 Hello and welcome to today's debate on about the question, who should pay for the arts? My name is Jason Riddle. I'm the college programs manager for the foundation for economic education. The mission for fee is to educate, inspire and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical and legal principles of a free society. We're hosting this debate as part of a seminar called Life as Improv here in Decatur, Georgia to explore how art, culture and markets come together to create beautiful things. A special thanks to the Arthur and Roop Foundation for making this debate possible. I want to welcome all the students here live in the audience, as well as everybody that's watching from around the world. To start things off, I'm going to introduce the resolution we're going to be debating. Then I'm going to introduce today's participants, and then I'm going to explain the format of how we're going to proceed. The resolution we're going to be debating today is, the best way to spark artistic innovation and make art accessible is to let people choose to pay for it. Dr. Dan D'Amico will be supporting the resolution, and Rachel Soprioti will oppose. Now let me introduce you to our debate participants. Dr. Dan D'Amico is a Williams Barnett professor of free enterprise studies and an assistant professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans, where he has received awards for teaching, research and service. Daniel's research has been published in a variety of scholarly outlets, including Public Choice, Advances in Austrian Economics, the Journal of Private Enterprise, the Review of Austrian Economics, and the Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics. He completed his economics PhD from George Mason University in 2008 with field examinations in Constitutional Political Economy and Austrian Economics. Rachel Soprioti Arts the Spear. She serves on the board of directors as treasurer for the Georgia Arts Network, as well as the board member and marketing chair for Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Atlanta. She has acted as a state captain at National Arts Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C., for the past five years, and Rachel has a BA in English from Dartmouth College and is currently pursuing an MBA from Kennestal State University. The order with which we're going to pursue today's debate is as follows. Each debate participant will deliver eight minutes of opening statements starting with Dr. Dan D'Amico taking the affirmative stance. We'll follow with four minutes of rebuttal from each side, and then we'll open it up for a 15-minute Q&A period from the audience. Finally, we are going to close with three minutes of closing statements starting with Rachel. Again, the resolution we're going to be debating today is the best way to spark artistic innovation and make art accessible is to let people choose to pay for it. Dr. D'Amico, you have eight minutes. So again, I've been told that my resolution is to support the case for the best way to spark artistic innovation and make art accessible is to let people choose to pay for it. Another way to think of this question is what is the proper role of government in fostering art in society? And it's a very common topic that gets discussed whenever people are concerned about the implications and potentials of the free society or the limitations of government. But as an economist, I tried to sort of look up facts and figures and put context on how significant or important this issue really is. And ordinarily, I'd love to sort of start these conversations off with showing just how important and significant this issue is. But in fact, a lot of the data I came across suggests that this isn't that important of an issue insofar as the fact that the amount of public funding that goes into something like art relative to other areas of public funding is very, very negligible. And so if, for example, you're a natural rights libertarian and sort of opposed to the idea of the public collection of taxation and your major complaint is that the government is spending money on art, sort of an unrealistic or unreasonable complaint. If the government did nothing else but spend money on art, it really wouldn't be doing much at all. And in general, it seems reasonable to support the government spending more money on art and less money on things like bombs and guns and wars and stuff like that. To give some context for this, the 2015 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was recently released by President Obama at about $146 million. My own research tends to focus on issues of mass incarceration in the prison industrial complex, which at the state and local level spent in 2010 spent $48.5 billion. So the public spending on art is a drop in the bucket compared to other spending arenas relative. So to some extent, my case today is relatively easy, which is that I'm arguing for the status quo and I've never really found myself doing something like that. Typically what's made the American art scene good is in fact its decentralized nature of not directly picking winners and losers in the art market, but instead creating a general environment that is conducive to innovation, discovery, and sort of an entrepreneurial approach to having a variety of funding sources for art and expression and participation in the production and consumption of art. So the relevant question, I think, more so than just saying should the government be involved in promoting art or not, is more, is there a role for increased public spending on the margins in the art market? It is a far more relevant question. And I think that's a very hard case to make support for that to take an active position to say that the government should spend more and subsidize art more is a difficult case to make. Why? Well, take, for example, again, a sort of staunchy natural rights position, someone who opposes the notion that their wealth or taxation is being non-voluntarily taken from them to subsidize art that they don't necessarily like. This is