there and see what's there that speaks to us and speaks to our concerns and speaks to our interests so that's part one okay so i don't think that the problem is can i make fair quotes i care where there's my scare quotes i don't think the problem is as big as a lot of people think that it is um okay i i do think uh and and um i do think though that it's always worth encouraging artists who are doing work that you love and that is important to you and that's speaks to the things that you care about right so if somebody is writing um novels with liberty loving themes and free market themes that really really appeal to you buy them buy copies for your friends hand them around write fan mail write reviews about the stuff get the news out there if there are bands that are making music um that you love and they are you know and they are anarchist libertarians or they are you know they're they're writing and singing on liberty themes help them help promote them right help help buy them help make that happen for them um we have the power as consumers right to put our money where our values are and so when we find it um buy it promote it and trust me more will be produced right we believe in the market right we believe that we can send signals to the market and the market will respond right if it becomes if it becomes profitable um and important to produce good liberty loving free market loving art we're going to get more of it right yeah for sure um so do you think um given that there are probably people listening and people who uh maybe watch us on youtube we do save these for youtube guys be sure to check us out um who would support liberty loving art do you think that that means that people should go out and just make you know do their rallying cry for liberty like does everybody have to go out and write an atlas shrugged for instance um i'm sorry at least the middle of that does everybody oh it's okay does everybody have to go out and write an atlas shrugged for instance or or write some sort of uh call to action um in art uh just because oh do i think sort of the duty the duty of every good liberty loving individual is to make liberty loving pieces of art sure yeah no because comparative advantage right right um if you make art um and if you make art you're going to make the art that you need to make right you're going to make the art that that comes from your desire to create and your desire to speak about things that are important to you this does the art that you need to make if you are a person for whom these things are important that art will often contain some of that within it right but i i think it's i think that it's a mistake in general to sit down and say today i'm going to write a great novel about why it is important that we have a free market and why we should have smaller government or no government at all um rather than i'm writing a novel because i want to tell this story about these people going through these experiences i mean i think um think about hunger games right which i think and i'm not going to spoil it because the third movie isn't out and a lot of people are watching the movies and not seeing the books but for those who have read all of the way to the end of the trilogy for those of you who will see the third movie and you really need to see the third movie by the time that you get to the end of this trilogy you're reading a series that's remarkably anarchist in its in its preferences and in its desires and the ends that it chooses for the characters about whom we care um i doubt that the author sat down and said i'm going to write an anarchist primer before mid-grade to high school readers right it's possible that she did but i think that she wanted to tell a story about catness and about the hunger games and about these competitions and about this this world that she saw so clearly um and i think she wanted to tell us about that um and that the anarchy in the in the text are rose out of um the natural conclusions that come from the kind of story that she's telling yeah i i know another example is uh cori doctoro has a book called little brother that i know that you love um and i love it too and i recommend it highly um it was awarded a i'm not going to remember the name of the award but it was awarded a libertarian book prize it's about the surveillance state and when he accepted the award cori doctoro said oh yeah i'm not a libertarian that's not really raw i wrote the book but i see how you guys got that and that's cool that you did so yeah just i mean i think that it's you're right the you will find um important messages in good art that people made with care um or you won't right it might not appeal to you but that doesn't mean that it's not out there right david simon for example has famously people want you know libertarians go nuts over the wire which i mean just out of their heads of the wire and he was interviewed um in reasoned by nick gillespie and david simon said you people keep trying to make me into a libertarian i'm not a libertarian the wire is not a libertarian show maybe that whole um and yet right one of the things about making art is that when it leaves your hands and you send it out into the world things happen to it and people find things in it that you you weren't expecting them to find right um okay i'm gonna launch our next poll because it really feeds right off of what we're doing here and i've got a couple of questions that i'll start um i'll start going through now and give people a minute or two to uh answer the poll so the first one is from sandy he says you're very careful to define the subject of this discussion as economic value do you think value outside economics can be objective in any meaningful sense for example in art or ethics do uh so the question basically do i think that art that there are objective standards for value in art or and outside of art too um just outside of i can in what people normally think of as the economic sphere i think he can correct me if i'm misinterpreting that's a really good question um and it depends i think a lot on whether we're talking about um over time or at a given moment um art and i'm gonna i'm gonna limit this to art but i i expect that this applies across the board um to a lot of different things that that might be valued in ways other than economic right um art is enormously tied up with um historical taste and standards right so for example um one of my favorite poets john don is writing in the 1590s to about um the the early 1600s um is when he's he's doing um the most of his writing um done is phenomenal he's the guy who wrote no man is an island um he's he wrote definitely not