President Donald Trump has the opportunity to do de-fund one of the most useless and most propagandistic institutions that is kept alive by the sweat of taxpayers: The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Kennedy center is nothing but a playground for the wealthy and their friends in various entertainment industries.
Unfortunately, Trump has apparently decided that while he tries to slash budgets from other areas, he’s going to keep throwing taxpayer money at what is essentially the federal government’s Department of Court Jesters.
It was clear right away that Trump was getting it all wrong when he posted on his social media account:
“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP ... The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
First of all, the Kennedy center is not “an American Jewel” and if it were such a jewel, it would be unnecessary to keep it afloat with taxpayer dollars. Secondly, if the Kennedy center engaged in repugnant antics like drag shows for children, shouldn’t it be severed from the federal government entirely? It seems that Trump’s plan is to keep the Kennedy Center alive so that one of his successors can easily start throwing money at drag shows for kids again.
The responsible thing to do would be to get rid of this unnecessary drain on taxpayer dollars altogether. Trump, unfortunately, is apparently too enamored of “the brightest STARS”—as he puts it—to stop ripping off the taxpayers. Trump’s agents are no different, of course. His designee to be the acting executive director of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, yesterday writes: “We must fix this great institution. The people working hard at the Nation’s premier performing arts center deserve better - and so do all Americans.”
Wrong. What Americans deserve is to not be forced to pay for bureaucrats at a “cultural center” when there are literally thousands of private-sector theatres, music venues, and recording studies all across the nation. If Americans are clamoring for “more Kennedy center,” then I’m sure they’ll be happy to voluntarily give millions of dollars to fund it.
In fact, let’s find out just how much Americans “deserve” or “need” the Kennedy center. Let’s cut off all federal funds and then see if the Kennedy center can continue to exist. If it can, great, and we will have proven that it doesn’t need taxpayer dollars. If the Kennedy center goes under without federal funds, then that’s proof that there was never enough public demand to sustain it.
At that point I guess America will just have to go back to that dark age before the Kennedy Center opened in 1971. It’s hard to believe that Americans were producing and funding performing arts before 1971, but my great-grandfather tells me it was a thing.
Subsidizing the Arts with Taxpayer Dollars
Whether or not the Kennedy Center exists at all would be their business and none of my concern were it not for the fact that the Kennedy Center is propped up by taxpayer dollars. It is, to use a favorite phrase of the governing elite: a “public-private partnership.”
From its very beginning, it was built upon funds stolen from taxpayers. The center was originally constructed in the late 1960s with millions of dollars of federal funds and federal debt. More recently, from 2016 to 2021, the Kennedy center received 270 million dollars from Congress. The Center paid its president five million dollars in the process. Each year, the Center receives about forty million more dollars.
What is the justification for handing over all this taxpayer money, year after year? The last time I checked, there was nothing in the US constitution about funding the careers of actors and other performers. Of course even if the Constitution did say that, federal funding of “the arts” would still constitute nothing more than looting of the taxpayers.
When it comes to suggestions that the Center be cut off from stolen money, the Center’s supporters do something similar to what National Public Radio does. They insist that they barely receive any federal funding at all, and its really not a big deal. The retort to this should be: “if your government funding is so insignificant, then you won’t mind giving it up.” The reality, of course, is that they always do mind. They always want to keep getting their taxpayer freebies.
Why Do we “Need” Government Funded Arts?
Once it becomes clear that they’re going to cling to their government money with every ounce of their strength, the advocates of government-funded arts then insist that it’s very important that the taxpayer be forced to keep paying for it.
In practice, the “justification” for the Kennedy Center itself is primarily the fact that the Washington ruling class likes it. The Kennedy center is a convenient way for the wealthy technocrats of DC to hobnob with famous entertainers and to funnel dollars to favored government contractors and political allies.
The official reason for supporting the arts in general, however, is that they would not be funded—at least not funded enough—were it not for taxpayer subsidies. After all, the purpose of government subsidies is to get more of what is being subsidized. So, federal dollars are doled out, we are told, to create “more” art. The raises the question of what kind of art is therefore being produced.
The answer is, ultimately, that art reflects the values of the people who fund it. This has been shown in detail in the work of Paul Cantor, the great literary critic who has shown how the great art of recent centuries was encouraged and funded by the private sector and its paying customers. People in the private sector have always been willing to pay for art that people actually like.
Cantor has shown that art thus reflects the values of those who fund it. We throw a monkey wrench in the equation, therefore, when government bureaucrats start funding it. Yes, the taxpayers supply the funds for government payments to the arts, but it is state agents themselves who make the decisions. We should not be surprised, therefore, when these government-funded arts promote what the government wants promoted: endless LGBTQ+ programs, anti-capitalism, and anything else that strikes the fancy of the regime’s art “patrons.”
A case in point, it turns out, is how much “modern art”—which has generally repulsed ordinary taxpayers, but which is particularly beloved by the sorts of people who run the Kennedy Center—is known to have been funded by the CIA.
In a free country, however, the arts are funded totally by the private sector. In a free country, the central government does not engage in Soviet-style funding of artists as means of spreading the values of the ruling class.
After all, just a glance around shows us that there is no shortage of private sector production companies producing plays. There is no shortage of musical ensembles. Shakespeare festival dot the landscape. Filmmakers nowadays record award-winning films on iphones and edit films on their laptops. Are we really to believe that the performing arts would whither away without millions in government grants to friends of the regime? There’s only one way to find out.
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