not the case that I'm necessarily arguing, but it is one that I empathize with because myself, my own tastes and preferences, I can honestly say before I got interested in libertarianism, I never really found much public art enjoyable. The types of art that I tend to enjoy are more subversive and counter-cultural, and it doesn't seem that a lot of forms of publicly subsidized art will necessarily appeal to those tastes and preferences. And so I think that any argument for an increase in the public subsidy of art or the public collection of taxation for art has to account for the fact that it's not necessarily satisfying people's preferences who particularly don't like that art or don't like art at all. And that that ends up having a qualitative effect on the types of art that get produced by these forms of public subsidy. So in another way of putting this is like, why is public art tend to be so boring? I don't think that that's necessarily coincidental. I think it's actually embedded in the nature of incentives that are associated with democratic politics. In other words, controversial art, regard productions are inherently challenging. They're likely to be more contested than say preserving classical pieces of art. And in fact, the majority of public funding for art tends more to go towards the preservation of classic or uncontested forms of art relative to sponsoring new and creative and innovative potentials for art. Which is to say that the role of government in producing vibrant forms of diverse art markets that we have today is very small. It doesn't seem to be that our artistic thriving market necessarily rests foundationally on a significant role of government. It's estimated that things like public symphonies, for example, in the United States only rely on about 6% of their incomes from sort of direct public subsidies. Instead they have a combination of private benefactors, consumers who pay marginal user fees for their services, as well as other forms of grants and stuff that are encouraged through private charitable foundations. In other words, the thing that makes the American art market great is this decentralized nature. And to some extent I would say what we really should be doing in addition to maintaining the status quo of how art is supported by indirect processes in the government is saying that more things should be considered artistic and more industries in America should be given this sort of unique privilege. Now what does this actually look like? Well, for example, most individuals who voluntarily contribute to artistic charities, for example, get things like tax deductions. There's also very lenient and relatively laissez-faire protocols on taxes and regulations with regard to importing art from foreign markets. It's also relatively easy to run nonprofit organizations that get tax breaks in the United States that are dedicated to fostering art from private donations, etc. It's estimated that only, like, so given that $148 million budget of the NEA, year to year it boils down to about 50 cents in tax dollars per citizen, goes to artistic subsidies by the state. At the height of NEA size and scope it was no more than, say, 65 cents. But on average private citizens donate about $100 per person to tax deductible charities that are classified as artistic and humanities endeavors. So the private voluntary efforts of ordinary people are far outpace what it is that the government is necessarily providing in the status quo production of art in America. There's also a lot of good general environment for the indirect subsidy of art. So there's a lot of role in which government plays in fostering artistic creation in the United States, but it's accidental and indirect, far more sort of innovative art comes out of university systems that aren't necessarily intended for the creation and production of art, but actually happens to coordinate with that as well. So I would suppose there's a number of challenges for my opponent to make a strong case for the expansion or significant role of government and art and instead that we should just continue with the status quo, which is a decentralized open-ended nature of art production in America. Thank you, Dr. D'Amico. Rachel Soproti, you have eight minutes. Thanks. I'd like to start off with a quote. This is from an article in The New York Times. Bear with me here. The permanent orchestra season has, as usual, been financially a bad one all over the country. There's always a deficit. A permanent orchestra, it seems, pretty well established by American experience, is not at present a paying institution and is not likely to immediately become so. Nevertheless, the prevailing note of the guarantors of the American orchestra is one of hopefulness. Things are coming on. The public is being educated. It will support the orchestra in larger numbers until it is finally self-supporting. This is a quote from 1903. This quote could have been written last year or any other year in between 1903 and now. Part of my point here is going to be that funding for nonprofit arts institutions, there's a reason that they are nonprofit. There's a reason that Hollywood and Broadway and architectural firms don't receive public funding and nor should they. Part of the issue is that the funding issues that arts organizations come up against are not an issue of popularity. They're an issue of productivity. A researcher named Robert Flanagan did a study of the largest 63 U.S. orchestras over a 20-year period looking at why the costs have increased so much over time. Most of it is due to musician salaries growing. They're growing at the same rate as everyone else's salary. We can't pay a musician the same thing that they were making 50 years ago if there wouldn't be any professional musicians. However, in the rest of the American economy, salaries increase, but productivity also increases. You can't play a symphony faster. You can't learn how to play a violin in a more efficient manner. There's always efficiencies in the margins that can be improved, but overall, the