proud um he's a he's a phenomenal poet just incredible um for years um from about the 18th century until t.s. aliet started writing about john don in uh in the 19 mid mid 20th century nobody read done he was out of fashion he was considered to be too irregular he was considered to be too clunky he was considered to be unskilled um over ornamented ornamented just just all sorts of very very bad things when t.s. aliet starts rereading him um and starts to write about him um and starts to point out the value that t.s. aliet finds in done's work done comes roaring back into style again right so i it depends right you could say for the standards of tastes of the 18th century done's work is objectively bad right but by the time you get to eliot writing great essays about john don you can say tastes are changing and in that moment done's work is objectively good so at particular points on a timeline i think you might be able to talk about objective standards for aesthetics um as uh as a movement through the whole of human history that's harder and probably the only way to start talking about that is that you sort of have to shrug and say well we have to see if it lasts okay right so you can talk about say Sophocles plays which have lasted a really long time now and have fallen in and out of style but they keep coming back right so that might point to some objective excellence in them right but you know it's it's a long time we're here for a long time or at least hopefully humans are here for a long time as a as a human culture right so i'm afraid that's not much of an answer well that's okay and i mean i think in terms of if we were going to and this that was more in aesthetics um rather than the kind of value we were talking about unless i misinterpreted you yeah that was more about sort of yeah subjective artistic aesthetic value judgments i would kind of just say um for beyond art um when you're talking i mean you started to get into this thing when you think about economics a lot where you're like what's a non-economic value i mean i think that uh almost all value is going to depend on the person and the time and the place and what they need in that moment and in that circumstance um it's a hard question to answer uh if anybody feels that we haven't done a good job feel free to jump in i've got the question to make it easy or reprieve yeah sure i've got three questions that are kind of similar so i'm going to amalgamate them in the interests of time so the first one is about children's art like reading rainbow or sesame street or government money that sends uh musicians to inner city schools or makes art available to children and even under the soviets this is the second question classical music was available to everybody at a much more affordable price because all art was sort of the same price um is there a problem with bringing moat's art to the masses and then the third one uh is that not all that so i think that these are um related and i hope you'll agree otherwise this is going to be a really complicated question the third one is that um a lot of art may be unlikely to pass the market test uh in that case should the government be providing the most unpopular art is that what should be subsidized so in all three cases i think we're talking about what about the art that's not necessarily going to make it through to the people that we believe it should make it through to because of restrictions on the market your children can't buy uh the art that would well they can't know what art is going to be valuable as they go forwards um the value of getting something like moat's art to everybody um and also the unknown value of unpopular or controversial or offensive art um do you think that those are cases in which it makes more sense for the government to be involved you know i think i think that there's a there are different questions going on here some of this is a question about delivery systems right is it necessary to um you know do you need to send the cleveland symphony into the classroom in order for the kids to hear the cleveland symphony you don't need to do that anymore and bringing in the cleveland symphony into the classroom through why look here i am in your living rooms right through uh through electronic media like this through cds through um that they don't it's not even cds anymore through what do you kids call it that the ipod right um and through through youtube performances and and all and and um spotify and all of these other ways that you can access music is becoming increasingly less expensive and increasingly accessible um to everybody and i think that that's important um but that's a delivery system question right i think that that there are also market responses growing up in cleveland in the 70s as i did the city was really interested in building their opera program and so what they did was for the um matinee performances they offered if you bought seasons a pair of adult seasons matinee tickets right for all of the operas you got x number of children's tickets for um i don't know seven dollars or performance right each performance this season so it let going to the opera become a family thing right and this was enormously smart because not only did they fill seats during the matinees when started philahouse but they grew up an entire generation of people in cleveland who started going to the opera when they were seven eight nine ten that's how you grow opera fans right so it was a smart market decision and it was a smart investment in the future of music in cleveland right um so i think that there are lots of ways to solve these problems that are not that don't have to be um that don't have to be done by by the government i do think art um art in the schools is very important um i think kids are natural artists and natural creators of art and appreciators of all kinds of art um but i i i question that that art has to be brought in by by the government yeah um i do have a couple of other uh responses from people i want to very quickly make sure that we touch on one thing before we go back to uh to questions because i think i i've got a couple more questions written down but we sort of handled one of them um but i want to talk with you sarah about the implications of the government not understanding subjective value which we can sort of see in the way that it funds art that's extraordinarily popular or we could also see for instance if uh as sandi suggested uh they only supported art that was very unpopular not understanding the way that art really depends on the person who's consuming it and the person who's making it um if we expand that uh the way that the government