same is true for a theater company. The same is true for a ballet company. The same is true for an artist. You can't just paint three times faster and suddenly you're more efficient and effective. That's not the way the artistic process works. That's the funding issue across the world, not just the country. One of the things that we have to keep in mind when we're talking about public funding is that we're talking about the US being so much lower than the rest of the civilized developed world, whatever you want to call it. In general, the average arts organization receives about 7% of their budget from either federal, state, local government, usually a combination of those. Very few actually receive federal funds. America has this, as my esteemed colleague alluded to, this very strong tradition of private giving. We also have charitable tax deductions, which are a huge part of the reason why we have that strong tradition. If you no longer have income tax, you no longer have that incentive vice program. These things kind of go hand in hand. Just a recent issue that's come up surrounding this. There's an IRA charitable tax bill that was passed a number of years ago by Congress, allowing people, I believe it's over 70 and a half for some reason it's not 70, to take out up to $100,000 a year from the IRA and donate it without it being taxed. This had been reinstated a number of times, and then a few years ago it wasn't reinstated, not because there was opposition, but so much is because, as we all know, Congress is at its complete standstill, they can't get anything done. Not just arts organizations, but it affects the arts organizations significantly, saw a huge drop in gifts from people over the age of 70, because they were taking advantage of this tax incentive. Right now a bill was passed by the House that's go ahead into the Senate that includes the IRA charitable tax reduction, however, the President's office has come out against the bill as a whole. So who knows what will happen there. The arts are a type of industry that often requires a gestational period. This is another way it differs from a lot of for-profit organizations. There are other industries like pharmaceuticals, huge R&D budgets, they can economically justify that spending based on the huge possible returns on the results, and the arts, the returns are not there. I mean they are there if you're a Hollywood blockbuster or if you are a Broadway producer, which is why huge risks are taken in those markets, but they're not going to be there if you're a composer writing, you know, the world's first symphony of Harry Potter music. The other piece of the resolution I want to touch on is, the resolution is the best way to spark artistic innovation and make art accessible is to let people choose to pay for it. And that's one thing I would like to talk about is accessibility. And the truth is that the majority of public funding for the arts goes towards issues of accessibility. It's not really so much preservation. They don't fund another symphony performance of Stravinsky in their own concert hall doing their own thing. That's not what the N.A. is interested in. That's not what the city or county levels are interested in either. They're interested in getting art to rural communities, to underserved communities. They're interested in ensuring that people with disabilities of all kinds have access to the arts. And that is something that has, even though the artistic world is this bastion of liberal hippie tree-huggers, accessibility is something that has to be forced down their throats, just like you've seen, I believe, in the private sector as well. If it weren't for the ADA bill, I wouldn't have parked next to a handicapped spot today. And that person that was parked in that spot would have had to walk a mile or wheel a mile. One other, one final point, I know, running out of time. So John Maynard Keynes, I'm sure you're all familiar with, he's a British economist, and he spoke about the artist who, quote, teaches us to love and enjoy what we often begin by rejecting, unquote. Speaking of Stravinsky, which is one of, his Rite of Spring is one of the most popular, like you program the Rite of Spring in an orchestra, seats are going to fly off the shelves, no problems. When it was premiered, there was a riot, because people hated it so much. Van Gogh sold two paintings in his lifetime. He painted 2000, he sold two. You know, Henry David Thoreau, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, Fran Schubert. I mean, the list of artists that were totally unappreciated in their own time is almost as long as the list of artists period. So would these type of artists have thrived in a Kickstarter atmosphere where popularity was king? I don't believe so. And a lot of these artists, those that I just named, had to survive in areas where there wasn't public funding, where there wasn't a lot of public support, and several of them killed themselves. I mean, it's not a good atmosphere for innovation when you have to be popular in order to survive. We're going to have to cut it off right there. That's all the time for opening statements. Dr. D'Amico, you have four minutes to respond. My opponent beginner discussion with a quote from 1903 that I actually think is a great quote because it kind of supports my argument, which is to say that at the time of 1903, the orchestra wasn't self-sustaining. But at the time of 1903, referring to something like the orchestra is the dominant sector of where you can possibly consume music from. If we change the quote just a little bit to be concerned with the music industry more generally, there's no question that the music industry today is in fact self-sustaining relative to say the orchestra market, which is to say that we have a lot more diversity and opportunity of choice for consuming music today than we did tonight. As we've become less reliant upon government funding for music, we've gotten this diversity. If instead we had a government-dominated role in subsidizing the arts, we'd just have orchestras and they're really boring. Second, she mentioned that the United States has a low amount of public subsidy for the arts relative to other developed countries. This is true. What's interesting to note is that we don't necessarily lag on vibrant art cultures relative to other countries despite this lower amount of public funding. In fact, we have very competitive and significant art cultures and in some margins some of the leading world art markets relative to other countries despite this low level of public subsidy. So I would argue again that this is driven more by the diversified nature of private charitable giving as well as like a consumer-based market approach to art in the United States. She mentions that a lot of public art funding is for the sake of accessibility. This is an interesting point because again the majority of public funding for art tends to go into non-contested forms of art, classical pieces in museums and sort of established versions of art quality. The modal listener of NPR is decidedly not poor urban and minority and is most often a relatively rich white bourgeois elite. I don't think that this is coincidental but is instead part and parcel of the incentive process of how governments tend to allocate money. She closed by talking about the threat of a popularity-driven art market but that's actually exactly what democratic processes tend to do with art funding. In other words, if we had an art market that was dominantly or purely dependent upon public funding, yes there's a general approval for sponsorship of the art with public funds but you have to contextualize that general approval with general approval for other spending of public funds. So in comparison to public approval for spending on things like military defense and or police powers, art tends to sit second seat to these more crucial endeavors. So when we have democratic responsive political elites who want to satisfy voters, in lean times arts tend to be one of the first things that get cut. That's true at the educational level for public schools, it's true at the general budget level of local as well as federal governments. So it's not so much that the government plays this sort of crucial foundational supportive role of the arts, it tends to democratize the allocation of financing for art projects more like like an alcoholic father buying you a brand new instrument and then it's the first thing that they pawn when they lose their job. It's an unstable environment to foster artistic creativity relative to, again, a diversified portfolio of investment in art from private donors, from consumer purchases, from charitable and non-profit organizations, as well as indirect roles of government through things like just generally fostering environments of low tax rates and low regulation environments for artistic creation and artistic import. Thank you Dr. D'Amico, Rachel Soproti, four minutes to respond. Sure, I'm not sure we're getting your information about where public funding for the arts is spent, but I will take your point that it is usually spent on institutions that have like long histories and are doing the overall genres of art that are more recognized. So yeah, your major museums and that kind of thing. But I'd just like to bring up one example which I used to work in Baltimore. There are two major museums, the Walters Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2006, the city of Baltimore gave those museums $800,000 to begin offering free admission. Prior to that admission had been $10 for whatever many years leading up to that. Both museums saw huge increases in attendance, huge increases in the diversity of attendance. The Walters Museum saw a doubling of the number of people that walked through their door that identified as non-white. They saw a 38% increase in attendance overall in their first year, and those numbers have either been steady or increased since then. The BMA saw family program participation increased by 89% and the Walters saw it by 400%. There are similar stories from the Cincinnati Museum of Art when they offered free admission and significantly after that, the city did it for one year. After that, both museums committed to finding other ways of keeping admission free. The city's money drove accessibility, drove their ability to experiment and innovate. Once their success was proven, both institutions have been able to get foundations and corporate support and individual support so that museums are still free. Also, it's true that arts funding at the government level does tend to be very unstable. It does tend to be the first thing cut, despite it being less than one-tenth of 1% of most of the government's budgets. But it doesn't have to be that way. In Minnesota, for example, in 2008, I believe they passed what's called the Legacy Amendment, which sets aside a portion of a specific tax for the arts, for culture, for parks and recreation. They actually got a huge surge of support from the hunting community, from the tree-hugging community, from the arts community. The arts council, in addition to what the state legislator decides to appropriate every year, they receive over $30 million a year. Here in Georgia, we receive half a million dollars a year from the state budget. The status quo is unstable, but it doesn't have to be that way. I think I'm running out of time. Thank you, Mr. Proti. We can now open it up to questions from the audience. Can we have our first question, please? I have two, I guess more for Rachel. If you could just specify some points you had made. My first one was the Keynes quote that you had stated, basically saying that we begin by rejecting art. How would you rebuttal against the question that growing up, all we do is want art? We crave art and nothing more as children. Oh, I don't think that Keynes was saying that we reject art as a whole. He was speaking to specific instances where artists that really challenge society are the ones that are making change, that are doing things that are subversive. Even Beethoven was subversive. I mean, he