just doesn't understand subjective value more broadly that it's really an individual um an individualistic thing that you're not going to know ahead of time well we're we're pretty good friends and i don't know ahead i i don't know your favorite color for instance and i really don't expect the government to know your favorite color um and i don't expect the government to know how much you value something like weekends off for instance or a flexible work week or um you know any number of things being able to get insurance through your health uh through your employer i should say or how you would like to consume your health care how you would like to pay for anything really uh yeah i mean subjective value and the knowledge problem are like this yeah right and and just so everybody knows because we did handle this in a in a different event with Steve Horowitz the the knowledge problem is kind of the way that we can't know everything that is to be known because there are just too many brains with too many wonderful preferences and thoughts out there for us anybody to know all of them um and so and even i can't tell you my preference i mean i know some of my preferences right i happen to know that purple is my favorite color i happen to know that because i work a lot of weekends i am norm i place place enormous value on weekends when i'm not working right but you know i um i bought a vintage dress the other day because i saw it and it was beautiful and i didn't know that i valued a dress that was older than i am highly but i did and now i have it and it makes me heavier um but i couldn't had you asked me three days earlier you know how do you then value um you know a vintage 1968 paisley shift dress i would have said yeah and this doesn't mean you this also doesn't mean that you now value all um vintage dresses either and so even if we were to provide this uh this information or the number of people who value vintage dresses to try to aggregate um the values that are out there which is the kind of thing the government does that can create problems because the government doesn't individualize its policies right it creates one policy for everybody which is good we don't want the government picking and choosing favorites in as much as that's possible because you can hopefully quickly see the problems that will stem from that um but the government makes policies on a lot of things um more things than we can probably generalize about and we talked a little bit about this um in the case of visas what visas pay for when you uh apply for a job um we were talking about musicians but i i think that i found out that in canada we don't do this anymore but in the states they still do um musicians have to pay a fee to come to the country and the reason that you have to pay the fee is to pay for something that's called a labor market survey which is somebody from the bureau of labor statistics or probably immigration canada i might be getting that wrong um i got so excited that we don't do it anymore that i didn't look into use to do it um would check and make sure there wasn't another exactly the same person as you who's producing the music that you produce in the way that you produce it and you're taking that canadian or that americans job by doing it and sarah you told me there's something similar for um academics as well right if an american academic wants to come to canada you have to prove that that you're you're a unique academic individual um which of course you are which you shouldn't have to prove right right i mean it's ridiculous it's ridiculous on any number of levels right and and problematic and so and so i think that one message that i really hope that people can take home from our discussion today is um subjective value is important in art and it's important in in other things um but what makes it important is that we're individuals um and we need to really acknowledge more often that we don't know it it really does feed into like you said the knowledge problem they're like this uh we can't know how everybody's gonna value everything because it's so subjective and to try and make policies based on the idea that we can is at least problematic and we should be darn sure um that we know what we're doing and that we know that the decisions that we're making are really what everybody would like before foisting them upon people right and i think it's it's interesting that that you've sort of taken us into this um thinking about individuality because one of the the reasons that i value art as highly as i do and i this is um part of the discussion that's um in the the new students for liberty um an atlas book on peace love and liberty um i i did an essay for them about war poetry um and one of the reasons that i value art as highly as i do is because it is one of the best ways that we have of hearing the voices of individuals um it's one of our best ways that we have of of listening to people who we might not otherwise get to hear the poet tom weyman um has a poem that's called what good poems are for i think he's a canadian janet he might be a canadian but he's got a beautiful poem called what good poems are for and i'll i'll send you a link to it after this so you can put it up if you want to yeah i'll share it with everybody and it one of the lines in it is in a world full of people talking a person is speaking right and to me that difference between the cacophonous noise of all of these people talking and then out of that noise comes this one clear voice that we get a chance to really hear and really attend to um that's one of the things that that for me um is one of the reasons that i value art the way that i do yeah that's cool meh i got shivers from that line it's a good line it's a really beautiful poem um and let me just sorry guys i'm just going to look at the time we are very short on time but i'm glad we could talk about that because i want to get your brains working and you can feel free to email me afterwards but i'm in the meantime i'm going to launch our last poll which is just kind of some fun um and it'll give me a chance to read i have a comment from peter who i'm i'm gonna out him it's my dad and i did it dad uh he's i i've often held these on mondays and he works monday night so it's a he can listen because it's tuesday so he says most art is driven by the artist for a variety of motives or reasons politics may just be another motive or reason to create art the quality of the art that results will relate to the engagement of the artist on the subject how it is received and how it is valued will likely be a factor of the audience of which it was direct to which it was directed