ended up changing people's minds very quickly. In the mid to end point, end of his career, he was wildly popular. But that's more he was talking about, was individual artists being able to challenge you and you see something for the first time you think that's awful. But you see it a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth time and you come to appreciate, you know, I mean, if you took someone from the 1800s and played them a piece of rock music or a piece of hip hop, they would not even be able to discern what it was. It would just sound like noise to them. And then you'd also made a statement about the lack of public funding and then you had mentioned something about suicide rates between artists. So I guess if you could kind of clarify the jump from there. Just the point is that artists who are in that class that Keynes was talking about of people like Van Gogh who are way ahead of their time are not appreciated. Artists are also, I mean, yes, they often have because they see the world in a different way and so they're often misunderstood. People who always think they're crazy. So the point is that they don't have a support system. They don't have a funding support system. Van Gogh spent his life begging his brother for money basically. And so if you don't have that support, it leads to issues of mental health and it can lead to suicide, sure. Thank you. Next question, please. My question is also for Rachel. You talked about there's no productivity in terms of music. You can play faster, you can paint faster. But the value of music or art is on innovation. So why would you be funding something like an orchestra which is not actually innovating in its process? Because you have artists like Jeff Koons which sold the highest-priced piece. He innovated, he didn't need the funding, he just made something new. He didn't paint faster or he didn't build faster sculpture. He just made something interesting for the people. It's true actually, Jeff Koons grew up in York, Pennsylvania. I used to live in York, Pennsylvania and he did receive public funding as a young artist before he was huge and famous, just to point that out. It's not like he showed up at 20 and suddenly was like, I'm rich and famous. There's that gestational period. Now, individual artists are going to mature at different rates, they're going to be doing different things. There are some people who are able to be hugely successful financially from a very young age, people like Yo-Yo Ma, for example. There are others who takes them a lot longer to get to the point where their art is ready for that kind of public consumption, that kind of public popularity and there are some who won't be popular in their lifetime. Hello, Ms. Rachel, I have a question to ask you. What do you think about the art, the vision of art and the design of art behind what people do as artists and stuff, Ms. Rachel? How people are viewed? I was saying, what do you think about the design and vision of art or for artists that does art? What do you think about that? That's my question to you, Ms. Rachel. I'm not sure I understand. What I'm saying is that people that does art what you mean about art and everything, what is the vision and the design behind the art of artists and stuff? What's the vision behind? And the design of art for different artists themselves. Well, I think, I mean, one of the great things about art is that there is no one overarching vision. Every artist has their own vision. Every artistic group has their own idea about where we should be headed, what we should be doing. There actually is a ton of innovation in the field. I mean, if you're looking for an entrepreneurial community, look no further. The arts are, and have historically been one of the most entrepreneurial communities out there because they have to innovate in order to survive. That's their whole thing. That's what artists do, is innovate. If I could just clarify in response to some of these questions. I very much agree with the innovative and diverse identity of art markets and it's precisely that that seems mismatched by the nature of government bureaucracy. So I would never want to sort of refute the Keynes quote by saying that there isn't an importance for subversive art. I just don't necessarily think that government financing is the ideal institutional form. Well, I will say that that quote from Keynes was part of his reasoning for, he actually started the Arts Council of England and that came from that. This is why he started that was to give an outlet to those people because there are some, there's not all, I mean, they're not all unappreciated art is necessarily subversive, especially to governments. My question is also for Rachel. I think we can agree that art is a good just like anything else in a market. How can you justify people who had no demand for that good still funding it through their tax dollars? Everyone has a demand for art. I mean, I assume all of you have read George Orwell's 1984, which is basically the opposite of what anything you've been learning here is. It's a world where the government tells you everything what to eat for breakfast, let alone what to do with your life. What I would challenge you all to think about is realize that that's also a world without art. 1984 is a perfect description of a world without art. A world without freedom is a world without art. And everyone needs it. Everyone needs art in order to even survive, like in my personal opinion. I mean, if you don't see, if you don't hear music, if you don't see beautiful things, if you don't have any way of experiencing artistic expression, that's just not a world any of us want to live in. Hello. So I have two questions, but I'll try and keep it brief. The first one is for Rachel. I'm actually from Cincinnati, Ohio, and we do a free admission to the museum. That's through private sponsors. But I understand your point about that increasing accessibility. But at the same time, when publicly funded art like the Robert Maple Thorpe exhibit, if you're familiar with that, came to Cincinnati, Ohio. It was very, very edgy and subversive and abrasive art. And because of it going on tour and being publicly funded, it caused a huge, huge backlash to where they actually shut down the museum and stopped touring the exhibit. So in that way, does that really balance out with the accessibility if the museums are actually being closed and the art is being kept from people and there's anti-art responses? Yeah, first of all, that's awesome. Okay? Like the fact that people reacted so strongly to works of visual art that they shut down the exhibit that is freaking awesome. Okay? I want to be in a world where people are rioting about symphonies. I want to be in a world where people are like... Like that's... And those things are exceptions, but I do think that in some way it does refute Dr. D'Amico's point about public funding going only to... I mean, you're constantly hearing about controversies around public art because art itself, like the fact that it's creating conversations, like that's what it's all about. I mean, that's what so many artists, certainly in the 20th century, have been doing is pushing the boundaries of what is art and what is acceptable. And that makes people talk about it. That's what art should be doing. Thank you. So the next question is for whoever wants to take it, but to what degree, I guess, do you think that art that is funded is actually innovative versus maintaining like the systems that we currently have in place? Like for instance, like during the Red School or scare the relationship between Hollywood and the government, or during the Cold War, the government was sponsoring Jackson Pollock and Expressionism to fight against communist art. So to what degree do you think that this is innovating in that they sponsored a new arts that it grew versus like, but it's still entrenching certain ideas and structures that we have in our society? Do you want to start with that one? Sure, I mean, again, I think that the nature of your first question, that there is a lot of controversy that surrounds public art, still supports my concern that the overall tendency of the allocation of public funding will be towards more sort of stable and commonly accepted. Like the incentives of political decision makers are to appeal to the median voter. And if anything is sort of too abrasive, it's unstable. It's not necessarily going to sustain itself. So in the history of like the most sort of overt and subsidized and centrally planned forms of art, whether it be like architecture in like totalitarian visions or propaganda or things like that, you get not only a sort of neutered vision of like common denominator to appease the public, but you get beyond that an expression of political interests as opposed to a reflection of say societal demands. And I think that that's also revealing about that there has to be sort of a balance and there's no necessary built-in constraint on public funding for art. So if we were to say yes, we have to have the public to fund it, we should have some recognition and concern about the sort of capturing of interest for the qualitative features of art by ruling elites, especially in the context of environments of potentially unjustified governments or regimes that have problematic relationships with their citizens. Just briefly, I think you have to look differently at secret CIA funding of Hollywood and of Jackson Pollock than you do with open and more transparent processes. I mean actually Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, a number of other artists made it through the Depression because of the WPA works program. And that was an open and above-board kind of funding. I think it's easy for people from the outside to assume that government funding goes to these really safe projects. But coming from someone who's worked on the inside and has seen the kind of projects that would not have been able to get off the ground if it weren't for public funding, there really is a need for it. I mean even though it's a small percentage of what may fund an organization or even a particular project, the ability to leverage those funds is huge. I worked for the Georgia Symphony that was received in NEA Grant and it just opened doors like you would not believe. NEA Grant actually covered a full project. It was $10,000 and it covered a free concert that they gave of a new piece of music that was composed. It was a great project, all about accessibility. But funders started coming to them like, oh you got an NEA Grant, you guys must be really good. Because it is a stamp of approval and that's true through all levels of government. And it's often easy to get an experimental project started when you have that initial government buy-in. Next question please. Dan just talked about this kind of a little bit. But the government funding of artwork, I don't see whether it would necessarily go to like subversive art, whether it would go to historical art. I do know for certain though that it wouldn't be based on public opinion, it would be based on not even the politicians that we vote for but probably the random appointed bureaucrats who are actually handing out the money. And I mean politicians are usually good actors but I don't think that that necessarily gives them any credence over the artwork. So just why would any particular group be the ones in charge of that distribution? Well you should know that the politicians have little to no say. They may have a couple of seats on the arts council board but the arts council is made up of people from the artistic community, made up of art critics and historians and artists themselves who have a lot better sense of what's quality work. But as far as choice, I mean, if you look since 2000, 24 statewide ballot initiatives or referendums have come to a vote related to arts and culture funding. Of those 24, 21 of them passed. It's over 87%. And if you look at local ballot initiatives, the percentage is even higher. Like time and time and time and time and time again, voters in this country have shown that they