um an example of a widely used political piece of art and i would i'm going to elaborate on uh what my dad said and say it's it's actually propaganda was the iconic world war two recruitment poster uncle sam wants you the pieces both widely accepted and for that reason would be very valuable if you were given a chance to purchase the original um which i think is true and i wanted to uh quickly say that i think that's really true about that piece of art because that's being used um there's oh one of the one of the charles coke uh maybe the charles coke no no it's generation opportunity has of course used the uncle sam um iconic poster to predict protest the affordable care act um and so it's really interpreted in a wide variety of things that to someone who is more supportive of the military um it will be seen as patriotic and as someone who's uh maybe more opposed to war it can be seen as something that's maybe a little bit disturbing um right and a parallel example to this and i'm going to get the number of it wrong and somebody will probably type in and correct me um Shostakovich um was composing um under the soviets and his either fifth or tenth i think um has this incredibly grand militaristic march in the middle of it and it made the soviets really happy and when you hear it today it is dripping with irony and dripping with sarcasm and it is so hostile to the very kind of jingoist get jingoistic nationalistic militarization that the soviets were pushing that one is astounded that they could not hear it um or did not hear it and so yes it's really evolved beyond um and and i think um i think he's right when he says that um oh i have to share this i'm sorry people are confident that they love their mom as a mom i have to say i feel that that that works my heart except for one person who has been moved by us to be very concerned about the knowledge problem and is not sure how much the Mona Lisa likes their mom uh sorry guys i just had to share that um i wanted to say though that uh so i'm a pretty anti-war um person and yet given the chance to have that original copy of that poster i totally still would because it's just such a uh there is something that kind of transcends it right like if you don't like the Beatles but you could get an original cut of the white album you would be kind of a dummy to say no even if you just sold it but um anyway uh so that's kind of kind of wrap up our uh discussion but i wanted to give Sarah a chance to talk about some of her favorite artists and you should be and art i don't know how to qualify one of them if they're an artist or if it's art or what it is um so you should hopefully be able to see them on your screen um Sarah can you see them or is it only for the viewers i can see most of them i see night veil and i see writer versus wolf okay and so the third one is lindy vaughn jord oh well lindy of course right um and these these are not just uh these are not just favorite producers of art but these are um favorite producers of art um who either art that shares our interest um in liberty and in in uh in criticizing government and in the case of welcome to night veil particularly in criticizing uh government and also current capitalism um writer versus wolf um is we like to call them the bleeding heart libertarian house band um they're a band um that uh currently currently during some some touring their first cd is out um they're a bunch of anarchist uh libertarians as you can see from their little bomb um and they're bleeding heart libertarian in their friend out there um and uh they make great music they played at the students for liberty conference um and lindy vaughn jord is is of course the um what 12 foot tall icelandic liberty loving folk singer in canada um who's who's all over the the uh the internet and what i like about um what i like about their the works of art um produced by by all three of uh these sets of folks is um that it's not didactic i mean and i you know i enjoy didactic are john john papola's wraps on the hyacanes debate are brilliant right but they're they're teaching tools um you can also enjoy them you can enjoy them as art but they're teaching tools yeah and and this is this is pure aesthetic delight um the stuff these folks are producing so you might uh consider having listen um check out uh the touring panel actually all three of these um groups are on tour welcome tonight they'll those live shows radar versus wolf is touring and i know lindy tours a lot so check out their web pages and he's currently in atlantic canada so if there are any atlantic canadians and i think oh rats i can't remember which state radar versus wolf are in tonight i feel like it might be in florida right now but yeah they're touring the southeast right now so i will send links to everybody um so that you can check out whether these guys will be coming close to you and if not fear not dear listeners because they're all available uh to consume as uh online art um so thank you so much sarah for being on tonight this was so much fun um sarah has a column which she mentioned with the freeman i will be sharing that as well because they're just some really interesting book reviews uh it's unlikely that you will read another book review column that will make you think as hard and as in as unexpected ways as sarah's does thank you very much with everybody and um why liberty is already out you can find it through students for liberty um and peace love liberty is forthcoming both are available i believe why liberty i believe is available online as a pdf um and peace love liberty should be as well but you can also request copies they are to be made available to spread the wonderful uh writing and ideas that are in them um and just for zero dollars so yeah for zero monetary cost to you can have a copy of these lovely books um and i just wanted to give everybody a heads up about my next event which is with slone frost who is the uh oh she's got a cute name for students for liberty that i love uh she's like the mom of students for liberty mom the liberty mom that's yeah that's what it is uh it's great and she's wonderful and we're going to be talking about healthcare and why the system is such a mess um so i really hope that everybody will be available to tune in for that uh you should be able to see on your screen that it's at august 12th at 8 p.m uh eastern because slone is in the central time zone and i don't want to uh totally mess with everybody's dinner time so hopefully we have everybody available to come and join us and that's all for tonight thank you again sarah and thanks everybody for joining us thanks for coming everybody thanks for having me janet