support public funding for the arts. And just one last thing. I think 1984 is a world full of art. It's all state-made art. That's the best art that the state can make and they've filled that with it. Art that you're made, art made with a gun to your head is an art. We have time for one more question. No one's forcing anyone when you get a grant to make the art. This question is for Rachel. I go to St. Petersburg College and they have a music room where they have musical performances. Now, some of them are known pieces. Some of them are lesser known pieces and it's mostly classical music. But they have a donation basket out. Now, they weren't planning on donations, but they said they had a basket out and people would just put money in it. Do you think this kind of thing will be done for any other kind of forms of art? Sure, that's happening. That happens all the time. You don't see that much in Atlanta because there's not a lot of people walking around. But in a lot of other cities, there's street buskers, what they call it, street musicians. But that happens on a huge scale. The Georgia Symphony does free outdoor concerts in the summer. One's sponsored by Kennesaw State, which is, of course, a publicly funded institution. One's sponsored by the city of Marietta. And they pass the hat because people come to that concert for free. People who wouldn't otherwise see an orchestra and they enjoy themselves so they're willing to throw in a few bucks. It doesn't cover the cost at all. But yeah, I mean, that's... Arts funding, trust me, there are many, many very sophisticated forms of getting money out of people to fund the arts, for sure. Okay, well, very good. Well, thank you very much for the questions. We're now going to move into a period of closing statements starting with Rachel Siproti. You have three minutes. Great. In case you haven't discovered this, I already... I love quotes. So I'm going to go ahead and start with a quote. The arts and sciences essential to the prosperity of the state and to the ornament of human life have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind. That's George Washington. And that's a quote of his that I love and that I couldn't possibly agree with more. I think we can all agree with that. The issue at hand is what is that primary claim to encouragement of every lover of his country? Is that an individual directive or is that a communal directive? And for me, the resolution that we were talking about letting people choose to pay for, in my opinion, public art represents more of the people's choice than some random rich person who decides to create a sculpture or a particular business that has a CEO whose nephew is an artist and they want to give money to him. I think that democratization of art is something that requires buy-in from the community and buy-in from the community is there. When you talk about publicly funding, when I talk about these arts referendums that causes public conversation, that causes public comment, that causes people to come out and make their voices heard. When you have, there's a community art center in Madison that was funded pretty much solely by one angel investor, angel donor, and didn't do very well. I think they may have turned it around, but it really struggled because nobody knew about it, nobody cared about it. Nobody had buy-in. And when you have publicly funded institutions, organizations, everyone has buy-in. Everyone believes that that's a place where they can belong. And that's what happened with the Walters Museum. The Walters Museum it seemed very hoity-toity and there were a lot of people who didn't feel like they belong there. But when it became something that the city funded, that was free for everyone, they suddenly saw it as maybe that does belong to me. Maybe that is, and our artistic heritage should belong to everyone. Thank you very much, Dr. Domingo, your closing thoughts. I'd like to close with three brief points. First is that I'm not anti-art or anti-public art, per se. I'm merely against the non-voluntary redistribution and subsidy of art, hence the resolution which is just that the preferable way of financing and supporting art is by means of voluntary choice and voluntary contributions and purchases. Second, there's lots of anecdotal evidence and success stories of conventionally subsidized or publicly sponsored art where you could show a sort of return on investment, but basic economics shows us that that's not really the correct way of interpreting those course of events. You have to compare what is seen with what is unseen. The relevant margin of comparison would be some ability to estimate how those resources could have been spent otherwise, not necessarily just a return on the investment. So you give an artist $10,000, he turns it into sort of a million-dollar worth of art. The question that we don't have, $10,000 could have otherwise been spent, how the individuals in society without the sort of forceful extraction of their tax dollars would have spent their own money on their own artistic preferences. And last is the delicate balance between a positive externality argument regarding art with a negative externality argument regarding art. It seems reasonable to suggest that art provides a social benefit or a public good for people, but the same logic would then dictate whether there are forms of bad art that might also provide negative externalities. And it would seem that by that same logic, by empowering state subsidy for art, we would also then be empowering state censorship of certain forms of art. And that's not necessarily something that I think is conducive to vibrant, innovative environments for artistic creation and diversity of artistic expression. Thank you. Well, thank you both very much. We certainly enjoyed the debate today. Again, thank you for everybody in attendance, and thank you for everybody watching during this live stream. If you've enjoyed this debate, we have nine others in our summer series that you can learn more about at fee.org. Thank you all very much. Thanks.